Mastering Wine: Why Play, Not Perfection, Drives Innovation in Wine and Life

I doubt I need to spell out details – take your pick. Closer to home life feels - and is - tough for many. So it might seem a strange time to talk about fun. But there’s a strong case that even – especially – in times like these, maintaining a sense of fun is more important than ever.

Dutch historian Johan Huizinga argued that play doesn’t follow culture, it precedes it. Humans didn’t invent games after we built civilization - we built it partly through games and fun. Fun isn’t the reward for serious activity; it’s often how serious things get discovered. This is something wine forgets periodically, and feels in danger of doing so again now.

Fun helps us experiment. Fun tolerates failure when seriousness often can’t. Fun includes winemakers who play around trying weird things - unusual grapes, unconventional methods, novel packaging. Some fail, but some become movements. Fun is generous and welcoming.

When a subject becomes sufficiently serious, the implicit message is that you need credentials, special language or knowledge to enjoy it. Wine has done this to itself repeatedly and the cost is real, handing market share to craft beer, cocktails, even cannabis, all of which better communicate permission to enjoy without understanding. And without fun, it’s hard to enjoy the thing core to wine’s very existence: there’s evidence that anxiety and self-consciousness suppress sensory pleasure. Someone worried about choosing the wrong wine or saying the wrong thing is probably going to drink less, not more.

Wine is an interesting lens through which to contemplate fun because it contains a clear contradiction. Wine is complex and serious in its craft, production and terroir, yet that complexity was never the original point of drinking it. But somehow seriousness has attached itself to wine like barnacles to a ship’s hull.

This has provoked a necessary reaction - natural wine, orange wine, pét-nat – and whatever their flaws, part of their energy and success has come from people deciding to have fun again, to make wine that feels like it was made by humans for other humans. Fun is therefore also risk tolerance. The winemakers who inspire others are just as often the renegades as the classicists.