I often believe that everything is interconnected.
Almost everything maybe, except for the flight of a butterfly in the Amazon and a rainstorm in China. I think that’s taking it a bit far, but it’s certainly poetically graphic enough to give us a quasi-scientific taste of chaos theory. Alas…
30 years ago.
The architect would return home with cement marks on his jeans. I’ve known the smell of construction since I was a child; my father used to bring it home on his clothes. If not, I would often look for him at the building site, where I had learned to look down and avoid nails. I was his double, and I couldn’t have become anything other than an architect. My research obsession as a student but also as a PhD candidate was the role of the core concept in architectural design and also in the subsequent understanding of architecture by the common man. I never became a PhD candidate because of my involvement with wine—which had a different smell.
I will connect these things with wine. Only the flight of a butterfly in Brazil and a rainstorm in China are not connected.
Suppose you want to design something on an empty building plot. There are thousands of design options, a veritable chaos of choices. The core concept is THE tool that the creator devises in order to herd all his countless ideas into a central one, with meaning, structure and expression. It goes for anything from a simple painting to the design of a city, the creation of a gourmet dish, or of a wine. What! Wine? Why certainly.
Isn’t wine the product of art and creativity? Isn’t the example of uncultivated land (like a blank page) that can be turned into a vineyard and made to produce a wine equally applicable? Do we not have chaotic choices of what variety of grape we will plant and what type of wine we will produce?
The core concept is a good thing. We love it. Let me tell you just how bad it is not to have a core concept, by citing a single word as an example: Athens. 99% of Athens is apartment buildings designed amateurishly, copied & pasted from ready-made design libraries without any idea, structure, or expression. Athens for the most part is ugly because behind its reconstruction lies the non-idea. All for the sake of speed and profit. Do you know how much a good architect costs? Do you know how much a winemaker’s vision costs?
This discussion started one night over some natural wines. For me to love natural wines, and especially wines painstakingly made to appear natural, they have to tell me another story. Something to make me believe that they taste like natural wine, because we like them that way, and not because it’s the fashion. I want to know the core concept of the winery. What kind of person are you, what do you wear, where do you go out to in the evenings, if you recycle… You know—simple things. So I can put together a profile of the wine producer which is consistent with the profile of the wine.
Let me explain it with a few examples. I may like your wine, but if I see you in your 4 litre BMW, which burns 20 litres every 100 km to make the astral balance dazzling, you do not convince me. I like your natural wine, again, but if I see you throwing buckets of carnations at the singer Kiamos at a nightclub, you’re toast. And even if I see you in the winery with a dog you’ve bought, rather than the mutt that was running around the vineyards, you don’t convince me. I like your natural wine, but if I see a west-facing glass conservatory in your winery which requires 40,000btu air conditioning to use, you go the way of the others. This isn’t me getting my own back. I’m trying to convey the idea of consistency by giving some extreme examples of contradictions I see around me every day.
Amid the many thousands of choices of wine on offer, I can be, and want to be, discerning. I need to grasp the core concept so that which I drink is not simply organoleptic elements. I want to see it in your shoes, in your winery, in the way you speak, in the way you make your wines. I want it to be single and substantial. That way I’ll understand your philosophy and, as a result, I’ll understand what I am drinking, and if I understand what I’m drinking, I will drink it again. Of course, this is not a rule, it is subjective, but as has already been said: I grew up with the smell of rice paper and the architectural maquette. Later it was called TCA… Anyway, I learned that everything has a reason for its existence. The reason is not binding; nor is the core concept. After all, the winemaker-architect invents his core concept. It’s his. He does with it whatever he wants.
Why did I put natural wines in the dock? Why, I didn’t. That’s just where the conversation started that night. For the same reason, I can love a Nemea from the wine tank or never drink a premium Nemea again. Just the appearance of the winemaker/winery/product can decide whether I fall under its spell or not. It’s not enough for me just to drink another good wine. So in the end, what is it that distinguishes a good wine from a good wine? It might not be anything in organoleptic terms. In a blind tasting, both might get exactly the same score, but in the long run it is consistency in living up to the concept, both inside and outside the bottle, that compels you. Consistency in vision.
Ultimately, a strong core concept that drives all of a winemaker’s decisions (region, variety, style, label, price, architecture of the winery, behavioural elements) can make me love the flaw. And if I love the flaw, I fall in love.
Have a happy summer. Fall in love with reality.
PS: Giannis, Markos, Nikola and Giannis, thank you for the conversation. I’d been trying to connect architecture with wine for a long time
