As goes rosé, so goes beef. Rosé is dead, long live rosé
Whilst summer fills our cups with sunshine, before her longest day grows dim, let us pass a moment together and let our thoughts be fluid, quenching the desiccated landscapes of our wrung-out minds. Put down spinning worries and numbing problems and let’s make a loop under the trees and be here together. The best things happen under trees.
It was, for example, under trees that vines (the tropical, ancestral lianas of the late Cretaceous) developed tendrils to seek the sunshine, where they could gather enough of her grace to tempt birds with flushed berries ready to fly on to adventures near and far.
But was I saying something about rosé? And beef? In the same sentence?
You’ve probably heard, rosé is dead. The deciders have spoken, apparently.
But wait, look here, we have a pulse!
Even if Hippocrates didn’t say the words, ‘let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food,’ he did write extensively about the connection between food and health. Hippocrates was, in fact, a major inspiration for The Three Children, encouraging his patients to enjoy wine ‘of a pale red hue’ as part of a diet that supported the natural forces within each of us that are ‘the true healers of disease’.
The Three Children were one of many meditations on the fingerprinting of food, the manifestation of place via sense. The pursuit of these threads is a wellspring of curiosity for me. My year of discovery since tinying (this is a new word I’m coining) my vineyard has grown a quest of sorts. It starts with rosé and leads to flank steak and ends….?
Yes, well, you know me. It’s never just easy here. Aren’t you curious, though?
Let’s start in the middle. For some many years now, Cory Carman and I have been conspiratorial partners in all things land and food. Our story begins at the farmer’s market, where so many stories begin, where we shared neighboring booths. Cory is a cattle rancher in Wallowa County (Oregon), and our stories have many parallels. Over the years we have spent countless wee hours hiking, cooking, drinking coffee, backpacking, driving, sitting outside in the dark, all of the words and thoughts directed towards our shared passion over land and the broken connections between people, the land they belong to, the food it provides, and themselves.
Carman Ranch is Cory’s family’s eponymous holding, but Cory started a meat company to support the promise of truly grass-fed beef, and grew over time to a small group of family producers who focus on grazing as a healing process to rebuild healthy soils and landscapes. In the last few years I have worked with Cory and the producer group to develop farm plans and establish goals for continued improvement. Carman Ranch Provisions just earned the Regenefied seal for their beef, and in addition to that work, we’ve been busy modeling a new food web. For now I will gloss over how few people are fluent in the soil food web, and say the new food web extends to land and sky, linking the animals, plants, and the processes they represent to the materialization of nutrients in food.
The promise of this work is that it could serve to blast some of the scales that have grown over our eyes with respect to food as a result of our palates being deconditioned (made stupid) by highly processed foods that trigger responses in the mesolimbic system (think dopamine response, reward center). Like every politicized aspect of our food today, the great beef debate basically makes sure that the most important questions about our food never actually get asked. The only possible winners in the politicized debate would be feedlot cattle or monocrop plant- based substitutes.
Animals are a critical part of every cycle that drives life forward. From sun to plants to insects to birds and herbivores to fungi, bacteria, protozoa, the relationships and links are all transferring energies and repurposing nutrients. Our food is our land. Our land is our health, and we now have a language for that study. We are tracking the nutrients in plants, soil, dung, and meat (and wine!) to put the power of the conversation where it belongs. Do you think the nutrition label on the carrots actually represents the carrot in the bag? Do we know what nutrients, vitamins, minerals and phenolic compounds taste like in medicinal doses? I would actually argue that you, who buy for quality in wine, have given wine that level of attention. And thus, a winemaker and a cattle rancher meet in a farmer’s market and the next thing you know they’re holding blind tastings of old versus young cows, hosting flank steak tastings from different finishing diets and yes, insisting that there is more than one way to rosé.
In 2019, I conceived of The Three Children as a means of teasing out the frames of color and light in the 2% of what is not water and ethanol in wine. When I am working or just being outside, letting it all in, I cannot help but wonder over what our food carries of this land to our bodies in every tiniest morsel. If there are 28,800 frames in a 20-minute animation, what is in a bite of this kale? What connections are expressed in one teaspoon of wine? Is the red Pinot Noir just the last scene, or is she the whole movie shown in 28,800 speed?
And to study those questions, I sought to slow the film. What signature moments can be captured to develop more of this place for the person whose glass it fills?
Monday’s Child is fair of face. And she is the first suggestion of June strawberries, the fluttering of poplar leaves and fresh sweetgrass. She is the cool breath of early summer nights.
Tuesday’s Child is full of grace. Tuesday is my muse. While I am a definitive Wednesday, (Wednesday’s Child is full of woe! Haha) Tuesday is savory raspberry muddle, the warmed faces of oak leaves releasing the spice of summer. The curving generosity of late summer chiseled by taut, peeking tannin and bright edges.
And the child that is born on the Sabbath day is bonny and blithe, and good and gay. And with Sunday, we see the three as one. She, having danced all night, and slumbered the winter in barrel, has been, and dreamed, and is, them all at once.
So, here we are at this resting place on our quest. If you seek nourishment, I urge you to seek it here, and here. Parched? I recommend a wine of a pale red hue.
Keep searching. The truth is out there.
~ Mimi
P.S. If you’d like to have some wine of a pale red hue (or any other color) delivered to your door in time for summer, to avoid any chance of overheating on the journey we are offering $25 flat rate for 3-day shipping anywhere in the continental US, for orders of six bottles or more, now through June 30. This is in addition to our usual quantity discounts on six bottles or more. Summertime!