Ian Augustine: Here is the Land, Here is the Wine (Wine Zine 03)
Daylover: Nurturing Land and Furthering Wine in Rhode Island
Originally Published September 2019
Rhode Island is a strange and beautiful place. There is a devotion to the old world that is central to my understanding of it. It is a place saturated in agricultural goodness, of both land and sea. It makes a still life of your kitchen table.
“See here — the table holds oysters, mackerel
sourdough.
Melons, wax beans,
corn.
Pork, cheese,
eggs.
You are intimate with the origins of each,
you are easily spoiled.
Behold the wild flowers,
unhappy and drooping in a July heat
but hanging in there
with the rest of us”
The still life is rounded out by the emergence of a dynamic wine scene. Providence, where I live, has become a haven for natural wine and for producers who find it charming to stop along the way from New York to Boston, or vice versa. Largely this is thanks to a handful of savvy wine merchants and buyers who have worked zealously to bring certain wines and portfolios into the state. And this has been driven by a community of thoughtful drinkers who champion the wines and are proactive in learning about them, and whose thirst continues to enliven the scene here and make Providence a serious place for wine.
For years I have worked in both wine and farming, watching the two industries grow and move alongside each other. It is a satisfying combination of work that typically rearranges itself from year to year. One year I am running a small vegetable farm by day, waiting tables and pouring wine by night. The next I am a casual farmhand, while I simultaneously help to operate and select wines for the local workers’ cooperative wine bar. In Providence, where I live, the dream of the infinite side hustle is very much alive. Each iteration of this hustle feels liminal and comes half-baked to you in the quiet lull of winter — you will carry out these dreams during the warmer months. During the months where heat buzzes, weeds multiply, people are thirsty. See you when I see you.
The current iteration of this hustle finds host in a project of mine called Daylover—one that seeks to navigate these cues, and to coalesce the presence of a vital agricultural scene and earnest demand for real wine.
While my goal is to broaden Daylover into a multidimensional project, it is currently anchored by a small CSA, in which I have been working to grow uncommon varieties of vegetables and herbs such as agretti, shiso, heirloom beans and chicories. Everything is grown from a small parcel of land in Seekonk, Massachusetts, just over the border and about fifteen minutes from Providence. This particular iteration of the CSA model, however, deviates a bit from the traditional model and hangs its hat on the spirit of curation. I might include in the share some wildflowers picked from the edge of the field, duck eggs and blueberries from another farmer, sourdough or cake from a friend, a poem, hand-printed tea towels, special imported teas. Things that were all billed as etcetera when I first began to put the word out. I host the pickup weekly at a shop called Campus Fine Wines, where I offer a handful of natural wines to taste as pairings for that week’s share. In 2019, certain regions and styles have unwittingly proven themselves as workhorse pairings for what is being plucked from the field–lighter style Umbrian reds, Alsatian Riesling and Pinot Gris, the brisk and salty wines of Rías Baixas, Burgundy always.
Vegetables, herbs and flowers are also harvested weekly for a restaurant called Berrí and a workers’ cooperative wine bar called Fortnight — two thoughtful and profound projects with which I am also deeply involved. Foremost to my interest in this type of work is a respect for responsible land stewardship, a concept that is at the heart of both of these. They are projects that continue to shape my approach to food and wine.
I want to do something that integrates more wholly the experience of stewardship in both farming and wine buying, rather than what either offers up individually. In this experiment, the gardener chooses the wines, sources other specialties, builds the still life upon your table. I want to help demystify real wine that is made by farmers, and to drive home the point that wine is worthy of the same consideration we put into the food we eat. The winemakers that we idolize are farmers, working in earnest to create a value-added agricultural product that preserves and shares a significant part of their world with others.
Daylover is a friendly nod to the Old World, and to those versions of the Old World that are present in mine. And also to the queerness that is here, present often in the curiosity of my peers who steward the land and wine. It is something that continues to make me feel held in this place.
*All of this is propped up by the privileged experience of those with the means of land access and food production, typically propped up by whiteness. It wildly excludes the experience of those populations in Rhode Island whose access to land and fresh foods has historically been and continues to be stifled and made out of reach.