Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, painted by Jakob Schlesinger in 1831. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. He never wrote a word about wine.
A philosopher writing about wine is already a risk. A philosopher writing about Hegel is a punishment. I am doing both at once, and only once: Hegel is here for a single job, it takes him about a page, and I have no intention of discussing his aesthetics, or Kant on beauty, or Hume on taste. From the next piece on, bottles.
Why Bring Hegel into This
Hegel in the Vineyard sounds like a joke, and it partly is. No grower has ever needed the Phenomenology of Spirit to decide when to pick. And philosophy applied to taste produces, with some regularity, pages that taste does not recognize.
There is a reason to trouble the philosopher of Jena, and it has to do with the way wine has been discussed for the past twenty years: around the opposition between natural wine and conventional wine. In philosophical terms this is a dyad, a pair of terms in which each is defined by the negation of the other. Anyone who writes, makes, sells or simply drinks wine has learned to place themselves in relation to it, by adherence or by refusal. The two words are now enough to predict a person’s verdict on a bottle before they have tasted it.
The opposition satisfies almost no one, and the first not to recognize themselves in it are the people who make wine. Among the growers I know, nearly all reject protocol-driven winemaking, and nearly none identifies with natural wine. Asked where they stand, they fall back on a compromise and try to change the subject: a little technique, and only when needed. The formula does not satisfy them, because it describes a middle position while theirs is a different one. Hegel comes in here, to say in what sense it is different.
Whoever files these growers under one of the two terms is doing philosophy too, without knowing it. Reasoning by binary oppositions is a conceptual choice that presents itself as neutral description, and it decides in advance which judgments can be made: whoever does not belong to one term belongs to the other. Either you are natural or you are conventional. The grower who claims a position of their own and refuses the compromise is doing something else, something Hegel spent a lifetime on: getting out of an exhausted opposition without picking a side.
Hegelian reasoning is already at work in what growers do, and missing from the discourse that describes them. Since getting out of an opposition requires knowing its structure, we need to look at how this one was built.
The Invention of the Conventional
The natural-conventional dyad has a short and documentable history. The word “conventional” enters the wine lexicon as an attribution, not as a claim: it is the name that the supporters of natural wine give to what they are distancing themselves from. What the tradition treated as a canon, the set of technical choices recognized by the winemaking community, is redescribed as a convention, that is, as a set of contingent choices.
The redescription has two unpleasant consequences. The first is that it corners nearly every actor in world viticulture into the uncomfortable category of the “conventional,” and nobody stands there willingly: imagine a writer saying, “my style is conventional.” The second is a reversal of the burden of proof. Under a canon, the burden falls on whoever departs from it; once the canon is redescribed as a convention, the burden falls on the canon itself. Hence the endless interrogation: how much sulfur do you use, how tight is your filtration, how much new oak.
The invention of natural wine is one of the great marketing coups in the history of wine. It is also an unfair one, because under “conventional” it gathered two practices that are worth keeping apart: classical winemaking and industrial winemaking.
By classical winemaking I mean the model that from the 1990s onward brought the microbiology of fermentation into wine: the role of yeasts, bacteria and enzymes, the formation of aromatic precursors, temperature control, the measurement of phenolic ripeness. Its representative figure is the consulting enologist, the flying winemaker, who works across different terroirs applying reproducible protocols. The wines that come out of it cost hundreds of euros, and even the critics most hostile to the model acknowledge that they are successful. The objection is not about quality: it is about the variety of the world. That model spread a uniform idea of excellence, and made wines born in very distant places resemble one another.
Industrial winemaking uses similar tools for a different end: a constant product at minimum cost. The amount of technique is comparable, the tools sometimes coincide, and the whole difference lies in the end. Classical winemaking pursues excellence and uses reproducibility as a means; industrial winemaking pursues constancy and makes reproducibility its purpose. The science is the same: what changes is the question put to it.
The natural wine movement could not help being blind to this difference. A criterion that measures the amount of intervention looks at means, and on means the two models converge: both add and both correct. The crudeness of the judgment comes from the structure of the criterion, not from bad faith on the part of those who apply it.
The difference between the two models is visible, but not where the debate went looking for it. If their operations resemble each other in the cellar, in the vineyard they diverge. It is not rare to find representatives of classical winemaking who have adopted the most advanced agronomic practices, and it is not rare to find “natural” wines made from grapes of opaque genealogy.
The criterion that discriminates therefore belongs to a plane the dyad does not contemplate. Its two terms disagree on the answer and agree on the question: both establish the value of a wine from what happens in the cellar, one attributing it to the correctness of the intervention, the other to its absence. Conventional and natural are the symmetrical opposites of a single underlying assumption, the primacy of the cellar in the normative definition of wine.
A Monad in Dyadic Disguise
Let us follow Hegel one step further. The natural-conventional pair is not a true dyad. It is a monad in disguise: a single criterion generating both terms, scored once positively and once negatively. For two terms to form a genuine dyad, each would have to bring a criterion of its own. Here there is only one criterion, the amount of intervention in the cellar sets its scale, and the two terms occupy its extremes.
Hegel comes to our aid, because he teaches that dyads are unstable and that one has to look for a standpoint outside them. Leaving the cellar and going back to the vineyard unmasks the dyad for what it is. It also yields an explanation of the natural wine quarrel, whose intensity has struck many observers as disproportionate to the stakes. People fight hardest over what they in fact agree on in general terms, so that the violence of the contrast measures how much of the criterion is shared rather than how far the positions stand apart.
Only by unmasking the dyad can the voice of the growers who recognize themselves in neither term finally take shape.
The Third Term
It was the growers, not the critics, who put Hegel in the vineyard: the shift happened in practice before it was formulated in words. The last two generations have distinguished themselves by what they began doing in the vineyard more than by what they stopped doing in the cellar. Plant material selection, soil management, the architecture of the vine have taken the place the previous generation gave to lowering sulfur and refusing filtration. It is, to borrow from another philosopher who detested Hegel, the twilight of the enological idols.
That gesture has a name. The German verb aufheben means both to abolish and to preserve, and Aufhebung is the operation by which a new position keeps what the previous ones held that was sound and takes from them the claim to account for everything. For the operation to work, though, the third term must bring a criterion the first two do not have. In wine that criterion is the shift of attention from the cellar to the vineyard.
The reason is simple. As soon as you look at the vineyard, “conventional” splits: classical winemaking comes away from industrial winemaking, because scientific knowledge comes away from the use that has been made of it. The same happens on the natural side. When the ideology of “no” gives way to the pragmatism of “a little, and when it is needed,” we are looking at a quiet revolution. The concept of post-natural wine, which Hegel would not have approved of (but nobody is perfect), names this third position.
A monad allows a single logical operation, opposition: either you are natural or you are conventional.
A triad allows distinction, because it has a place for what differs from both without standing between them. The third term does not add a model to the list: it adds an operation. A judgment becomes sayable that was not sayable before, namely that a model can be legitimate and at the same time not shared. I can admire the perfection of a Lynch-Bages without wanting to drink it.
The classicism of late twentieth-century scientific enology made possible wines whose greatness deserves to be acknowledged, and which find no place in today’s wine discourse. Wines that made history and defined an aesthetic canon, a style that dominated a time and a place. The greatness of the classical is precisely what the discourse of natural wine conceals.
From his position in the middle of the vineyard, Hegel lets us see two differences the dyad kept hidden: on one side the difference between classical wines and industrial wines, on the other the difference between classical wines and natural wines.
Where Hegel Stops
Here our path parts from Hegel. In his system the third term is the truth of the two that precede it. Applied to wine, the thesis would say that classical winemaking was post-natural without knowing it, and that natural wine was a stage on the way to something it did not yet know. That is not what I mean. Hegel is useful for getting out, not for arriving. He tells us that the opposition is exhausted, that it has to be looked at from outside, and that what once occupied the whole field now occupies only a part of it. Here we have to take our leave, because beyond the threshold there is no synthesis: the three terms remain irreducible to one another, and each of them constitutes an exclusive cultural apparatus, irreducible to the other two.
They remain irreducible because they are not stages in a history. They are genres, and genres coexist. In the history of the arts, classicism, romanticism and naturalism do not succeed one another by elimination: they persist as different ways of solving the same formal problems, and each period inflects them in its own manner, with hybrids, revivals and impure forms. None of the three is the truth of the other two.
Three Genres, Three Ideas of Success
The same holds for wine. Classical winemaking, natural wine and post-natural wine are three wine genres, and each has its own idea of success, discussed and negotiated by a community that recognizes it. For the classical, a wine succeeds when it realizes a codified project: balance, definition, conformity to a repeatable ideal. For the natural, it succeeds when it bears faithful witness to a process no one directed, and deviation can count fully as part of the success. For the post-natural, it succeeds when the vintage and the place remain legible through the gesture that accompanied them. These are ideal types, constructions that guide description: few real growers match any one of them completely.
Canons of this kind are not commensurable, and none of them can be judged by the criteria of another. A classical wine assessed by the natural canon will always come out as manipulated. A natural wine assessed by the classical canon will always come out as faulty. These are category mistakes, and the dyad produced them continuously because it had no other way of judging.
This is the gift of Hegel in the vineyard: a three-term structure makes visible what a two-term structure concealed. A judgment of success is internal to a genre and is argued with the criteria of that genre. A judgment of taste is mine, and commits no one else. The dyad made the two coincide: whoever was not on the right side was on the wrong one. That is why the growers I began with have no voice.
Respect Without Affection
Separating the two judgments has a price, and it is paid by whoever separates them. Admiring the perfection of a Lynch-Bages without wanting to drink it means admitting that one’s own irritation is a preference, not a verdict. Anyone who already loves classical wines gives up nothing by calling them classical: they were granting them value in any case. Anyone who does not love them has to concede something they would rather not concede, and that concession is the entire content of the new word. A renaming that cost no one anything would change nothing.
“Conventional” allowed one not to discuss the other side’s reasons, because it declared them arbitrary from the start. “Classical” forces one to recognize them as a tradition, and to recognize that one’s own distance is a matter of taste, not of superiority.
Hegel in the vineyard has taught me to respect wines I will probably go on not drinking. It is the least comfortable result of this reconstruction, and the only one I could not have reached by staying inside the dyad.
Heady.