Once you know what to look for, natural wines are easy to spot: they tend to be smellier, cloudier, juicier, more acidic and generally truer to the actual taste of grape than traditional wines. In a way, they represent a return to the core elements that made human beings fall in love with wine when we first began making it, around 6,000 years ago. Advocates of natural wine believe that nearly everything about the £130bn modern wine industry – from the way it is made, to the way critics police what counts as good or bad – is ethically, ecologically and aesthetically wrong. Their ambition is to strip away the artificial trappings that have developed in tandem with the industry’s decades-long economic boom, and let wine be wine.
But among wine critics, there is a deep suspicion that the natural wine movement is intent on tearing down the norms and hierarchies that they have dedicated their lives to upholding. The haziness of what actually counts as natural wine is particularly maddening to such traditionalists. “There is no legal definition of natural wine,” Michel Bettane, one of France’s most influential wine critics, told me. “It exists because it proclaims itself so. It is a fantasy of marginal producers.” Robert Parker, perhaps the world’s most powerful wine critic, has called natural wine an “undefined scam”.
For natural wine enthusiasts, though, the lack of strict rules is part of its appeal. At a recent natural wine fair in London, I encountered winemakers who farmed by the phases of the moon and didn’t own computers; one man foraged his grapes from wild vines in the mountains of Georgia; there was a couple who were reviving an old Spanish technique of placing the wine in great clear glass demijohns outside to capture sunlight; others were ageing their wines in handmade clay pots, buried underground to keep them cool as their predecessors did in the days of ancient Rome.
For whatever reason, the way I’d always pictured the proper death of one’s dog was like a scene taken from the 1957 Disney film Old Yeller (1956): after years of steadfast companionship, when man’s best friend no longer derives joy from chasing rabbits and can barely lift his head, his owner has to muster the resolve to get out the rifle to put him out of his misery. Although an oddly bucolic fantasy for someone living in Los Angeles, at least part of it was no doubt influenced by how I’d learned to think about death as a physician.
In human medicine, we’re used to implementing any and every life-saving intervention right up to the very end. As a medical intern 20 years ago, I remember thinking about the futility of that approach with patients in pain and suffering from multisystem organ failure, sustained only by machines and a regimen of some 30 or 40 medications, and unlikely to ever make it out of the hospital. What was the point? Whatever happened to quality of life? But those reservations be damned, we never gave up, and among the interns who transferred care to each other from shift to shift, the dictum of patients ‘not dying on my watch’ was something to which we all held fast.
Every morning, Stephen Wright gets up at around 4.30AM, makes a cup of tea, sits beneath the oak tree in his back garden and pretends he's the first person awake in the world. There are no sounds of passing traffic or nearby building sites, only the birds and the smell of bluebells. Whenever he sees a robin, he thinks of Donald. Then he finishes his tea and walks into his House of Dreams.
Stephen is an artist. In the late-1990s he made the decision to turn his semi-detached south London home into a work of art called The House of Dreams. It started out in just one room, but over two decades spread everywhere. He created sculptures, mosaics, paintings, writings and collages, and gathered thousands of recycled objects. The house has become a reflection of his memories, dreams and reflections, no matter how painful or personal. It’s his greatest work, and also where he eats, sleeps and lives.
I nap outside as often as I can. It is one of the great joys of my life, I think. As Walt Whitman wrote in Song of the Open Road, “Now I see the secret of making of the best persons, / It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.” In bed, my dreams are only my subconscious pile-driving me with cute narratives themed anxiety or doubt. But outside—sunny days in a field or under a tree when it’s drizzling—I dream of big sounds or gestures or shapes; I sometimes wake up humming. Not camping, with a sleeping bag and tent and careful preparation for bed and the constant scrape of polyester. No, I’d rather be huddled somewhere and a little underprepared, nothing overhead or below, day or night, in the way Mary Oliver writes in Sleeping in the Forest.
“The Perfectionists” succeeds resoundingly in making us think more deeply about the everyday objects we take for granted. It challenges us to reflect on our progress as humans and what has made it possible. It is interesting, informative, exciting and emotional, and for anyone with even some curiosity about what makes the machines of our world work as well as they do, it’s a real treat.
Microdosing is hot. If you haven’t heard — but you probably have, from reports of its use at Silicon Valley workplaces, from Ayelet Waldman’s memoir “A Really Good Day,” from dozens of news stories — to microdose is to take small amounts of LSD, which generate “subperceptual” effects that can improve mood, productivity and creativity.
Michael Pollan’s new book, “How to Change Your Mind,” is not about that. It’s about macro-dosing. It’s about taking enough LSD or psilocybin (mushrooms) to feel the colors and smell the sounds, to let the magic happen, to chase the juju. And it’s about how mainstream science ceded the ground of psychedelics decades ago, and how it’s trying to get it back.
This truthfulness of fragility is William Trevor’s credo. It is why we honor him as the supreme master of his honest art.