The chapter attends to the epistemological and ontological premises that feed natural wine and its ethical potentials. Wine, I argue, poses a fundamental problem: how to articulate the relationship between land, life, and value in its production and consumption. In capitalist modernity, this problem has been framed as one of controlling “natural limitations” via law, science, and technology. This model is reproduced, significant differences notwithstanding, in contemporary ‘conventional’ winemaking, whether brand- or terroir-oriented. Natural wine, I suggest, provides an ingenious reformulation of this problem. To expose this point, I mobilise the notions of soil, vitality, and ‘surplus-value of life’, and compare the nonconventional approaches to normativity of medieval monasticism and First Nations ontologies. The text ends by wondering whether the current debate on natural wine certification may have a deeper significance than is usually thought.

--

Capitalist modernity,Ecological ethics,Multispecies locality,Ontology of wine,Value of natural wine

This publication is an output of the following project(s):

• UrbanoScenes. Post-colonial imaginaries of urbanisation: A future-oriented investigation from Portugal and Angola