The Roots of Technology

In my struggle to discover common ground with critics of wine technology, I find myself sympathetic to concerns that new approaches to winemaking might alter its nature, which is pretty mysterious and possibly fragile. But these concerns are being voiced a century too late, when the advent of electricity and modern science changed wine forever. Electricity isn’t evil in and of itself, but it has conferred great power absent wisdom, and scientific skepticism provides scant protection of mysteries beyond its grasp. In the Age of Progress, these vast changes occurred without much resistance, and it is only now that we are beginning, postmortem, to question technology, of which my innovations such as oxygenation and alcohol filtration are a trivial corollary around which this long overdue debate has finally coalesced.

musings: