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Winemaker's Journal
May 2004
My father is a farmer, an architect and a town planner. He maintains that where water meets land, or plains meet mountains you find good energy created by a change of direction and a re-direction of change. These are good places for people and for plants.
Waterfronts around the world, once teaming with people and activity were rendered soulless, inhospitable wastelands by mechanization and containerization. The inhuman, unnatural scale imposed by man striving for efficiency, cut off cities from their lifeblood oceans, their energy.
As a result harbour cities around the world have suffered and the inhabitants of those cities have suffered. Only through carefully considered rejuvenation of these most necessary of human and spiritual spaces, have waterfront harbours given back to the people a sense of belonging more wholly and naturally to their environment.
Over the last few decades, wineries around the world have done just the same thing. They have imposed an unnatural scale of production on what used to be a seasonal, small, energizing, hand-crafted way of life. This is because in a market of bulimic margins, swayed by fearsome, fire-breathing supermarkets, efficiency is everything. Why? Because we are told that price is everything.
Like those harbours, man has wrought the pencil-sharpened perils of cost efficient business practice on winemaking. And the energy has been lost; the soul of the grape can not survive a loveless production line. Correct, clean, balanced wine is the best result one can expect. And as the global village marketplace daily demonstrates, most people seem so out of touch with themselves and the cycles of nature that this result is good enough.
At Flagstone we find ourselves rebelling against this. Surely everyone can sense good energy when it enters the body? Everyone knows that even a simple meal of eggs and bacon, cooked with uninhibited, unselfish love by your mom, or someone who loves you, is the best tasting meal ever. It glows from inside and afterwards you sleep deep, wonderfully peaceful sleeps.
That is why at Flagstone we believe the process is extremely important. For us, wineries are like harbours, bridging raw nature to human accessibility. You can do it sensitively and you can do it wrong.
In our case we believe it is our responsibility to preserve the energy and soul of the land. No, it is much more than this. By pouring our own love and caring into the process we are able to do a magical thing – we can enhance this energy.
We hate the idea that wine is a commodity, conforming only to the soulless, bland possibilities of commercialism. Wine is not that at Flagstone. It is not only a nice tasting form of alcohol. And at the other end of the spectrum, it is not a status symbol.
Wine should connect us to the seasons, root us to the soil and open our minds to greater possibilities. Most importantly wine should do a simple, small thing – it should add joy to life. That is why we don’t pander to conservative labelling or invite the adoration of people who drink a certain wine because of what it says about them. That’s for car manufacturers – and we aren’t doing anything that technical – we’re just channelling natural energy.
Efficiency, we will openly admit, is way down our list of priorities, as a result our wines are more expensive than many, but they will never be priced to attract image-ego drinkers. If a snob visits us, we make him drink beer – it does him good.
We believe handcrafted, balanced wines can contribute joy to a meal, a conversation and even a dream. If you have read this far, you probably agree. I hope you do and I hope you keep supporting wineries that believe in crafting Real Wine.
Bruce Jack
Flagstone Winemaker
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