Still Life With Wine
Maybe posting your blurry bottle pics isn't so bad? In any case, you're part of a grand tradition.
I love to look at still life painting. When I go to the world’s great art museums, I’ll often skip the grand masterpieces and head straight for a simple painting of objects on a table. I do sometimes enjoy the ostentatious, over-the-top still life of the Dutch Golden Age—the so-called pronkstilleven, showy tables overflowing with shellfish, exotic fruit, vases of flowers, ornate glasses, and even little dogs, birds, and monkeys. But mostly, I gravitate towards the more humble and modest still life: lemons and wine glasses painted by Pieter Claesz, coffee and brandy by Albert Anker, or pantry items by Francisco de Zurbarán.
At the Prado in Madrid, I might skip Goya, Velázquez, or El Greco in favor of, say, Juan Sánchez Cotán’s austere bodegón “Still Life With Game, Vegetables and Fruit,” a strange painting from 1602 depicting a cupboard with small birds attached to a cane, three lemons, seven apples, a goldfinch, a sparrow, two partridges and a white thistle-like vegetable called a cardoon—all set against a deep black background. The objects in the painting, according to the audio tour on my headphones, “are precise and sober, and at the same time, poetic and strange. They highlight everyday simplicity.” About 17th-century still life, the audio tour narrator suggests, in full sincerity and with zero irony, that “one could see the creative hand of God in even the most trivial of objects.”
I’ve spent a long time looking at Cotán’s painting. Something about the artist’s life story connects with me. In his 40s, one year after he painted that still life, Cotán had some sort of midlife crisis. We don’t know why—though, apparently, a bunch of people owed him money for paintings. Whatever the reason, in 1603, he closed his workshop, renounced the world, and art, and entered a Carthusian monastery, where he lived a life of solitude, silence, and contemplation. Only six of Cotán’s paintings still exist.
I first encountered Cotán during a trip to Spain in the middle of the Covid pandemic in 2021, a few days after the travel restrictions to Europe had been lifted (and a week before I contracted Covid myself and could not return home). After my visit to the Prado, I went to a nearby restaurant called Angelita, where I had lunch with my friend François, who lives in Madrid.
François insisted we order tomatoes as our first course. “These are the best tomatoes you will ever eat in your life,” he insisted. There are not many times in life where someone says something so hyperbolic and it turns out to be true. That two-hour lunch was among the most memorable meals I have eaten. And those tomatoes! They were a variety called Corazón de Buey that were grown in Zamora at the family farm of Angelita’s owners. They were so red, so meaty, so juicy, that one bite nearly brought tears to my eyes. Is it ridiculous to say that one of the most exciting, inspiring things I’ve done in Spain was eat that tomato? In any case, Cotán still life and that tomato are somehow intertwined in my memory.
I guess it’s likely that I love still life art because of what I do for a living—posting descriptions and impressions of things I’ve eaten or drank. It certainly causes me to reflect on the meanings and ambitions of wine and food writing.
“Still life is a minor art, and one with a residue of didactism that will never bleach out; a homely art,” writes critic Guy Davenport, in his book, Objects on a Table: Harmonious Disarray in Art and Literature. “It has the same relation to larger, more ambitious paintings as the sonnet to the long poem.”
We all know that wine writing is too often coated by an embarrassing residue of didactism that will never bleach out. Wine writing is no doubt a homely subgenre of a minor genre, whether that be food or travel writing.
For years, I’ve had a New Yorker cartoon tacked near my desk: A man and woman sit at a table gazing at one another over glasses of wine; the woman, her hand clutching at her bosom, says to the man, “Do wine writers suffer and all that?” Hopefully, I do not have to explain the irony. I mostly keep this cartoon on my wall in a vain attempt to remind myself: Do not take yourself too seriously. But the cartoon is also there to emphasize a key difference between the two genres I work in: wine writing and travel writing.
Wine writing should, or could, be an adjunct to travel writing. Wine takes a writer like me on amazing journeys around the world. But I’m always surprised how dissimilar the two genres have become. Part of that has to do with the lack of immediate, visceral drama that happens on my wine itineraries.
When I travel to write about wine, I go to some of the most beautiful places on earth, where I drink rare bottles from some of the world’s best winemakers, and dine in some of the world’s finest restaurants. While this is all fantastic, and a lovely way to pass one’s life—and you should certainly not cry for me—it does not generally offer up the gripping, dramatic, universal experiences and conflict that are the linchpins of compelling narrative nonfiction.
“Hmmmmm,” says the wine writer, swirling, sipping, and spitting in the tasting room overlooking the gorgeous vineyards. “The tannins on the 2019 are still a bit green and aggressive at the moment, yeah? And how much new oak are we tasting? Hmm. How disappointing. Perhaps it needs a few more years in the cellar? Sigh. What a pity.”
As the woman in the cartoon asks, “Do wine writers suffer and all that?”
Travel writing—at least good travel writing—is about travail. We’ve been told that travel without suffering makes for a lousy story. As Camus once wrote, “What gives value to travel is fear.” Whatever I feel about, say, a disappointing cabernet franc harvest in Chinon, it is far from fear.
Some believe wine writing has fallen far below the other minor genres, lamenting that even the writing itself has devolved into facile “wine communication” or “wine content” and has essentially become an endless stream of blurry bottle shots and tasting notes posted on social media (of which I am also very guilty). Much of it has become: “Look at this amazing unicorn wine I drank last night (and which you didn’t)!” As Fran Lebowitz famously said, “Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.”
Of course, what are Instagram bottle-shot posts if they aren’t some rudimentary form of still life? Even during the Dutch Golden Age, still life art was just as much about “look at this crazy stuff I ate and drank!”
“The other main story about still-life art is that it is fundamentally materialistic art, a collector’s genre,” writes New Yorker critic Jackson Arn in his recent piece about still-life artist Giorgio Morandi. “To possess a 17th-century Dutch painting of a lobster and some grapes on a silver dish was a way of possessing the actual dish and fruit and crustacean. Nature is captured with the brush and consumed, endlessly, at the looker’s leisure.”
But there are times when still life—and wine—transcends materialism.
As Arn notes, “One story that gets told about still life is that it is fundamentally religious art: the iris symbolizes the Holy Trinity, the walnut shells symbolize the Crucifixion, half-eaten food symbolizes the transience of life, and so on. Things are never just things.” Indeed, things are never just things. If we’ve learned anything during this dismal era, when things like the “Gulf of America” or “Fort Bragg” or “Mount McKinley” are never just things.
One of my favorite still life painters is Adriaen Coorte, who worked near the end of the Dutch Golden Age in the late 17th century and early 18th century. I especially love Coorte’s quiet, shadowy close-ups of white asparagus bunches set against a black background. White asparagus would have been just as rare and prized then as it is now, a “luxury” food. But Coorte’s moody depictions are far from showy or materialistic. There’s something dark and haunting about his asparagus.
Art historians don’t know very much about Coorte. But we do know that he painted during a time of upheaval in Holland. Following wars with with Spain (the Eighty Years War), France, and England, Coorte was painting his asparagus during a time when the Dutch Golden Age had mostly passed. Besides war there was also the plague. In 1664 alone, 24,000 people died of the plague in Amsterdam, more than 10 percent of the city’s population. Pandemic lurks behind so much of the painting of this era, often with obvious still-life imagery of skulls or hourglasses or rotting fruit—suggesting the transience of life, the certainty of death, the futility of pleasure.
Coorte’s most affecting work, however, focuses simply on the food at hand. When I look at his Still Life with Asparagus—as we’ve survived our own recent plague and as we all post images of our food—things don’t seem to have changed as much over three centuries as we like to believe. And I often wonder what Coorte drank with his asparagus after he finished painting it. (I would pair with German weissburgunder btw).
Likewise, some of the most symbolic paintings to emerge from World War II are Pablo Picasso’s series of five paintings of tomato plants in bloom. When we think of Picasso and war, most immediately jump to his great, moving anti-war painting depicting the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.
But Picasso went mostly silent during the years of World War II, when his art was blacklisted by the Nazis and he was forbidden to exhibit his work. He created his modest tomato plant paintings in the summer of 1944, in the days just before the liberation of Paris. The contrast of the bright red and green fruit against a melancholy, drab grey and yellow backdrop suggesting resilience and hope in times of strife.
“It shows that there was light at the end of the tunnel. For Picasso, the very act of continuing to paint as normal was an act of resistance,” said Samuel Vallette, an art expert at Sotheby’s (who sold one of the tomato paintings for $15 million back in 2017). Having eaten those life-changing tomatoes at Angelita in Madrid, I can understand the hype.
Now, I am not suggesting that any wine writing—especially the content coming from me—rises anywhere near the level of a Picasso still life. Or the still life art of Coorte, Cotán, Morandi, or honestly, the work of even a merely competent mid-level painter. Wine writing is never going to be anthologized or put in a museum.
But even so, still life can teach us something about the importance of wine in our distracted, chaotic, and technology-driven age. The act of taking a moment to pay attention to what’s on the table, right in front of you—to spend the time and to really experience it—is no small thing. And to take things a step further, to share that experience with others, feels important right now.
In Nathan Heller’s wonderful piece in The New Yorker “The Battle for Attention,” he invokes philosopher William James’ definition of art, explaining it as a dialogue between form and perception:
“In its objective state, van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ is daubs of paint on a canvas. On the moon, without an audience, it would be debris. It is only when I give the canvas my attention (bringing to it the cargo of my particular past, my knowledge of the world, my way of thinking and seeing) that it becomes an art work. That doesn’t mean that van Gogh’s feats of genius are imagined, or my own projection. It means only that an art work is neither a physical thing nor a viewer’s mental image of it but something in between, created in attentive space.”
We experience a similar thing with wine. No matter how many classes or how much book or classroom learning you do on wine, you can’t understand it unless you put in the time at the table. You have to pay attention. That means, for at least a few moments, leaving behind what you “know” about wine, and simply smelling and putting it in your mouth. That attention is followed by the most important part: free association.
And if that attention and free association leads to an act of creation—whether to write a newsletter or a tasting-note haiku or a post to your Instagram story or just simply a text message to the group chat—that is a good thing.
Don’t listen to the haters and meme lords who make fun of you and your blurry bottle pics. Post them. You’re part of a centuries-old tradition.
