The Color of Exploitation

It took three separate trips to California's Wine Country for me to get it. It sunk in slowly, one lush vineyard at a time, one campesino at a time: The color of wineries is brown. Beige, tan, rust-hued, like a rose gone bad. Like a peasant driving a horse-drawn wagon up a hill winding through endless rows of vines; like a Mexican immigrant trimming the artfully landscaped shrubbery at a faux-Mediterranean villa complete with fountains, ponds, bridges, sculpture, marble; like the dirt under the nails of a laborer in the fields whose native language is not yours. Or mine.

Like wine that derives from juice pressed and separated from the grape skins right after crushing, the color of wineries (in this country) at first appears white. Pale, like a straw-shaded Sauvignon Blanc, pale as all the servers in the tasting rooms, all the courteous Caucasians waiting on the pale-colored tourists at the counter, pale as the winemaker emerging from his immaculate, sunless cellars. Yet behind the pleasantly bland, colorless exterior presented to the public is the darker backbone supporting the wine industry, the sweat and the toil of the sun-baked peasants who work the fields to produce the grapes to make the wines of the white white owners of the wineries. Always it has been so, in California. Inside the white. Outside the brown. Inside the air-conditioning, the money, the pleasant chatter of the vacationing class. Outside the heat and the dust, the low wages, the halting English and fluent Spanish.

On some level, I've known for a long time that the serving class in this country is not white, not of this country (with the exception of servers at restaurants, who are most often white. White actors. . . ) But I've been color-blind when it comes to wines; that is, when it comes to the effort required to produce them. I love wines, as I love good coffee. Now, in addition to fending off attacks from friends who cannot understand my attachment to Starbucks (it's the coffee. But not just the coffee. And that's a story for another day.), I find myself defensive about wines. And with good reason.

Last night, I dreamed of wine. I dreamed that I called it "reflective, literally and figuratively." Smart dream, that: Wine is literally reflective, catching the light in crystal shards and tossing it back in the drinker's eye; and it's figuratively reflective, inducing meditative thoughts with its liquid beauty, its color. Its color. . .

I lift a glass of the Dry Creek Mood Hill Cabernet to the light, and it looks red, so red. I pour out a class of the overpriced, delicious Viognier from Pride Mountain, and it's so very white. Red, and white. Blood, and tears. How obvious is that? I've been colorblind.