If you’re raising your wine glass this holiday season to give thanks among the company of family and friends, take a moment to remember the thousands of laborers in this country, and the millions worldwide, who toil in vineyards to bring that fruit to the bottle. Because all of the mystique, all of the prestige, all of the warmth, the sophistication, the glamour, and the grandeur that wine embodies is resting on their tired, stiff shoulders, and supported by their aching backs. Without them you’d have nothing to toast with.
It is an obvious if slippery truth that Americans don’t think much about where their food comes from. The draw of a fast-food way of life, combined with the country’s Rabelaisian consumption habits, leave little room for contemplation.
Nevertheless, authors like Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver, as well as such locavore eminences as Alice Waters and Judy Rodgers, have made some headway in reminding us that the food we eat comes from somewhere, and that how it’s grown and raised can have consequences – both physical and metaphysical – for our health, that of its providers, and for the well-being of the planet at large.
Still, it seems that despite their best efforts, our capacity for contemplation seems to last only until we’re hungry again, and like most base desires, hunger tends to limit our perspective.
If all of this is true about food, it’s even more true with wine. After all, wine as a product gives scant evidence of its roots as an agricultural product. There’s no dirt, no dust, no bugs crawling on it (none you can see at any rate), nothing but that elusive sense of terroir to remind that this too was grown, tended, harvested, before it was put in a bottle.
Everything about it, from its lavish packaging, its elaborate paraphernalia, its exotic aromas and intoxicating flavors, seems designed to make you forget that people, lots of people, work their asses off to get that stuff into your glass.
I was nudged into this entire train of thought by the ¡Salud! Wine Auction, an event I attended earlier this month in Portland, Oregon, to benefit the Tuality Healthcare Foundation. Tuality provides health services for hundreds of seasonal agricultural workers and their families from Jalisco, Michoacan, Oaxaca, Sonora, and countless other states and villages in Mexico who migrate to Northwest winegrowing regions in Oregon and Washington.
Of course their efforts are hardly limited to vineyards. In north-central Oregon, they harvest hops, strawberries and asparagus, then move on to in the Yakima Valley in Washington to harvest cherries, then back south to the Willamette Valley in Oregon for grapes and berries, then back to eastern Washington to harvest grapes, pears, peaches and apples, then back down to Oregon to cut and bundle Christmas trees.
Along the way they encounter hypertension, type-II diabetes, gallbladder problems, high cholesterol, tension headaches, eye irritation from sun exposure, dental problems, arthritis, any one of which, untreated, can lead to crippling debility, illness, or both.
It goes without saying that all of them are off the grid. Even if they are here legally, none of them have the luxury of healthcare as we have come to enjoy it (for all its shortcomings). Tuality acknowledge the debt we owe to their tireless labor and keeps a vital cog in our vast, bewildering agricultural system running, one we all rely on without thinking.
Wine auctions are generally strange affairs, built on a kind of lavish black-tie boilerplate to attract wealthy patrons, with multi-course dinners prepared by celebrity chefs; fantastically rare and expensive wine flows without cease, from bottles that farmworkers probably couldn’t buy with a season’s wages. The whole idea, I suppose, is to convince patrons that over-spending on a case or two of wine will have been compensated for by a good party.
Perhaps the most famous is the Hospice de Beaune, held each year in Burgundy, France, to support the efforts of a number of local charity hospitals. But probably the most excessive of the species is the Napa Valley Wine Auction, held each June in the Napa Valley, where millions are raised for worker health and where certain lots from swanky cult producers can fetch stratospheric sums (single lots in the Napa Valley can rival the entire take for the ¡Salud! Auction, which this year, raised close to $800,000).
The scale of giving at ¡Salud! is obviously less extreme than Napa, but no less fervent or engaged. It’s important to note that the list of participating wineries at ¡Salud! – there were 42 this year – reads like Oregon’s A-list for Pinot Noir, from pioneer wineries like Adelsheim, Chehalem and Erath, established powerhouses like Domaine Drouhin, Ken Wright, and Beaux Freres, and newer entities like Raptor Ridge, Scott Paul, and Solena.
The combination is clearly designed to draw a high caliber of donor. But it also brings home the fact that none of them would have the reputations they enjoy without the support of the people they’re helping by this effort.
Of course the relative glamour of such events usually draw many ironic parallels to the very cause it’s seeking to promote. The heavily marketed, much-promoted, ‘wine-as-lifestyle’ aspect of the industry can fly in the face of the very modest and earthbound labors of the people who are benefiting from it all. There is, routinely, a level of excess that would probably leave the recipients aghast, if they could even conjure it. And if you’ve ever witnessed a bidding war, you can be sure the vineyard workers’ welfare isn’t exactly foremost in each party’s mind. The wine industry seems to sit with these contradictions unscathed.
Nonetheless, it was heartening to see how Oregon wineries pitched in. Many of the contributions the other night came from winery owners and employees themselves, who of course understand the value of their investment. And after they mothball the ball gowns and tuxedos, they’ll lace up their boots and be back among the vines, side by side with their campesinos, without whom they wouldn’t have a winery, and you’d have an empty glass.
Here is a very incomplete list of Wine Charity Events for you to consider attending or contributing to:
¡Salud! Wine Auction, Portland, Oregon benefiting Tuality Healthcare Foundation; saludauction.org
Winesong! Auction, benefiting the Mendocino Coast Hospital Foundation; winesong.org
Sonoma Paradiso, benefiting various charities in the North Coast; sonomaparadiso.com
Sonoma Valley Harvest Wine Auction, benefiting various health and education organizations in Sonoma County; sonomavalleywine.com
Sonoma County Showcase, benefiting education and activity centers and food banks in Sonoma County; sonomashowcase.com
Napa Valley Wine Auction, benefiting education and health organizations in the Napa Valley; napavintners.com
Hospice du Rhône, benefiting health organizations in the Paso Robles area; hospicedurhone.org