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Jura abounds with natural beauty. I think the most influential reasons I stayed in the Jura after my arrival in 2017 is its unique position of being an incredible wine region set amongst hay fields, forests and at the foot of a small mountain range full of lakes and hiking paths. Despite this richness in nature, Jura has, until relatively recently, stayed off the radar of many tourists and wine aficionados. Especially where I live, in the south of the department, the tiny villages have not been influenced by tourism in the same way that some better known wine regions have. This can lead to a rather romantic vision of the Jura: one a bit lost in time, where my neighbours forage regularly in the forest surrounding our village, where the days move a little slower, where many people still engage in traditional bucolic activities like winemaking, beekeeping, basket weaving, bread baking and preserving. I won’t contradict this vision, because certainly it is true that I am often surprised at the industriousness of my neighbors making and creating. However, on the opposite side of this rural coin is a lived experience of the Jura that can tell another story.

Jura was, for a long time, not a popular wine region. The winemaking families here practiced polyculture, raising cows along with growing vines in order to mitigate the risks associated with agriculture. The commercial side of winemaking was difficult, wines being sold locally at the rural fairs. Many winegrowers sold their grapes into a winemaking cooperative, a system that is still important to farmers here. I really appreciate the sentimentality towards the cooperative: at a time when most people didn’t have much money, it was essential to share in the harvest so that everyone could survive. Years when you, as a winegrower, might have lost your crop to frost, your neighbour would share their harvest with you and vice versa. There is a real pride in the community created so that everyone could support their families. My neighboring farmers are also proud to have created a CUMA, which is a cooperative for agriculturists to collectively buy and share rather pricey winegrowing equipment. The associative nature of winemaking in Jura is a story that isn’t often told, but I think is a wonderful history of a place that is equally abundant in beauty and hardship.

Today we see another absurdity of this place: one where the average standard of living has certainly risen, but most vineyard workers are still making the minimum wage (in France today this is about 1400€/month), but certain wine bottles now reach abhorrent prices on the secondary and tertiary markets. It is complicated to digest this as a winemaker: On one hand I cannot overstate the relief it is to start a rather risky business, but not have the constant stress of how will I manage to sell my bottles. The demand for Jura in this regard has been a big safety net for every producer. But now there are discrepancies that arise: the income disparities not only between producers but between growers and sellers. It is a difficult subject to untangle because it requires normative opinions on who should be making money and how much.

The rise of prices for Jura wine appears to be, so far, a double edged sword. On one hand, certainly farmers who are taking risks to grow grapes here are entitled to make a decent living from their work, hopefully enough so that they can have a reserve for the years (that are more and more frequent) when part or all of the crop is lost. However, now that a farmer can make a legitimate salary from wine in Jura, the price of land continues to rise with speculation from investors starting to seep in. And yet another perspective is that land still remains relatively accessible and each year more and more young winemakers are starting new projects in Jura, something I think brings incredible energy and possibility to the region. Wine from Jura was fundamentally a product of peasant agriculture and easily accessible. Now higher prices have made it difficult for even locals (who are often earning minimum wages) to access the wines. It is a complicated narrative: the inexorable rise in prices vs the ethical desire that wine remain a simple agricultural product, attainable for all.

Absurdity can exist in a myriad of ways, not necessarily a pejorative word, but one that I think fits the complicated beauty of winemaking in Jura. An area with one face towards a past that wasn’t always easy for winegrowers and another face towards a bright future, but certainly full of its own contradictions. I believe that understanding the nuanced nature of the reality of living in the rural sphere allows for all types of discussion. We can all contribute to this dialogue, bringing diverse and somewhat complex perspectives to the conversation. For my own part, I want to help build a future where everyone can thrive and as such I try to hold in my head the intricate but interdependent politics of disparity of rural living standards, the desire to create a feasible and thriving business and of the role I play in continuing to promote wine as a product of simple and human scale agriculture.

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This season has given me a lot to think about: starting off with a bang: spring frost, and continuing with a challenge: a few months of almost non-stop rain. In organic viticulture we use topical sprays against disease, which wash off with after a certain amount of rain. I can summarise the past few months as rather tiring and a lot of running to try to stay ahead of disease, while watching the preventative sprays rinse away, one day to the next (spoiler alert: disease has arrived, despite best efforts). Now, don’t think that I am necessarily complaining, surely the ups and down of the weather are part of the package of being a farmer, but the murmurings (which are not new) are that lately the wet seasons are wetter, the hot seasons are hotter and the feeling is that the climate is more and more unpredictable.

This reality of climate change is the reason I was drawn to regenerative agriculture, my understanding of it being the creation of a resilient, diverse and closer to an actually sustainable system of farming. But lately I’ve called into question what it means to use the word regenerative, both its strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, recently there’s been a lot of chatter in the world of wine about regenerative agriculture and what it means to different groups of actors. I think we need to take a little time and dissect what are the issues at hand. I want to examine how the words regenerative agriculture have been defined, how they have been adopted by industrial agriculture and finally, what I think the missing pieces are in our current discourse on viticulture.

Let’s not get bogged down in defining regenerative agriculture for too long. I would urge you to check out the Rodale Institute if you are interested in learning more, they have been working on regenerative organic agriculture for decades and are a great source of easily accessible references. But for the sake of our investigation, I will tell you what regenerative means to me: Regenerative agriculture is a practice that puts soil health and biodiversity at the forefront of agriculture system design. It aims to tackle climate change by both maximising carbon sequestering, resiliency of the ecosystem, including the water and air systems and, in particular, respecting the complex functioning and structure of soil. Practically, this could mean different things for different farmers, but I understand many people prioritise not tilling the soil, year long cover crops, thoughtful soil analysis, the reduction of inputs, and above all the increase in biodiversity. For me, the idea of a truly sustainable agriculture system is necessarily organic, not for the sprays the farmer is using against disease (truly, a more sustainable practice would not include sulphur or copper), but that the farmer is not using chemical herbicide (read:round up).

Now here is where I first became confused about what it means to be practicing regenerative agriculture. A friend told me recently that there are large commercial farms using the term regenerative agriculture as a pursuit of ecology, but also using chemical herbicides. These farms explain that a pass of herbicide is still relevant as a no-till practice under the umbrella of regenerative agriculture. We’re stepping into some muddy waters of of semantics, but I would like to call a spade a spade and say that this is absolutely absurd. In my view, a sustainable system fundamentally cannot be using chemical herbicides. But the term regenerative agriculture has already been coopted by industrial agriculture to the point that now the giant pharmaceutical producer of round up has a division dedicated to regenerative agriculture. It’s completely antithetical to the idea of ecology to be using chemical herbicides.

I feel robbed of my words. I fully enjoy using the term regenerative agriculture, not because I think it is perfect, but because it provides a useful tool to start the conversation about what true sustainability might look like. I think that one of the strongest points of being a proponent of regenerative agriculture is that there is already a large community of farmers using this term that are dedicated to finding ecological solutions to agriculture. The term provides a very useful meeting place for all types of farmers to share and support each other. Regenerative agriculture also gives us a useful lexicon to discuss a reimagining of agriculture in the context of climate change: reimagining the aesthetics of agriculture, reimagining the values associated with farming.

But where I find regenerative agriculture falls short is in its basic conception: regenerative agriculture is organised around a rather vague concept of sustainability, and a handful of technical processes. It is in this weak definition and technical organisation that leaves it vulnerable to be adopted by some commercial, large scale farms that are perhaps more concerned with profit than with ecology. In such cases, regenerative agriculture becomes less about ecological system change and more about corporate owned agrochemical inputs. Moreover, normalising the term regenerative agriculture instead of regenerative organic agriculture further hollows out its underpinnings: allowing the use of the term to imply an ecologically driven approach, but without adhering to the regulations of organic farming.

I think in order to move forward, we need to go back. I look to why I was first drawn to regenerative agriculture: as a response to ecological degradation stemming from modern farming practices. At the onset I was looking for something transformational: a change, a shift in how agriculture is practiced. But now, after reflection, it seems that another highly technical conception of agriculture is falling a bit short of the desired system transformation. I would argue what is missing, not only in regenerative agriculture, but in viticulture in general, is a robust and holistic political discourse around farming.

Maybe the answer lies in another word: agroecology.

Agroecology is a conception of agriculture that links practical processes of farming with the wider social, economic and political dimensions of agricultural production. (I would in fact argue that regenerative agriculture stems from agroecology, sharing many of the practical theories). What is important in agroecology, that is missing in regenerative agriculture and even organic agriculture, is the understanding that a response to ecological degradation requires not only looking at specific practices but the relationships between farming, farmers, global economic systems and sources of power at all of these levels. Agroecology is an incredibly dynamic concept because it seeks to place social capital within the framework of sustainability, meaning that change should be led by farmer participation. Sustainability arrives by expanding the power of small farmers to make locally and socially relevant ecological decisions instead of empowering the expertise of large biotechnology companies.

If we are seeking real change in the realms of viticulture and wine, agroecology can provide a useful framework in which to work: changing a system means understanding the system as a whole. Change will require taking off our technical caps for a moment and seeking to understand how our specific vineyard sites and how we farm them are more broadly connected to social and economic systems, not only locally, but globally. Understanding how farmers can make better use of internal resources, thus broadening their agency and moving away from the technocratic power of biotechnology companies. Agroecology provides a deeper understanding of agriculture that promotes a practice more in line with what true sustainability might look like.

And somehow after all of these definitions I would also argue that we shouldn’t get stuck in terms and phrases, but rather persist in the idea that ecological sustainability requires a continued exploration of the connections between actors at all levels and the economic and political power they impose. That sustainability is fundamentally a political process and that we should not shy away from including questions about social, economic and political systems in our thinking about ecological farming.

I have almost grown accustomed to the feeling of running in the summer. There’s always something extra that could be done. Sometimes the amount of work that is required during the growing season can feel inundating: that the rest of life’s priorities can fall away in favour of a singular focus on the vineyard. And this is where today’s story begins: taking a moment in the busyness of life to appreciate the work you’ve done, how far you’ve come and how just a glimmer of gratitude can be really grounding when there world seems to be spinning around you.

Preface: The Big Bang

The question was “do you believe in destiny?” I had to give it a lot of thought. My obvious answer, as a rather pragmatic person, is no, but I cannot deny the feeling of luck and happenstance that has imbued my life with really incredible opportunities. That while I don’t adhere to magical thinking I cannot deny that I feel a lot of gratitude for the moments that have brought me here today: to what I think it one of the world’s most beautiful vineyard sites, in a bucolic French village, supported by so many wonderful people near and far. But there have been specific moments that I cannot rationalize that have made it all happen. J offers a scientific explanation: That since the Big Bang the arrangement of energy and atoms in Universe have been on a predetermined trajectory, and that all we are today was decided at that instance of cosmic inflation. I let out a dismissive “mmhmm…”, but could it be true?

Chapter 1: ice cream luck

The end of summer 2016 was arriving in Canada, and I had still not done any of the essential summer activities before harvest arrived: lunch at the bistro on the lake, a swim out at the point and an ice cream from the local shop. I decided to make a day of it and do everything on my list. En route to the bistro I drove by the ice cream shop and declared that as an adult, I had every right to eat an ice cream before my lunch. I stopped, ordered a cone and plopped down on the little bench in front of the store to enjoy my treat. Coincidentally the house across the street was putting up a FOR SALE sign just as I was sitting eating my ice cream. “What a cute house!” I thought. I called my friend, a real estate agent, to see what the deal was.

By the next day I had bought the house. It took every penny of my savings and a large part of my salary each month; but the adorable 1.5 story century home was mine. I was terrified, as I had never committed to one place or such an investment in my life. What I didn’t know then that this was the beginning of the road to everything I have been gifted with today, a pivotal moment in the Big Bang destiny.

Chapter 2: first sunset of the Summer

It’s May, I have just arrived back to Canada from harvest in South Africa. The southern hemisphere harvest was an incredibly formative time, it clarified my understanding of winemaking and how a harvest works on a practical level. I was back home, full of energy and motivation and ready to put my new skills into practice. All my colleagues had also returned from their winter séjours and we were awaiting the busy summer tourist season to begin. The energy was joyful and celebratory. C went to his stash of wine to bring us a special bottle. I can remember the exact scene: the warmth of the setting sun, the cool late spring air, the laughter of the guys as we huddled around one small table. The wine was relevatory, unlike anything I had experienced in my still limited time as a wine drinker: energetic, salty, a richness without being fat. It was a Ganevat chardonnay, and my mind felt expanded on what wine could be, how a bottle of fermented grape juice could be emotional.

Chapter 3: the answer is right under your nose

Flash forward 3 years and I’ve made my way to La Combe. I’m trying to learn everything there is to know about organic wine growing and natural winemaking. I arrived speaking no french, knowing nothing of rural French life, and facing a steep learning curve for everything in the vineyard. There were many days of total frustration: of not understanding or being understood, of making mistakes, of trying to prove that I was a strong and capable worker. There were also days of total exhilaration: so many laughs with my new colleagues, glasses of wine shared, a magnitude of new knowledge acquired.

My favourite days of vineyard work were always in the farthest vineyards next to the village of Grusse. High on the hillside, surrounded by nothing but cow fields, forest and the occasional passing cyclist, there was a tranquility and beauty of the place that was astonishing. The best part was our view: across the valley a bit higher on the hill was a vineyard, surrounded by forest, with a small cabin built at the very top. I always thought to myself, “it’s so beautiful, imagine if I could have something like that for myself one day? What a dream that would be.”

Two years later a man comes to the domaine, with vineyards to sell, as he is starting to plan for his approaching retirement. I happen to be there, cleaning the press with a Karcher in my hand. I had just coincidentally mentioned a couple months ago to JFG that if… by chance …he knew of anyone renting a little bit of vineyards, I was ready to strike out on my own little project. We all pile into a car to go see the vineyards for sale. We tour around a few sites in the neighbouring villages before arriving to Grusse. As we continue on a little farther I’m speechless when we stop at the vineyard I had been peering on from across the valley the last years. It was extraordinary: 3ha of vines, all 5 grapes from the Jura AOC. I couldn’t believe we were there and I immediately told myself that I would find some way to make the dream a reality.

Here our story circles back to the ice cream shop. Buying that house in Canada, by total chance, without really thinking it through, and then selling it again 5 years later, let me have enough investment to buy the vines and set up a tiny cellar in the Jura. I have no investors. While this comes with an incredible amount of risk, as well as some very lean early years, I have freedom in the project to explore the winemaking I want and practice the type of ecology that interests me. Were all these coincidences predetermined at the moment of the Big Bang? We’ll never really know, but I am certain I have stumbled across an incredible array of opportunities that have brought me to where I am today.

Fin: a day to celebrate

I retell this chain of events in the context of how lucky I feel to have had incredible opportunities in my life, I’m not sure that its destiny, but I certainly feel like so many important parts of the path I have taken have been determined by seemingly insignificant moments of coincidence. It’s decided that it should be celebrated, to take a moment from the incresingly stressful vineyard work and appreciate the luck and hard work I’ve put into building the domaine. To be honest I have never done this: step back and appreciated how far I’ve come, how much I have accomplished.

So every year I will stop on April 13th for a celebratory ice cream cone (the day I finally signed the papers to buy the vineyard). A nod to the first ice cream cone I ate, on the bench at the end of Canadian summer, that lead me to the house, that let me create a life in France. I cannot overstate how fun and joyful it is to celebrate yourself. To give yourself permission to find gratitude for what you’ve been given and what you’ve done. I highly recommend that when life starts to feel like you’re swimming under water to make a conscious effort to remember that you’ve also come a long way, that we can celebrate the bizarre and seemingly trivial moments, because sometimes those are actually the most important.

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As a North American, the art of convivial eating is not embodied in my culture. Sure, we enjoy family meals at holidays and of course have a really rich tapestry of culinary tradition from around the world, but the long, lingering meal for no reason other than to share food together and that spans an entire afternoon was something I uniquely encountered upon arrival in France. It’s something that changed how I view the meaning of eating and also how I think value can be transmitted through hospitality, care and empathy.

I propose to you: The Long Sunday Lunch (and subsequently what lessons on being human this phenomenon might illuminate).

The first Long Sunday Lunch that stayed with me was a spring day in La Combe. I was still living at the domaine and spoke not more than a few words of french. I didn’t know anyone in France outside of my small circle of coworkers and certainly felt far from the familiarity of Canadian culture. But the incredible hospitality of JFG and AG always included me in their family meals, and this meant that I found a place of belonging. Often I felt like an observer of a performance piece: children of all ages running around, people in and out of the kitchen for hours, endless bottles of wine, too many courses to count. Was this for something special? No, it was merely Sunday and we were celebrating being together.

What moved me the most during my time spent in La Combe was the hospitality extended to anyone who passed by. Everyone was invited for a coffee/glass of wine/to join for a meal. I don’t think I would be still here if I hadn’t had the gracious welcome that I received (and still continue to enjoy today). All this instilled in me a real appreciation of the power of a shared meal, what it means to cook for someone, what it means to linger at a table with people you love and how really hospitality is a form of care and I would argue that this all translates into a beautiful type of empathy.

There’s something transformative about having lunch over the course of 5 or 6 hours. It becomes less about the actual eating and more about the luxury of spending so much time around a table with the same people. The art of hospitality is really about caring for others: accepting them, nurturing them, listening to them. It feels like a uniquely human experience that the sharing of food can be imbued with so much meaning. Lunch becomes less about what you ate and more about that someone cared to feed you. Less about the actual food and more about the moments in-between: the children leaving the table to play, the close conversations while washing dishes; the laughter shared during a pause between courses.

It feels like we are living in a moment of time that could really use more of this type of hospitality. Not necessarily fancy foods or wines, but moments when we lean into caring for each other, moments when we really sit with others as they are, listen to them over the course of several hours and also share ourselves. The Long Sunday Lunch isn’t only a bastien of French food culture, but can be a reminder of a gentler, fuller way of living.

I wanted to share with you my experience of The Long Sunday Lunch because it has had such an impact on how I feel about welcoming others into my home and the types of relationships I’ve been lucky to forge around my dining table. This type of hospitality has allowed me to reflect on how openness and acceptance forge connection; how deeply caring for a visitor in your home can be its own type of empathy. More than anything I hope we can all share a meal together; learn something surprising about each other and practice the type of care that makes the world a lighter place to be in.

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part one: the body as a tool

In my own experience the division of labour in wine is highly gendered. Certainly this is changing, but what I have lived is a distinction between the types of work that are for women and the types of work that are for men. In the past I often found myself as a woman doing the green labour: liage, ébourgeonnage, palissage etc. whereas the men were tasked with work involving machinery. I don’t find this division inherently problematic, but rather the issue arises in the way in which we assign value to those types of jobs. Specifically the respect and money that goes to the traditionally masculine type jobs.

I think the voices of those working in the field are less heard, they wield less power and maybe possess less agency. I hear often how winemakers’ health is up or down (topic for another discussion), but rarely the voices of those working in the vines day to day. They are literally using their bodies as a tool of capitalism: sore backs, stiff legs, burnt skin. Where the masculine type workers have the privilege of using tools, the feminine type workers are the tools.

But what a pleasure it is the come home at night, with a day’s work in your legs, feeling the beauty of being in nature and also being useful in a way which is maybe adding something to the world. Wine is full of dichotomies. How can we explore this narrative without seeing gender disparity as a story of victimhood?

Part two: unapologetically claiming space

I’ve been reading lately about how some men have be able to occupy space with their work: how historically prolific creators have be able to possess a singular focus towards their art. For women this is a far more difficult task, as they are often employed in the additional job of being a mother and as a caretakers in general. It feels empowering to try to reclaim some of the space that men have enjoyed, to be a woman unapologetically focused on her craft. It’s not a narrative of victimhood, but one of choice and competence. The goal in all of this is to somehow find a way to share with other women the opportunities and risks I’ve been able to take. I’m not entirely sure what that looks like, but every year I hope more and more women can come to the domaine to reap what they may need for their own success.

Lastly, how to revalue women’s work in viticulture? Surely it is a formidable skill to take care of a vine from winter to harvest, should the pay not reflect the importance of this work? When women need time to caretake, can we not accommodate them and perhaps more importantly change how we honor this kind of work? More questions arise for me about the value of productivity over everything else. I’m writing this not to be inflammatory, but because these are the types of discussions I’d like to engage with in wine. Surely there’s no black and white response, but by creating a meaningful discourse perhaps we can all make wine a more just place.

Back into my body, with its aches and pains, but also with its heroic strength and resilience, I reflect on the great pleasure I’m having reclaiming some space with my own voice and words.

Early December is surprisingly lush in the the Jura, a deluge of rain has arrived after another rather hot growing season. It feels unsettling that the winter growth in the prairies and forest appears more green than during the increasingly brown, arid summers. The phrase climate change weighs heavy in the air for anyone who depends directly on the land for their livelihoods. The anxiety of an uncertain future is tangible, but for now I will happily watch the rain fall from my desk and give thanks that the stream in the village is again flowing; after having disappeared this summer.

Choosing a path of action towards a sustainable future feels daunting: the sheer magnitude of what needs to shift can be paralysing. Besieged by devastating news, imagining a hopeful future is difficult. What I do know is that I have 3 hectares of land. I have 3 hectares of land that I can steward. I have 3 hectares of land that I can use to the best of my abilities, and moreover my imagination, as a grand experiment in what truly sustainable agriculture might look like. I have 3 hectares of land that I hope becomes a place not only of grape growing; but of soil creating, habitat building and of sharing between anyone who is interested.

Can agriculture ever be sustainable? This is the question that lurks at the back of my mind, as essentially growing a monoculture that requires, even in organic agriculture, many inputs, surely cannot be defined as truly sustainable. So then what might that look like? I have some ideas, perhaps some of them are true, some of them not, but in either case they all require a radical reimagining of the aesthetics of viticulture as we see it today. I don’t have any definitive answers to the sustainability question, but I do have control over a small project that seeks to better understand how nature and cultivation can be less antagonistic.

Soil may be our greatest resource: it can take thousands of years to build top soil, and it is teaming with micro biotic life that allows us to grow crops full of nutrients. Soil is also an incredible carbon sink; when plants photosynthesise they take atmospheric carbon and bind it into the ground. This, above all, feels like the most hopeful piece in being able to mitigate climate change. We can take advantage of this ancient machinery to not only take greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere, but by building healthy soils our ecosystems become more resilient to stress. These sentiments about soil are what drive my project, more so than grape growing, or even the winemaking.

But where to begin? I feel both freedom in the fact I did not grow up in an agricultural milieu, with no predetermined expectations of my work, and at the same time, not being a scientist by formal training, I never feel like I have the perfect amount of information around a project. Time feels fleeting; so I dive in, whether I am ready or not. With that in mind I see this project not as a short term plan but something that will span my lifetime and hopefully the rewards of that work will be seen in future generations.

Now, after only a few years of stopping tillage, the grass and herbs in the vines are quickly covering the once cultivated rows. Some people tell me this will kill the vines: it is true that this aesthetic of viticulture opposes what has been thought and practiced for a long time in many vineyards, but I truly believe that there is strength in diversity. Looking at ground cover with only an eye to resource competition is a rather myopic way to see an ecosystem. There is an architecture of the soil to be respected and my thoughts are that if there is a maximum of organic matter and microorganisms every living thing in the vines will benefit. Time will tell, as this is not an exercise in laziness but rather in thoughtfulness and observation. I feel lucky to be able to look towards some brilliant farmers and thinkers who are also practicing regenerative organic agriculture. It feels exciting and beautiful.

Back now to my desk listening to the rain come down, for this is the time of the year for planing. Planing how to manage all this grass I let grow, how to one day get animals grazing in the vines, how to make a vineyard as diverse as possible while also trying to grow fruit. There are a lot of dichotomies in the equation of ecology/agriculture, but what is exciting is that regenerative organic agriculture allows for imagining a future where life is flourishing.

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November arrives and with it a moment of pause, another wine year finished. It’s my favourite time of year, which feels slightly devious to say, as my rhetoric is usually one of dedicated work and focus. But now, after another gruelling season and euphoric harvest, I can stop. I can take long mornings in the sun-filled kitchen and indulge in afternoon naps on the chaise next to the wood stove. It’s almost romantic.

After many years working in agriculture, I have come to treasure this time: not only as a moment to physically recuperate but also a time to turn inwards. The summer growing season work demands pure physical grit: early mornings, long hours, trying to get the manual labour done in a race against time, sun and heat. By contrast, early winter is a moment I can return to my thinking self and ask how this wine project reflects my values and curiosities and where would I like it to go. It’s a moment to reconnect with my motivation and use my energies to imagine something even more beautiful for the next cycle.

The world of wine contains multitudes: both stories of great success and lesser told histories of struggle and pain; I want a place where we can engage with both. I want a place to share some of the beauty I’m trying to create in my small corner of the world, and also a place where we can speak pragmatically about the challenges facing people who depend on wine for their livelihoods. I want a place where I can talk about the story I’m weaving of my life in France and also engage with questions collectively to make wine a more just place to live. I want a place to share the small moments that inspire me and also have a broader discussion on ecology and social justice. I want here to be that place.

Now I will retreat into this brief pause, because right around the corner is the return to the vines and the beginning of another cycle. I look forward to sharing the next season with you, we have much to discuss.