The project philosophy began with wanting to capture what makes wine so pleasurable, and the depth of complexity in each glass. So began the four-layer method, breaking down and researching exactly what made a particular wine of a particular vintage as it is at the point of consumption.
The layers enable the building of the rich story in each glass, the place, growth, labour and pleasure of so many hands.
Each layer is heavily built upon, disrupted by the next and partly concealed by the one before it. What ends up growing into the living product is a record of everything that has happened in the painting along with the wine it is depicting.
Layer 1: Terroir
Soil, rock, water, weather, time.
The place the wine is coming from, and everything that came before it.
The minerals runnign through the vineyard, the rain beating down onto the vines, the sun scorching them and the earth, and the colours of the surrounding landscape.
Always ineffable, layer 1 shows how terroir is felt rather than explained.
Layer 2: Grape
This layer is physical, often rough but bold, deliberately visible in dedication to the hands and labour that go into growing, harvesting, tending to the precious vines.
The pruning, picking, waiting, praying.
Layer 3: Wine
Here the fruit transforms into wine.
We see fermentation, colour, texture, and time in the overlapping washes of colour.
This layer is living and changing right until the end.
Layer 4: Consumption
Finally, the wine has reached our lips.
Taste, pleasure, conversation, memory, celebration. What happens when we drink, where are we drinking, who is around us?
As the previous layers overlap in conversation with each other, after being scratched into, covered, revealed, and lost again, this final layer holds the traces of all four.
