The Happy Moron

Nifty article from the BBC on a Portugese winemaker trying to balance the old school tradition of port-drinking with the need to rebrand it and market it to youth.

But what caught my eye was this:

“We have to adapt our markets. We absolutely have to get more young people drinking port.”

He paused to sweep his hand around the view of the vineyards, and said: “Otherwise this whole valley will revert back to scrub.”

It has not been scrub for a long time.

Every year, the Romans ripped off their sandals to tread the Douro Valley grapes pretty much as some of Paul’s harvest is trod by villagers today.

The rest is done by computerised machines that simulate human feet.

Long ago, I read an article on gin-making. The gist of it was that for a branded gin, the product has to be exactly the same every year. When they buy juniper berries for gin, a crop that is too high quality – too plump, too juicy – will be rejected. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, what matters is that it is the same.

But computerized, simulated feet? Come on!

Very often, we associate longevity with knowledge. This makes sense; if you do something for a very long time, you get a lot of experience with it, you learn what works and what doesn’t. It’s hard to not get good at it.

But it’s possible. Sometimes when you do things for a very long time, you become a slave to “the way we have always done it” and the very weight of experience which should benefit your expertise becomes a barrier to it.

In particular, extreme longevity can destroy knowledge, because once a stable state is reached, the knowledge needed to recreate that state fades away and is lost. If the pinnacle of an art is stable, then the knowledge needed to attain the pinnacle is no longer needed.

To me, designing a machine that simulates human feet tells me you don’t understand the process. And it’s stupid. But not in the good way, although it is kind of funny.

If you understood the process of grape crushing, perhaps you could design a grape crushing machine that made sense as a grape crushing machine and that was free from the burden of simulating human feet.

PostScript: I’m probably being over snarky here, because in all likelihood, the vineyard fully understands the process and the article badly misrepresents the machine in question. I have in my mind a most wonderful contraption built of gears and booted dowels; the actual press is probably far more mundane.