The Hero's Journey: Nouveau wine & Satisfying Humanity's deepest need
The Hero's Journey: Nouveau Wine & Satisfying Humanity's Deepest Need
It's all about survival, community, gratitude, joy, and tradition. No, not Season 4 of The Witcher. This is about one of the longest unbroken human traditions universal to every culture.
Have you noticed that modern society has a strange preoccupation with the Medieval / Dark Ages time period? Its a time distant enough in the past where history and mythology mix in the sandbox of our wildest imaginations. Back then documentation was patchy, and, now, people know just enough to be intrigued and let their imagination fill in the rest. Most stories we have from this time follow a simple “hero’s journey” with a grand narrative, clear beginning and end, and a simple battle of good vs evil. It’s simple. It’s cathartic. It’s like brain candy. Anyone watching Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Witcher, or even reading the legend of King Arthur would agree. Good guys + 1; Bad guys 0. The end.
That’s what nouveau wine is, and was, all about. It’s a simple, quaffable drink meant to give catharsis from the trials and tribulations of the year. Nouveau wines, most famously Beaujolais Nouveau, are young wines that used to be shipped off to urban centers a few days/weeks/months after the grape harvest. Sometimes they were still fermenting, cloudy, or sweet. As these wines were meant to be consumed immediately, they were kept in barrel and not bottled on their own until after the 1950s. And consumed they were, as they were meant to be served as part of a communal feast celebrating the end of the harvest.
This kind of celebration is universal to every culture on earth and goes back 10,000-12,000 years, as far as agriculture, because they embody many of humanity’s deepest needs at once - survival, community, gratitude, joy, tradition, meaning, and nature. Having a good harvest was an existential relief. It literally represented life over death. People have been gathering together, before the onset of winter, for ritual feasts since 9600 BCE at Gobekli Tepe (Turkey) to the Festival of Min in 3000 BCE (Egypt) to the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival in 1000 BCE (China) to Gaelic and Christian harvest celebrations from 500 CE onwards to the modern US tradition of eating turkey and watching football until you fall asleep. Humanity, throughout time and space, has used this time period to come together as a population, eat, drink, and celebrate life.
We wish you, your family and friends, and frankly, all of humanity peace, tranquility, and prosperity while engaging in this universal age-old custom of “the harvest festival.”
