Wine of the Mind: A Distillation of Culture in Ancient Chinese Poetry

Part I:

Poets were the earliest wine writers. In China, where there is a long and vibrant history of poetic and drinking culture, the influence of wine in poetry is hard to miss. Wine was a favorite subject of perhaps the most famous Chinese poet, Li Po, who is rumored to have drowned when he fell from a boat trying to embrace the moon’s reflection while drunk. In his book Chinese Wine, researcher Li Zhengping writes, “Chinese people traditionally viewed poetry as the wine distilled from the mind, and many of the great poems are indeed as aromatic, tempting and exquisite as wine.” Wine and poetry in ancient China were intrinsically related in a symbiotic relationship that extended beyond the mere corollary of pleasures we recognize today. Drinking wine and writing poetry was common, and even today, people retell the stories of Chinese writers who played drinking games, floating wine cups downstream and composing a formal poem where the cup landed, drunk on the language of the land.

            Much more than an intoxicant, wine in ancient China was believed to have medicinal properties, and was a central part of religious life. Drinking wine was not only an accepted form of socializing, it was an important tool to keep one’s body and mind in balance, as long as frugality and moderation were practiced. In his book Ancient Wine, Patrick McGovern contends, “The history of civilization, in many ways, is the history of wine. Economically, religiously, socially, medically, and politically, the domesticated grapevine has intertwined itself with human culture from at least the Neolithic period and probably long before that.” The same, of course, can be said about poetry, though that is a vine of another varietal. Each time we pick up a poem from centuries earlier, or drink a wine grown from a plant that’s been cloned and transplanted for hundreds of years, we recapitulate that history, pulling past values into the present.

McGovern goes on to claim that wine is possibly the greatest legacy left by ancient humans; the psychotropic effects and medicinal value of alcohol explain its central role in society, religion, and the economy; fermented wine was more nutritious than fresh grapes; and finally, wine’s preeminence in history is largely due to the chemical compounds that delight our senses. “Widespread use of wine by a population, however, was a two-edged sword. Persons who indulged in wine were likely to carry genes that predisposed their descendants to alcoholism” (McGovern). This duality contained within wine—the nourishing and destructive qualities of alcohol—are evident in the works of poets such as Li Po.

In his book The Art of Chinese Poetry, James Liu examines some common concepts and ways of thinking and feeling found in Chinese poetry: Nature, Time, History, Leisure, Nostalgia, Love, and Rapture with Wine are all discussed. In the last section on wine, he writes, “Again, as every reader of Chinese poetry must be aware, there are constant references in it to drinking and becoming tsuei, which is usually translated as ‘drunk’, though actually it caries rather different implications and associations.” Liu goes on to cite the Shuo Wen, a philosophical cornerstone of Chinese etymology from circa 100 AD, which explains the composite character as a whole means “everyone reaching the limit of his capacity without offending propriety.” Liu explains that because tsuei does not mean the same as “drunk” or “inebriated” in English, he prefers to translate tsuei as “rapt with wine” because it focuses less on the notion of intoxication and more on the notion of “being mentally carried away from one’s normal preoccupations.”

Part II:

According to the scholar and translator Burton Watson, “Nearly all Chinese poets celebrate the joys of wine, but none do so as tirelessly and with such a note of genuine conviction as Li Po. Though he wrote in a poetic tradition that condoned, even demanded, the frank expression of sorrow, and he himself often gave voice to such feelings, one imagines that he could never have been entirely desolate so long as he had his wine” (Chinese Lyricism). Sorrow and wine seem linked in a dialectic union in his poetry. Life’s brevity breeds sorrow, yet Li Po seems to suggest that wine enables him to see beyond his own sorrow and appreciate a larger sense of existence. We can find a subtle expression of this idea in Li Po’s poem “Something Said, Waking Drunk on a Spring Day,” where he writes:

                        Overcome, verging on sorrow and lament,

                        I pour another drink. Soon, awaiting

                        this bright moon, I’m chanting a song.

                        And now it’s over, I’ve forgotten why.

Here we can see how wine sooths the mind, stripping it of the sorrows and laments that usually rattle in our skulls like death chants. After another drink, when the song has ended, Li Po has forgotten the sorrow that caused him to sing. Wine not only relaxes us physically, it eases us into new perspectives, and it helps release us from worry and desire. There is cruelty and hatred everywhere, Li Po seems to suggest, but wine can dispel these evils of the heart. This sentiment is perhaps best exhibited in Li Po’s poem “Drinking Alone,” which ends with the lines, “Out beyond this jar of wine, its all longing, longing—no heart of mine.”

An ardent Taoist, Li Po’s poems reveal that he studied Buddhism early in his career before converting to Taoism. An excellent example of Li Po’s Taoist disposition with a Buddhist bent can be seen in the third of his poems titled “Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon.” The poem begins with a description of April blossoms, and opens in a somber tone typical of Li Po. He writes, “Who can bear spring’s lonely sorrows, who / face it without wine? It’s the only way.” This is a concession by Li Po that wine prevents desolation. He goes on to say that no matter who we become, our life is fated from birth:

But a single cup evens out life and death,

our ten thousand concerns unfathomed,

and once I’m drunk, all heaven and earth

vanish, leaving me suddenly alone in bed,

forgetting that person even exists.

Of all our joys, this must be the deepest.

We cannot escape our fate, but wine has the power to help us shed the concerns that bind our minds and make us servants to our own desires. Alcohol, Li Po suggests, leaves us raptured, released from the bounds of heaven and earth, released even from one’s own sense of individual existence. This feeling, this rapture with the world that wine induces, which hinges on the release of the ego, of one’s sense of singularity, this, claims Li Po, is life’s deepest joy. From the poem above, we can see how this enjoyment and inspiration were inseparably linked, and that the greatest joy Li Po gets from drinking wine is a lucid understanding of existence and a heightened spiritual perspective.

Part III:

A good wine, like a good poem, makes us focus on its qualities. When we read a beautiful poem, or drink a special bottle of wine, we cannot help but be made aware of our experience, of the balance, intensity, complexity and distinctive personality captured on a page or in a glass. In The Philosophy of Wine: A Case of Truth, Beauty and Intoxication, Cain Todd claims that by drinking fine wine, “We learn more about our multifarious interest and pleasures, the nature of appreciation, and the meaningfulness and emotional expressivity that objects in the world can attain for us. And we become aware of our own powerful and subtle capacities for discriminating and evaluating.” Just as when we experience a great wine, brilliant poems force us to exercise and expand our perceptual and imaginative capacities. By trying to understand and appreciate wine we come to a deeper appreciation and understanding of our own existence. I think this is what Li Po meant in his second poem titled “Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon” when he ends with these lines:

Three cups and I’ve plumbed the great Way,

a jarful and I’ve merged the occurrence

appearing of itself. Wine’s view is lived:

you can’t preach doctrine to the sober.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Wine

In The Wine Bible, Karen MacNeil writes that a great wine must possess five qualities: a clear and distinct expression of flavors and aromas; a distinct expression of its varietal character; a harmonious integration of its many components; complexity; and connectedness—which she describes as “the embodiment of a single piece of earth. […] the bond between a wine and the plot of land it was born in.” MacNeil claims that connectedness is the most elusive of these five qualities, and her description suggests that what she means by connectedness is the ineffable characteristic of terroir, and how the best wines contain not only the first four qualities, but locates those qualities within a specific setting. While connectedness in wine may be the most elusive quality to ascertain, I find the notion of complexity equally confounding and compelling.

MacNeil writes, “Complexity is not a thing but a phenomenon. […] Complexity is more like a force that pulls you into a wine and impels you to repeatedly return for another smell and sip because each time you do, you find something new.” Much more than the layering of different flavors, complexity is the push and pull of novelty and pattern, of surprise and gratification. As a phenomenon, complexity is not so much an expression of a wine’s natural qualities as it is the perception of our own qualities in a wine. It is our consciousness that allows us to perceive wine as complex; and while certain desirable mutations may have been selected over centuries of grape growing, those qualities were produced for us by the grapes. Each mutation in a grapevine has been an appeal to our desires to ensure we continue its propagation.

At the beginning of the summer, I opened a 1998 magnum bottle of Zinfandel to celebrate the new condo my family friends Brad and Deb had bought in Santa Cruz (it seemed fitting to welcome these East-coasters with a wine made from a grape that is decidedly Californian). I told Brad, a neuropsychologist, that the grapes were grown in volcanic soil near Clear Lake. We entered into a discussion about differences in cultivars, how the soil and climate preference of grapes mimics our own preference for certain flavors and aromas, and as the conversation meandered from varietal to varietal, I sensed that our own evolution is not unlike that of the grapevine. Brad explained the neural dynamic of vines, the genetic crossbreeding and cloning that occurred long before any varietal names were prescribed. Mastery of the inner workings of wine is a prodigious feat, and when we drink, we sense its complexity. 

The Evolution of Terroir

Taste is a learned response. It is a product of society, and changes according to time, place and cultural traditions. Thus our perception of terroir when we drink wine is also tied to traditions that continue to evolve. There is a culture behind terroir that follows the winemaker into the field when he ties his vines to staves; it is there when he decides his fruit is ready for harvest; and most pronounced when he enters the winery—his studio, his church, his laboratory, his home. Perhaps the most direct role the vintner plays in making wine is deciding how to store it and for how long. Oak barrels came into prominence during the Roman Empire, and today they are the most common vessels in which wine is aged.

Before the use of oak casks, wine was typically stored in clay amphorae sealed with pine resin. In his book Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages, Patrick McGovern writes, “Tree resins have a long and noble history of use by humans, extending back into Paleolithic times. […] Early humans appear to have recognized that a tree helps to heal itself by oozing resin after its bark has been cut, thus preventing infection. They made the mental leap to apply resins to human wounds. By the same reasoning, drinking a wine laced with a tree resin should help to treat internal maladies.” For Paleolithic winemakers, adding tree resin to wine was a way to absorb the power of the trees, and, as it happened, helped to preserve the wine. The technique of adding resin to wine is analogous to ageing wine in oak barrels. The porous nature of the wood allows the wine to oxidize, smoothing tannins and concentrating the wine’s flavor and aroma. The resin in the wood also imparts its own flavors onto the wine.

At the 2012 Cabrillo Music Festival event Music in the Mountains, I was fortunate enough to speak with Randall Grahm, the winemaker for Bonny Doon Vineyards. I asked him about the effects of barrels on wine, and in particular that I was interested in gaining a better understanding of the difference between French and American oak. Randall explained that there are several hundred phenolic compounds in wine, and that some, such as tannins and vanillin, are also found in oak barrels. Newer oak barrels impart a stronger imprint on the wine, with American oak tending to lend stronger sweet and vanilla overtones than French barrels, which tend to oxidize slower, and that supply notes of spice and toasted almonds to the wine.

The choice between French or American oak barrels raises a philosophical question about the nature of terroir. The milder French casks are said to promote the characteristics the soil imparts to the grapes, though the flavors of American oak can become nuanced after barrels are used for a few years. French oak is traditionally used for wine making, but there are no French oaks trees in America, and terroir is supposed to express a specific place. For American vintners, the decision whether or not to use native wood is as perplexing as deciding how much of terroir is geological and how much is cultural. Some critics have claimed that the New World has no terroir, but this view overlooks the many American winemakers who are inspired by the traditions of the Old World. The concept of terroir, like that of taste, has evolved, and will continue to change.

Any writer will tell you there is always something lost when a work is translated, but there is also the potential for something to be gained, for a sentiment or belief or tradition to be revived or reinvented in a new fashion. Culture changes as we construct new traditions. Inspired by a novel understanding of vini/viticulture, geology and soil sience, winemakers all over the world have the opportunity to express their own terroir, to bring out in their wines the flavor of the land and the traditions that govern it. Of all the wines I tasted at the Music in the Mountains event, my favorite was a Pinot Noir from Windy Oaks, which offered up strong notes of strawberry, the wonderful Pinot-funk characteristic of barnyard and damp earth, which I find is a strong expression of the terroir of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

This was not the first time I had tried that Pinot. A month earlier at a wine tasting event sponsored by the Monterey Bay Wine Co, I was able to taste the wine and talk with Jim Shultze, the winemaker for Windy Oaks. When I asked him what he thought about terroir he told me he felt it was “an expression of extreme mineral intervention”—found in wine that has has high malolactic acid levels for a wonderfully textured, round mouth feel. Jim told me he might have the longest growing season in California; his harvest ends as late as November 1. He uses all neutral French oak, but added that he’s experimenting with barrel stave thickness, grain tightness, and large volume neutral cement barrels.

From the clay amaphorae of Egypt and Greece to modern stainless steel and cement tanks, the traditions of winemaking continue to change, and so too does the wine. But while the winemaker imparts his cultural prejudices on the wine through his choice of container, Jim reminded me that the grape belongs to a longer tradition. The grape vine, vitis vinifera, was domesticated around 6,000 years ago, and we can trace its ancestry back to ampelopsis, a climbing vine of the vitaceae family, which originated 500 thousand years ago. Nature has its own customs. Jim told me that last year he picked his fruit at 22.5-23 brix, a measurement of the sugar levels in the grapes, but that he picks his fruit based on flavors, not brix. He wants to harvest flavors, not alcohol, he explained. “Let the wine decide when it should be pressed.” The grapes know when they are ready to ferment. Their tradition is to ripen on the vine and lead us, eagerly, into the fields for harvest.

A Hint of Mountain Lion

The intensity of the stars on a clear evening in Bonny Doon always astonishes me. The other night I walked to the top of the drive to finish a drink and look at the waxing moon shed its light over the field across the street, the tangled silhouette of untended apple trees illuminated against an azure sky. In the meadow to my right, deer hid in the shadows of branches, and shuffled deeper into the woods when they heard my steps. Since a fence was put up across the street four years ago to keep them out of the vineyard, the deer have frequented my property. At the top of the drive I leaned against one of the cement pillars that mark the entrance to my home, and when I looked up to find the moon I heard a low, guttural growl, an angry purr from the field across the road. I felt a fear that heightened my senses. The mountain lion that hunts in this area, that killed a four-pronged buck beneath the plumb tree in my orchard last year, was upset that my steps had put the deer on edge. Everything was quiet. I could no longer hear the deer, though I did not feel alone in the meadow. I climbed to the top of the cement pillar, looked for the huge green cones of cat eyes that reflect light like a mirror, and shouted out my own animal call. From behind me, across the stream on the far side of the canyon, the coyotes began their cries, hoping that the lion’s growl had meant a kill and scraps for them. Then there was silence again. I didn’t jump down until I heard the deer come back into the field, carefully plodding among dry leaves, alert in the arid evening, wary of the hunt.

The next night I woke with the sense something was outside my window. I could see nothing, though I felt sure I was not alone, that something was moving in the night. That morning, walking to work, I noticed the ornamental fruit tree at the top of the driveway had been scratched. The bark was shredded, and limp brown strips lay curled at the base of the trunk, white claw lines etched into the wood, revealing the flesh beneath grey outer bark that had been peeled away. Perhaps the cougar was only sharpening its claws, but I can’t help but feel it was at least in part leaving a message for me.

In Vino Veritas

Surrounded by coastal redwoods, 40 acres of grape vines, chardonnay and a little pinot noir, firmly stretch across the fine gray sand at Bald Mountain. It’s my first time to the vineyard. At an elevation of 920 to 1,050 feet, roughly three miles off of Smith Grade in the mountains of Bonny Doon, Bald Mountain Vineyard looks out over the Monterey Bay. Just beyond the trees I can see the ocean, the thick fog already making its way across the edge of the bay, sucked inland by the day’s heat. The grapes are eager for the cool evening when they’ll continue to ripen, though the absence of the sun at night means no photosynthesis will take place. The wines produced here are known for their low residual sugars and high acidity, largely a result of the cool microclimate—deep canyons that fill most summer evenings with coastal fog.

Ryan Beauregard, the vintner and proprietor of Beauregard Vineyards, makes one of my favorite Chardonnays from Bald Mountain fruit. He discovered fossils of ancient crustaceans in the vineyard when he planted some of the first vines here almost 20 years ago, a reminder that all this land was once under water. Ryan jokes that people shouldn’t be surprised about rising sea levels—there’s evidence all around that it’s happened before. Here along the Pacific coast, where the continent is slowly deteriorating, cliffs crumbling back into the ocean, the continental shelf slowly subsumed beneath the ocean’s crust, it’s difficult to imagine a more beautiful place. “This is terroir,” Ryan says, reaching down and bringing a fistful of soil to his nose.

Due in part to the cultivation of the land, as well as the many quarries in the area that have fractured the soil (sand, limestone and asphalt quarries all operate within a few miles of the vineyard), there is a strong mineral component to the wines in this region. The most prominent characteristic of wine from the Ben Lomond AVA, located on the western edge of the Santa Cruz Mountains, is an intense minerality. Ryan and I decide the effect of the soil on wine from this area is similar to a combination of flat water, San Pellegrino, an earthy terrain, chalk, granite, and sandstone. I suspect the minerality is also a consequence of the logging of the redwood forests that began in Bonny Doon in the mid 1800s, which upturned much of the soil on the mountain, as well as the limestone-rich earth—an ancient ocean floor, once covered by thick layers of redwood duff and other forest detritus, which is now prime real estate for grape growers.

However, there is much more to making wine than finding the right place to plant a certain varietal of grape. If a sense of terroir is to be achieved, if a wine is to convey the flavor of the land, it is important to stay true to the land in every aspect of the winemaking process. This includes using local yeast and unobtrusive oak barrels. An American winemaker might plant a Pinot clone from Burgundy, ferment the fruit with a famous French yeast, and age the wine in new French oak casks, hoping to recreate a wine from that region, but he will be disappointed. It will express little of the land from which it was produced. If you want French wine, go to France.

Here in California, farmers recognize that the climate is everything, and that food is best when it’s picked at its peak and consumed locally. This is especially true of wine grapes, and this recognition is a driving force behind the concept of terroir. Originally a French word used to describe the flavor of the land, and to distinguish wine produced from different vineyards, American wine makers, especially small, artisanal producers, are now heralding California’s unique microclimates as perfect for wine rich in terroir. Only a minority of California winemakers, however, are on-board the terroir bandwagon. While an aesthetic pursuit has provided solid ground for many vintners who champion terroir as a focal point of good winemaking, some winemakers are now using the concept as a marketing gimmick, selling the image without truly embracing the philosophy.

The central tenet behind terroir is that beautiful land produces beautiful wine, and that every individual wine can be a reflection of the land in which the grapes were grown and the wine is produced. To work with the land, to cultivate and nurture the terroir of a wine, is to reveal the components of place. What a shame it would be if all wine tasted the same. What pleasure would there be in drinking something so bland, so uninterestingly universal? Combating the entrepreneurial, neo-Californian technological approach to wine making is the Old World, French naturalist perspective that focuses on the wine and not the profit. This view recognizes that wine tastes like the land, is in fact a gift from the earth, one that should be respected, shared and enjoyed.

As Ryan and I pull up to The Lost Weekend Tasting Room after our tour of the vineyard, he stresses that I should develop my own opinions about wine. As I learn more about this region where I grew up, and where I’m living again after six years on the east coast, I’m starting to understand that this is what an appreciation for terroir is: an invitation to find my own taste, to discover what vineyards and what vintages appeal to my palate without letting critics or advertisers chose my wines for me. It’s a challenge to reconnect with the land.

“Wine offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than possibly any other purely sensory thing which may be purchased.” ~Ernest Hemingway

There is an awful lot of writing about wine, and I often compare the two. A wine’s terroir is like a writer’s style. Take the metaphor further, and each vintage of wine is like an edition of a book. If Hemingway were a wine, he’d have a rough, leathery terroir, and his best vintage (in my opinion) would be 1926, the year he published The Sun Also Rises. Style is unique, but some styles stand out more than others, and when we find a great one, one that speaks directly to us, we keep coming back to it. It finds its way into our heart so that when we pick up that book, or that wine, we are transported, brought home to Hemingway’s Spain, or to green rows of woven vines.

Behind the Bottle

My two passions in life, writing and wine, sometimes seem inevitable. I was raised in the Santa Cruz Mountains around books and literature; my father is a well-regarded poet, and his writing studio, which sits on a hill above our home, is a short stroll from one of the finest wineries in the Santa Cruz area. 

For the last two years I’ve worked on an MFA in poetry at North Carolina State University during the academic year, and spent the summers working for the vintner across the road, labeling and boxing new bottles of wine, pouring for customers in the tasting room, and helping with other chores when he was away. For a week last summer I walked through his vineyard every morning while he was out of town. At dawn, after feeding his chickens, I led his dogs between rows of green vines, leaves the size of my palm dripping with dew as the sun forced the fog to recede to the edge of the redwoods bordering the property. On one occasion, men with El Salvadorian accents were making their way along the rows—fixing posts, checking the drip system.  It was then that I realized the many invisible hands and hearts that go into the wine that I was pouring in the tasting room.  It was then that I realized I want to combine my two passions.

In one of his odes, Pablo Neruda shouts out to wine:

more than the wine of life;
you are
the community of man,
translucency,
chorus of discipline,
abundance of flowers.

Neruda knew the terroir of the human heart. He knew good writing, like good wine, must be balanced, well constructed, surprising but not overwhelming. And the best writing, like the best wine, appears so natural it seems to originate not from a person, but straight from the earth. Winemaking, unlike writing, is a process that involves many people, many of them invisible, unrecognized.  Neruda understood the labor, cooperation, reliance on nature, commitment, and luck necessary to make fine wine, and he seemed to insist that wine is more than an integral aspect of human life: it is a metaphor for everything that holds a society together. In order to better understand our own lives, let us understand our wine. Each sip of wine is a reminder of the complexities that tie things together, of the subtle connections that make life enjoyable.