On the benefits of (good) stress

Nature has a lot to teach us on the topic.

Photo: Furkan Elveren via Pexels

I’ve been thinking a lot about nature, and how it can show us how to live, and even thrive. It’s easy to think we’re separate and apart from nature, but the reality is we are a part of it. I’ve learned that there are incredible structural parallels between nature and humans.

Consider:

• Branches and leaves of trees and how they mimic the structure and function of lungs in a human body.

• Or rivers and blood vessels, and how rivers branch into tributaries to distribute water across a landscape, and the human circulatory system branches into arteries, veins, and capillaries to transport oxygen and nutrients throughout the body.

• And honeycombs and our bone structure… how the internal structure of human bones mirrors the hexagonal efficiency of a honeycomb. The genius design produces maximum strength with minimal material…bones are lightweight and durable, just like a beehive’s honeycomb structure.

I have an affinity for trees in particular, and have thought about the lessons they have to teach us. Things like deep roots, unseen networks of support below the surface, and their ability to lose their leaves in order to survive the winter.

And then this… the idea of some varieties of stress forming us and helping us be more than we would have been without it.

It all started last March, I came across an article in The New York Times Magazine, “Maggie Harrison’s War on Wine” (gift link) and I dove in. Maggie Harrison is a winemaker, yes, but more so, she’s an artist who breaks one of the foundational rules of winemaking. Most top-tier winemakers produce wines using a single varietal (aka one type of grape). She does not. And the results are exceptional.

Everywhere I looked online, Harrison was receiving accolades for the results of an unorthodox approach to winemaking, which drew as much from painting — she has a condition known as synesthesia, in which information meant to stimulate one sense also stimulates others — as it did from traditional notions of taste and aroma.

At Antica Terra, her winery in the Willamette Valley in Oregon, Maggie Harrison dispenses with the single-varietal approach. Instead, she blends grapes from eight of the top vineyards in the Willamette Valley (this includes her own) and another two from California. And she blends them blind to remove any bias.

The process looks like this:

“They sit around the table with rows of tiny bottles in front of them. Adams and Ready take copious notes. Every time they add another sample, they taste and spit and discuss what they’re tasting, smelling, sensing and feeling. This goes on all day, for 10 days. It’s an improvisation. They assemble each wine in their minds like a song. This blending period is when Harrison’s wines find their identities. ‘Though they can be punishingly difficult,’ [her friend and owner of Hiyu Wine Farm in Hood River, Ore.] Ready told me, ‘those blending sessions are about trusting yourself, believing in the process and letting go of the desire to second guess.’”

I found all of this to be fascinating and kept reading.