Quality Stress / Stress Quality
*John Prine and Bukowski were both mail carriers. They wrote their stuff as they worked. Underpaid, cold and physically downtrodden, the words played out in their heads, in memorization. What does stress do for them?*
Stressed vines make good wine. If I had a penny for every time I heard that in wine country. Often from my own mouth. “Hello! Welcome, here are the bullet points of my terroir that bring stress naturally to these vines. Stressed vines make good wine.” And then a patron says to me: does a stressed winemaker make better wine? Knee-jerk, I think of course not, there is not a direct correlation. The winemaker is not so integrated a scribe of the vine, as the vine is of the terroir. The terroir is expressed through the vine, then the wine is a vehicle for the scribe work that the vine did of the terroir. The winemaker drives the vehicle. Bringing the vine into a consumable product, taking it to an audience to share the terroir. But I like being amenable, seeing both sides.
So, I answer him: I am an artist wine producer and I know for sure that I make better drawings when I’m stressed. My thoughts go one direction as I recite to him in another: “When I draw under the gun, like in front of an audience, there’s a febrility to my line, it emotes tenfold compared to the lines I produce when drawing in seclusion”. I fill his glass with my wine while I talk, and I am wondering, will that be my big moment of gratitude to my kids? That they stressed me enough and consistently to push my line to its fullest expression?
Under circumstances of live drawing, that’s when I know I’ve made something honest and unfiltered. I found these circumstances by drawing in the pigeon coop, under the shitting birds. It wasn’t so much the shit that made the stress that made the beautiful line, it was that they move all the time. I only see them for a second then I look at my page and draw them from memory. The birds ended up on my wine label, but not my poopy version. They’re my beacons of freedom. The place where I discovered where I need to get to, to be free from my inhibitions, outside of myself and my filters, to draw as just an arm connected directly to my subject. It’s not about the physical place, that pigeon coop, where the rats get fat, it’s about what circumstances I discovered there and where else I could go to find those circumstances. Now I live with constant time crunch and base volume of children in the house so I don’t need to cast around further for a manufactured stress. Plus, I’ve done it enough that I can channel the feeling.
Choreograph the situation of production to control the quality of the output. A stressed vine makes better wine. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, a vine that produces fruit under stressed growing conditions will produce less fruit, and lower yields lead to basically more attention per berry, and the more attention berries get from photosynthesis the better chance they’ll have to express to their full potential, the ingenious packet of genetics they carry that make them which varietal? Cabernet Sauvignon? A stressed Cab vine will produce a Cab berry that packs the fullest expression of its genetics, which when let loose, roams deep and full and wide. Lush! and did I already say deep? Finding the obscure corners of Cab aromas, the savory, the earthy, the mineral, the baked chocolate and dried herbs. With a deprivation irrigation program, arid and rocky soils, long slow hot days, the wine expresses itself fully and so does my line when it is stressed. And I’m the winemaker either way, just being the agent, the arm, that drives the stress-expressed vehicle into circulation.
Image courtesy of the artist Carmen Winant, “Body Index/Stene Projects” photographic collage, 2018
