Fable Mountain Vineyards: “Don’t label us, just look at our labels”

Apart from wine, work and grapes, vineyards provide us with much beauty. The aesthetic pleasure we find in vineyards, I think, stems from the collision between lands that produce good wine grapes – hills, steep slopes, river banks, mountainous valleys – and the human intervention of grape farming.

The steep steps of the Douro, the magical, almost mystical Ribeira Sacra and the slate cliffs of the Rhine immediately spring to mind. Wild, untamed, brutish and violent nature set upon by farmers who order, constrain, and align it to rows of pruned vines. This contrast is where the beauty lies. The starker, the more defined the line between that which is feral and that which is cultivated, the more I think it excites the viewer, the stronger the shove is in the direction of  the sublime.