Musings on Phenomenology …

Contemplations about the philosophy that inspires our farming practices 

Our mission at Burl is to allow our vineyards and their fruit to speak more fully by exploring and measuring how components like secondary metabolites (such as phenolics) form in grapes, how our farming practices affect their formation, and how, in turn, this impacts the sensory qualities of our wines: their flavor and complexity.

 We originally came up with the term phenolmenology as a bit of a joke, combining this focus on measuring phenolics with our underlying approach to winemaking, which relies on phenomenology. Phenomenology is the direct investigation of phenomena as consciously experienced without theories about their causal explanation and as free as possible from unexamined preconceptions and presuppositions. 

 We liked the wordplay so much, we gave the name Phenolmenology to the 2023 skin contact pinot gris we were making, hoping to harness the beneficial phenolics from the skin and seeds to add flavor complexity to the wine. But the term quickly revealed itself to define not just a single bottle but also the core of Burl.

 As an agricultural project that sits at the intersection of the scientific and natural worlds, we are ever aware of the tension between a scientific view of the world as an independently “real” entity and our personal experiences of that same world. A phenomenological approach threads this friction by initiating experiments with a hunch, then inductively noting results through observation and testing, with curiosity and neutral expectations (rather than beginning with a hypothesis and seeking facts to validate it).

This methodology reflects our instinctual desire to learn first from the plants, then explore how different growing practices impact soil biology metrics and the plants’ production of phenolics and other secondary metabolites. As we pay attention to how the plants respond to their environments, growing conditions, and our interventions, the story emerges. Science next serves to illuminate the relationship between what we see and what is actually happening within the plants.

 Ultimately, however, we never forget that wine is experienced by people, despite all of the context we place upon it and our efforts to rationally grasp the natural processes and human intervention techniques that go into it.