One of the greatest minds ever. Love that quote!
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old thread, but
Wine is an artificial craft - not art per se -
a winemaker can not express thoughts, feelings, opinions in his product, he is relying on terroir, weather, grapes …
very different to music, literature, painting, sculpture, movies, architecture …
Sorry? Why can’t a vigneron express thoughts or feelings in wine? I can produce a wine that is joyous, refreshing, that jumps with life or a wine that is uncut, dense, brooding and still represent terroir and farming. At it’s best, wine can be achingly beautiful which is both the expression of the place and also the skill of the hand guiding tye process. The concept that that hand is lacking emotional discretion in the process is pretty ludicrous.
In wine you’re working with a living medium, whether it’s art or not, and the shaping of that medium can be recipe, manufacturing, craft, insprired, or something that definitely infuses culture and awareness into the process. It stamps time and place on the wine in a way that goes far beyond some ifea that terroir is a liquid “Wish you were here” postcard (Hey, look kids…Alacatraz.)
Is Ferrari not art because it’s just an automobile? And all a carmaker can do is represent technology and the combustion engine?
Maybe 90% of wines made don’t attempt to go beyond a basic recipe, but at the point that someone aspires to put beauty in the bottle instead of a fermented beverage, then you have moved betond just representing terroir, farming, and fermentation and have begun to work with emotive responses.
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I jumpstarted one of those threads. It’s going swimmingly… should of came here first.
Not everyone can afford DRC but a lot of people use the same font.
Would someone appreciate a DRC if it was a shiner and no papers?
Everything taken far enough deserves an eye roll and a let’s move along now I guess.
You forgot to mention the cleaning and sanitizing.
I spray peroxy on equipment like I’m painting a mural 
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The amount of wine that won’t be drank because it’s just a part of a collection feels like art that hangs in a safe and won’t be seen.
I think it’s wild to call janitors winemakers but here we are cleaning drains and putting on suits at the wine dinner.
And not even about to touch is a winemaker with a spreadsheet the same as a cellar hand one, that does all the making.
Well I guess Chihuly didn’t blow his own glass and he has a couple museums.
I heard Michelangelo was a beast for cleaning the marble before he started sculpting and the Papacy was completely frightened at the amount of percarb he used to clean the ceiling of the Sistine chapel before he went to work….
Honestly, I don’t really sweat whether wine is art or not. The thread was interesting to take a side to see how people rationalize their decision.
How did Bottles hurt you? 
I’m not sure how I missed this thread until now. What fascinates me is not the answers to the initial question but how winemakers and wine drinkers (don’t) see their practice as art. And the contentiousness above—yeesh. But more on that would digress into male psychoanalysis and I’ll resist the temptation.
For me, the practices of winemaking and drinking can activate art, in other words make art out of practice, turn practice into works of art. These practices do so in two senses. In the first sense, they shape our knowledge of ourselves and of our worlds. In the second sense, they expose us to limit experiences, to the sublime.
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Another thought that occurs to me regarding wine and art is in respect to Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Just about every winemaker in this thread has mentioned how winemaking is not art when it’s just about mechanical reproduction. Beyond this thread, perhaps throughout WB as a forum, there is a common resistance to winemaking as mechanical reproduction and wine as a mechanically reproduced object. There’s also a certain melancholic thread that runs through WB that this resistance is difficult, perhaps, some might say in our lowest moments, futile. So much of what we do here, when we’re not simply listing off our collective consumption, is about instilling something more into what winemaking and wine drinking are.
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There’s more I’d like to say about this: wine as shaping knowledge, wine as shaping subjectivity, wine as sublime encounter and wine as an antidote to the mechanically produced product. How wine and practices around wine pull together all of these to make something I think we can all agree on: certain forms of culture. Wine is art at least in the sense of wine as culture-in-the-making.
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I don’t really follow what you mean by this, but I think the difficulty of applying the basic thesis of WB’s (heh) WAMR to wine is kind of twofold:
1.) The “mechanical reproduction” at play here isn’t really WB’s “mechanical reproduction,” which is based around the idea of there being a disappearance of the idea of an “original” piece around which ritual / aura can congeal. What he’s saying about film is that there conceptually can’t be an original because all of the rolls of film distributed to movie theaters are the same as any other; none of them is more “true.”
Any consumptive object (like wine) simultaneously is all originals (no bottle is strictly a copy of any other) and impossible to orient aura / ritual around in the way WB describes (because wine is destroyed in the act of its appreciation, ie drinking it.) When you make wine industrially, trying to make every bottle taste consistent, you are ultimately kind of fighting nature to do it: having to find solutions to various parameters like the acid being too high, the alcohol being too low, certain flavors being present or not vintage to vintage, etc.
I don’t think WB ever intended for “mechanical reproduction” to simply mean “industrial production.” Even in the most boring-ass industrial production of wine there still has to be some human intervention in order to achieve consistency, which isn’t true of visual media like film and photographs.
2.) To the extent the essay has anything to say about wine I think the bit about tactile experiences and the role of habit (which I think is near the end, it’s been a bit since I’ve reread that thing) is more applicable.
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- Benjamin did think that mechanical reproduction reduced art’s “aura,” though, you are right that he didn’t deny that reproduced artworks were art. But 2) those who say that wine isn’t art don’t object to the fact that numerous versions of the object are produced (like photographs or films), but that wine lacks the ideational content necessary for an object to be an artwork. My point here is not to defend that position, since I have done so at length elsewhere, simply to clarify the argument.
I wrote this before I read the comment just above by “smarsh.” He makes my point about Benjamin with more clarity than I did.
I know what Benjamin meant by mechanical reproduction. I’m also happy that you elaborate on what he meant. This is a non-academic discussion and I want to allow for multiple interpretations so I didn’t immediately constrain the term mechanical reproduction.
That said, I don’t think Benjamin’s articulation of mechanical reproduction toward a conceptualizing art production with loss of originality was meant to exclude mechanical reproduction in the more familiar sense (call it Fordist or what have you). In this conversation, I want to bring all these meanings in.
So for the sake of it, let’s say that there’s a resistance in WB of mechanically reproduced wine as machine harvested grapes, SO2 galore, sterile environment, deskilled labor, etc.
Completing this thought will necessitate moving from phone to pc. More to come.
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I’m going to start by taking issue with this statement of yours, then go off on a riff. My intention here is to keep conversations open, not shut anyone down (unless they become complete arseholes) – certainly not people like you who make reasoned contributions.
Firstly, even the most “mechanically” produced tv ad is a moving image that involves human intervention (one I’m seeing these days is for something called FRNDLY and is populated by human looking AI). Your statement above doesn’t go anywhere for me. Visual media involve human intervention and wine involves human intervention – Benjamin’s thought cannot be disqualified for wine on this ground.
Secondly, Benjamin was not trying to make a claim that the reproduction of art had become purely mechanized. His point in that article – and the reason why I bring it up here – is that we live in a time when it is commonplace for the things around us to be reproduced and even quotidian. There can be no cult around a work of art because (a copy of) it is readily available to us. In this sense the winemaker is not that different from, say, the film maker. Both design the production of the object and then multiple representations of that work exist and are consumed in multiple places. In the case of a mass market film of a landscape, of a “terroir” wine made by high volume techniques, the authenticity of that place is detached (liquidated, even) from the product.
There’s more to say on this but I’ll leave it here for now.
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I appreciate your comments above and have noted that sometimes your points were lost. That said, I also have some sympathy with @Brian_G_r_a_f_s_t_r_o_m 's not giving a shit about Kant and Hegel (although the tone of his post was perplexing to me). It’s quite painful to me to say this, but for the immediate purpose I don’t give a shit about Benjamin.
What I’d like to add to this conversation is that I think there is something artistic about making and consuming wine. This is my intuition. How can I explain this sense to myself? This is where the thoughts I made above come in. When I drink what I call a “good” wine, it feels like more than pleasurable consumption. Drinking a good wine takes me places, makes me want to learn things. Drinking good wine makes me want to design forms of consumption – perhaps a dinner, or a time with friends. You could even say that drinking wine helps me create rituals of communality. I know I run the risk of being accused of hyperbole when I say this, but it helps me design how I live. This is hard to do in a world in which so much of how we live is designed for us. (I could bring up Benjamin’s politicization of aesthetics here, but I already said that I don’t give a shit about Benjamin (momentarily) and I don’t want to run afoul of Todd’s no politics order. 
)
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Nice post, and a lot of great things in it.
I would guess though, that in the era of actual film or hand processed photographs, that there is quite a bit of minor variation between copies of the film or photographs. While they would age and degrade differently than wine, that would still happen.
That said, I really enjoyed the post.
I would say that you have struck at the heart of this thread with this post.
I would speculate that almost every single person with an opinion in this thread came to their idea as to whether wine is art or not intuitively.
And then began to work backwards in order to attempt to suport that intuition. Often with a distinct lack of understanding of what the true process is.
I say “lack of understanding of the true process” to mean that I know what my accountant does but I lack understanding of what it really means to be an accountant. To be immersed in the being of an accountant. Similarly, while winemaking is what most here think it is, it is also much more beyond that. It’s much more beyond what many practicing winemakers understand, and quite probably much more than what I understand.
But much of this thread is people determinedly working to validate their intuitive choice and then using arguments, some logical and some flawed, to defend their intuition.
I don’t actually care if wine is art as a producer, but for all the reasoning in this thread the only real answer to the question seems to be: if you think it is, then yes. If you think it isn’t, then it is not.
I haven’t seen any argument made that wine is not art that doesn’t disallow other commonly accepted art forms from being art. Nor does the vast majority of wine, like the vast majority of television/movies transcend the rank of storytelling (I mean by the wine itself not the producer or marketers)
But there’s an argument to made that great wines can move a person in much the same way as a great painting or poem, even if it’s just a practice or a craft.
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