Winegrowing, done properly, is quite unreasonable. A ballerina, spinning gracefully on their toes until they bleed, is quite unreasonable. Sailing past the horizon in a hollowed-out log with no certain aim but to go “there”, is quite unreasonable. Existence itself sometimes feels quite unreasonable. It is the varying degrees of this absurd and hazardous itch that pulled us from the Savannah and into outer space. The vast majority of us though, quite reasonably, seek stability: maximizing control to minimize risks. However, there are from time to time some strange few that seem disinhibited by prudence, cajoled by propriety and harassed by convention. They cross live wires just to make a light. Some leave little more than a mess, most leave nothing at all. But in those exceedingly rare instances where the alignment of things is just so, these sparks of innovation provide new sources of energy that fuel incalculable inspiration, pushing and pulling us out of stagnations we likely did not recognize, and opening new horizons to explore.Wine has been fortunate to attract a share of radicals and lunatics sufficient to produce relevance over millennia, but they are by no means guaranteed. Some calls go unanswered. Imagine if Punk had not existed in response to Disco. Randall Grahm’s Kantian critique of Purely Pragmatic Winegrowing has reoriented the pursuit as infinite game, effectively setting the goalpost in a dimension that will take generations to fully understand.As everything only means whatever meaning we give, looking for it is the obligation we are afforded as (mostly) self-aware beings. That Randall works so hard to articulate the purpose of his actions is evidence that he is looking for it himself, and is itself an exercise to be taken seriously. However, his work has promulgated, in an industry that often struggles under the weight of its own self-seriousness, a rare sensibility of playful yet precise intent wherein seriousness is the only fatal error. We need more Randall Grahms in the world.

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