Birds Drunk in the Vineyard

It’s harvest now. Every year, there’s something I don’t expect. As an owner and founder of a non alcoholic winery, I got calls. Boy did I get calls. And, letters. Lots and lots of letters.

One fine Napa day during harvest, the manager came into my office looking pale and stunned. I just figured the bank had called again. Alas, it was nothing that simple.

She was holding a letter in her hand that was on a folded piece of notebook paper. The edges were ragged where someone had torn it out of a spiral notebook. The paper had letters of the alphabet cut out from magazines pasted on it. Right away I figured it wasn’t telling me what a fine job I was doing.

Roughly the letter said, “I’m going to kill you. You’re sending teenagers to Hell and you’ll pay.”

I had to admit it was a strong opening.

“Non alcoholic wine leads to alcohol. Alcohol leads to Cocaine. Cocaine leads to Heroin. From Heroin it’s straight to Hell. Die. Die. Die.”

Or, words to that effect. The actual grammar was a little more obscure than that.

It was postmarked Mississippi.

When the Sheriff came and got the letter he thought it was a lot of trouble to go to just to threaten somebody all the way across the country for selling a product 99.9% of the people on Earth didn’t know existed.

Actually, the Sheriff didn’t know we existed either and he was only 15 miles away. But, he did allow as how that whatever the letter lacked in elegance it made up for in passion.

Also, he was of course, like all right thinking people, sure that non alcoholic wine was impossible. So, getting all worked up over something that didn’t exist didn’t make much sense.

Well, said I, if that’s our customer base, I’ll have to adjust.

I learned that at a Stanford extension course so it must be true. It is in that spirit that I commend your attention to the otherwise heretofore unrecognized importance of birds in wine which is respectively rendered below.

The Harvest Return

I should note that the starlings have begun returning to Northern California for harvest this month. I saw them starting to gather when I was in Carneros (Southern Napa Valley) a few weeks ago.

If you are lucky enough to find yourself near a vineyard in Autumn sometime, walk out into the clouds of these small black birds and feel them scattering before you, flicking from trellis to trellis, and then suddenly, breath-takingly, lift off in unison until the cloud of their bodies blackens the sky over you, beating in rhythm to your astonished breath.

Birds on the Edge

These starlings dive into the vineyards to feast on the second crop—the grapes that come out and ripen as nature’s afterthought when the harvest is over. As the starlings dart between the sky and the vines, they suddenly dive down in long graceful arcs and land with a thump in a dead stop on the fence wires.

Or, not. Some of them miss the wires entirely or hit the wire and fall off. In fact, significant numbers of them are dropping on the ground like tiny bowling balls, their beaks ominously stained dark with grape juice.

As I watch I begin to consider the possibility that Nature is overrated. These birds are after all, drunk. So drunk, they fall off wires and telephone lines and barrels and whatever else they try to land on.

After harvest grapes hang on the vines so long that wild yeasts in the air begin to work on the grapes’ rising sugar and they begin to ferment. And, as anyone in the wine business will tell you, fermented grapes are by anyone’s definition, wine.

The birds are engaging in a natural sacrament begun long before the thought of a church had ever entered an aspiring primate’s head. And they do it on purpose. They come every year to the same places at the same times in search of annual ecstasy.

So, what are we to make of this? Clearly God made these birds in such a fashion that they are irresistibly drawn to alcohol. And, he then created wine in bird size doses by causing the grapes to ferment on the vine. So what exactly did God have in mind?

Consider, if you will, the case of the Bombycilla Garrulus, better known around Whitehorse, Yukon Territory as the Bohemian Waxwing. During the fall migration season after consuming copious quantities of the fermenting local rowan berries, the birds get rowdy and run into things—barns, cars, trees, whatever is around.

The Animal Health Unit there has set up modified hamster cages as ornithological drunk tanks to hold the otherwise perfectly healthy waxwings until the birds sober up and can get on with their migrating.

It is a very successful program.

“This reminded me of when I was down at UCSB [University of California at Santa Barbara] …”the median of the 101 freeway had berry bushes. Every fall the big seafaring birds would eat the fermented berries and fly intoxicated. They would dive bomb the busy 101 and every now and then hit your windshield with some serious force.” —Justin Leigon, Piña Vineyard Management, Napa Valley

Even seagulls and pelicans are not immune. Nature is mysterious.

Drunk elephants in a Chinese tea garden. Local scientific types said it was impossible for elephants to get drunk on the 30 kg of corn wine they consumed. If they aren’t drunk, at least they look mellow. National Geographic photo.

In India it is said that Elephants get drunk on the fruit of the Marula tree—they certainly act drunk—but the sheer number of Marula fruit a 6,600 lb. elephant would have to consume to get drunk makes it highly unlikely that alcohol is the sole cause of their odd behavior although no other explanation has been forthcoming.

On the other hand, Velvet Monkeys seek out alcohol, including tourists’ piña coladas when said tourists are otherwise distracted. And the last thing you want to deal with on vacation is a lit monkey.

Did I mention that Wallabies get high on poppy plants in Australia? That’s not even legal for humans.

The point here is that God built a bias for getting high in general and for getting high on alcohol specifically into animals, and thereby, into humans. It is as natural for us to drink as it is for animals and birds. I’m just saying, if it’s natural for us to drink, wouldn’t you think God drinks too?

Otherwise you have to assume that God is mean, and wants us to suffer since he knows already that we can’t resist an addiction He created. If He doesn’t know that, He’s not God.

Who knew that drunken vineyard birds were so theologically complex?

The history of the relationship between the human animal and wine has been a long and bumpy one. Wine, and alcohol in general, terrify some people and elate others. It’s all about that breaking the rules thing.

And just what are the rules anyway? It’s hard to say.

Since at least the beginnings of recorded history, human beings have struggled with whether our bodies’ bird-like reaction to wine is a good thing or a bad thing morally.

My friend in Mississippi clearly came down on the wine is immoral side.

On the other hand, large chunks of the human population are fine with it.

So the question is this, is wine a blessing or a curse? That’s my question anyway. Most people seem to have made up their mind already on that one.

I grew up in the Methodist Church. Methodists do not drink. We do not dance. We only breathe on alternate weekends. We are quite probably the world’s dullest religion. As a child it seemed impossible to me for a Methodist to sin because we didn’t have the imagination for it.

We used Welch’s Grape Juice for communion. Wine was forbidden.

I was reliably informed at an early age that drinking wine would send me to Hell. It seemed a lot of power to invest in a beverage, but at six years old, what did I know?

My parents wouldn’t let me have pizza either. Maybe pizza was worse. Was grape soda on the list too? I liked grape soda. More to the point, if there was a drink that was guaranteed to send me to Hell, why wasn’t there a drink that was guaranteed to send me to Heaven?

The adult world made no sense to me at all.

As I grew older I could find no evidence that God cared one way or the other about what I drank. Nonetheless, throughout all of recorded history, our species has created institutions which have in turn created rules and methods of enforcement, sometimes violent ones, to prohibit the consumption of alcohol on the grounds that God is against it.

Hence, the cut out letters from our friend in Mississippi.

The Birds of Forbidden Desire

So are these fence-missing birds sinners? Do other birds cut out letters from magazines and paste them on notebook paper and put them in the mail?

Is God angry at the vineyard starlings for getting drunk and missing the fence posts? Does He lie awake at night and curse the velvet monkeys and laugh at the wallabies in His sleep?

It’s probably just me, but here’s the problem I have.

Is God mad at them for doing what He created them to do? And if not, why is He mad at us for doing the same thing? That confuses me, on the grounds that birds-that-sin is a difficult concept for me to get behind.

God created the same desire, with the same result in us, that he created in the starlings. Also Bohemian waxwings, seagulls, elephants, pelicans and wallabies.

“So,” I say to those foolish enough to engage me in this topic, “how then, are we sinners, any more than the birds?” This is exactly the kind of things that got me in trouble back in Bellaire Methodist Church.

It does seem mean and petty to me for God to create a craving for alcohol in us and then turn around and punish us for craving it the way He created us to do.

There are plenty of good social reasons to ban alcohol—drunk driving, domestic abuse, the financial cost to the rest of the people that aren’t too drunk to work, the strain on the hospitals and social services.

It also makes you fat.

All fine reasons to prohibit or restrict drinking. But God is against it? Could my Mississippi admirer be right? It’s a question I’m not qualified to answer, but it seems contradictory at best. Certainly confusing.

Are these starlings really going to Hell when they die? I don’t know, but it seems unlikely. It seems unlikely there’s a Hell for birds at all. But, I’m not in charge. I can’t really say for sure.

These are only some of the benefits of being a winery owner that they don’t teach at Stanford. On the up side, we got a lot of publicity all over the world for just that reason.

Well, now I think it’s probably time for me to go watch the starlings starting to mass over the vineyards and contemplate the wonder that all of this is here at all. If you are lucky enough to get a chance, I hope you’ll do the same.

And if you’re inclined, raise a glass to the starlings over the vineyards.