Recently we’ve seen a series on social media put on by one of the major wine publications where vintners and winemakers and growers are asked the question “why wine?” and they give their impassioned pleas and arguments for the world’s oldest intoxicating elixir.

But since no one’s asked us yet, and since we got to thinkin’ and drinkin’ about that stuff ourselves, well… (buckle up, folks!)

Why Whine?

We’ve now lost three of the last eight vintages to smoke and fire. Our ranch has burned twice now in the past six years. In the wake of the catastrophic Glass fire in 2020, we spent fifteen months without power, running generators to keep the lights on and run the well pumps. We have dealt with mildew, invasive pests, invasive plants, hail, frost, mudslides, “the county,” “the public,” “the neighbors,” “the trade,” the poison oak, the deer, the gophers, da bears, the rattlesnakes. The regulatory environment surrounding alcohol sales, especially in Napa, CA, is a Kafkaesque labyrinth of antiquated prohibition-era laws and rules, with agencies at the federal, state, county, and even municipal level providing regulation, oversight and taking their cut. We are competing against an oversaturated market (nearly 500 bonded wineries in the Napa Valley AVA alone!), all while dealing with rising farming and labor and energy and insurance costs (if we can even get insurance). And now we have the WHO saying “no amount of alcohol is safe” with no qualification or nuance whatsoever, and the Instagram wellness-industrial-complex slinging ketamine and cleanses and teetotaling, all in the name of optimization and “maxxxing” as people seek the very Best version of themselves, often at the expense of their own happiness. The entire wine industry is facing unprecedented headwinds, and small, family wineries bear the brunt of these forces since they lack the cash flow, marketing departments, distributor relationships, and man/woman power that the corporate entities have.

Even without all of these obstacles, the whole wine thing is, at its essence, just farming. Which, if you’ve ever been a farmer, you know is the ultimate lesson in Humility: you can do everything right, wake with the sun and toil away until nightfall day in and day out for months, pouring your literal blood, sweat and tears into the craft, only to have the whole thing vanish in an instant if Mother Nature decides she has other plans. “That’s farming!” we all say, (shoulder-shrug emoji) before dusting ourselves off and getting back up off the mat to fight another day.

You know what? Damn. Now that we see this all in black and white, we don’t think what we were going to say about why we do what we do could ever justify it or make sense. Why would anyone do this? It’s insane. It’s absurd. Folly. Maybe the main reason we do what we do is that no one has rolled up with a suitcase of money big enough to set us free from this albatross of a legacy yet?

Anyone want to buy a winery and vineyards on Howell Mountain?

KIDDING!!

But this is the trend, as family-owned-and-operated places sell out to corporate consolidation, foreign investment, or private equity. (You may no longer know who owns some of your favorite brands - do their wines seem different suddenly?) Point being, to a lot of us, in the current environment, the math on an exit ramp is, as the kids say, “starting to math.”

Why Anything?

Maybe from a philosophical point of view, the absurdity is the point. Toiling away to produce something that is ostensibly so frivolous is very existentialist—infusing the meaningless with Meaning through our choices and intention. After all, this quest for Meaning is the basis of the human experience as we attempt to overcome our angst and live a fulfilling life, no? Producing wine means creating the space for celebration, for joy, for vitality. And choosing joy in the face of a nihilistic, amoral universe is in itself a radical act of will. In this act, we find Meaning, and we are free to define that Meaning as we see fit. Given the cyclical, annual, seasonal nature of the process, from the existentialist framework, it’s pretty much Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill over and over only to have it tumble down again: a punishment, pointless suffering. Albert Camus asked us to imagine Sisyphus happy, but how? Sisyphus is happy because he understands the futility and the absurdity of his task. He acknowledges it. And then he refuses to be crushed (that’s a wine pun, folks) or to even suffer, opting instead to live anyway, to participate in the miracle of existence defiantly, passionately. He screams at the universe, like Lt Dan during that hurricane in Forrest Gump, “Is that all you got?” And he chooses happiness, while refusing to succumb to circumstance or a pain he never chose.

In the wake of all we’ve been through in the past decade, having seen our own boulder tumble down the hill again last year with the Pickett fire, we rose with the sun early last week and went out and picked and crushed our own grapes to make a new Rosé for vintage 2026 and kick off harvest, and it felt to us like unbridled joy as an act of resistance – a big middle finger to all of it. You can’t break us. Celebration matters. Wine matters. “So guess what? We happen to like pushing boulders and running up and downhill. It’s fun, and it makes us stronger.”

But assuming it matters, what does wine “mean”? Defiance for its own sake is a bit silly, if satisfying. If what we are defying is nihilism, amorality, the ethical and ontological vacuum of a cold, uncaring universe, the act of defiance must replace those “empty” concepts with something real and vital. So how do we infuse the cultivation and production of wine with Meaning?

So Really...Why Wine?

Just as a fine wine will always express its sense of place—the character of the vintage and the myriad interconnected biological, chemical, and physical factors unique to any site—it will also always reflect the values of the people producing it. These values are the meaning we impart to wine. None of these meaningful things are understood without a bit of investigation on behalf of the consumer, but choosing which wines one drinks is also a philosophical act. And that’s the fun of wine, of collecting, of visiting vineyards and wineries and learning about the farming and production methods, the history, the land, the people. Isn’t that why wine tourism is even a thing? Wine consumers are as eager to find meaning in their favorite bottles as we producers are to infuse them with such.

Meaning for us starts with this place being our home. Three generations live here on the Black Sears ranch, among the vineyards and the forests, and most of what is here, we have built, maintained, cared for… for nearly 50 years now. This part of Howell Mountain is some of the most biologically diverse land in all of America, and it is a blessing that we are able to make our lives here and serve as stewards for such a special place. And while we are passionate about wine, we are most passionate about the non-wine things that make our wine, at least in our opinion, so very special.

Call us crazy and feel free to agree or disagree, but we feel in our hearts that there is a right way to make wine. Many may disagree with us about any or all of what we believe, and that is definitely okay, but our choices for what constitutes “right” are where we find meaning in the acts of agriculture and production, and wine’s expression of our values.

We believe in the preservation of wild spaces. We think deforestation and habitat destruction are wrong, and if Napa Valley never planted another vineyard, we’d all find a way to carry on. We also believe in sustainable and regenerative farming, and that not only are those methods best for the health of the land as a whole, but that they produce the best, most expressive wines. However, while agricultural methods are important, monoculture will never be “sustainable” or “regenerative.” You can plant cover crops and not use chemicals and have all the CCOF and Demeter certifications there are, but if you are mowing down every living thing in the vineyard for decades to promote healthy vines, well… This is why a mere 5% of our land is vineyard, 24 acres out of 420. It’s also why we’ve converted about 150 acres of our land to the Napa Land Trust preserve, which means keeping these wild spaces wild… forever. And while we don’t care much for certifications, if you want to know how we farm our vines, note that our house sits in the very middle of the vineyards, so anything our vines are exposed to, we (and our children) are exposed to also.

We believe in diversity, that there is strength in diversity, and that diverse environments create complex wines of depth and character. The biological and geological diversity of this part of Howell Mountain is central to the character of our vineyards and the wines they produce.

We believe that family is everything, and that legacy family vineyards with history and shared vision, shared passion, and the bonds of blood will always produce superior wines to corporate wineries with corporate cultures and corporate values and shareholders to appease.

We believe in artistry over big data, humanity over technology, slow and intentional over optimized and efficient, and that no wine is perfect. (Even if every Black Sears bottle is, to us, perfectly imperfect.) We aren’t Luddites, and sure, we use technology. (We got a new press and optical sorter!) But we choose when to harvest based on taste and years of experience, not what the numbers on the refractometer or the ETS report say, even if we use those tools also. And as for those other wine “numbers,” the ratings… see Newsletter/blog #1. (thumbs down emoji)

We believe in the vines themselves, in their mystery, their resilience, their strength, and their ability to express themselves. We respect them like our children, keeping them safe while allowing them to grow and flourish on their own. And we understand that we are merely here to shepherd them, never to control. So we are minimalist, avoiding excessive intervention or manipulation or additives. The touch is as light as possible in the cellar with regard to winemaking.

And as we noted above, we believe in celebration - that even in the face of the growing and terrifying existential threats we face as a planet and a species, life… right here, right now, in this very moment… is a blessing and a miracle and a gift for which we can never properly express enough gratitude, but that demands celebration at any and every moment for which we can find the time and the space. YOLO, fams! Even when things suck, try and remember that we have all been born into the safest, greatest, most exciting, most interesting time in all of History.

But perhaps most of all, we believe in Connection. And we believe in wine’s essential role in Connection—to the land, to one another, and to the Spirit that surrounds and binds us all. Throughout wine’s 8000+ year history, this has always been wine’s role within civilization. It’s the only thing we know of that has been planted at the center of the world’s most successful and longest-lived cultures; the only one also elevated to sacrament, prescribed as medicine, and shared at nearly every wedding, funeral, treaty, and reconciliation in western civilization.

Unfortunately, if there were a one-word diagnosis for the philosophical malady that seems to have infected humanity in this newest millennium, it would have to be “disconnection.” And many of us feel spiritually, emotionally, physically disconnected—unmoored, lost, and adrift in the modern world.

Today, reality itself is in doubt. Trust in our leaders and experts and institutions is dissolving quickly. Our means of understanding the world (science) is in crisis. Ethics in 2026 are an afterthought—the Monday morning quarterbacking done as we pick up the mess from once again having failed to heed the warnings of our stories: Prometheus, Frankenstein, every sci-fi novel ever written. The very future of Consciousness, if we are to believe the hype, is in the hands of a few CEOs – all men, all weirdos, all messianic billionaires with spray tans or vacant eyes, hair plugs and tight, black T-shirts. We are adrift in an abyss of nihilism posing as irony, “fake news,” conspiracy, relativism, and what Princeton philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt so eloquently called “bullshit.”

We are disconnected from Nature because of our mastery over our environment. We are disconnected from our planet as a result of industrial farming, sterile urban living, and systems that have created an inverse relationship between the health of our ecosystems and the health of our economies.

We are disconnected from one another by politics, culture wars, religion, radicalism, and an insidious impulse toward technology that inserts itself as a mediator in all human interaction: the Zoom meeting, the email, the text message, the dating app, social media. Further divided by the atomization of culture by the devices, the algorithms, and the echo chambers, all of us living in what sometimes feels like separate realities. “They” tell us that these technologies are there to connect us! But it’s all fake, lies upon lies. Many of today’s great philosophical minds claim that “the odds are” that we are all living in a Matrix-style simulation run by a higher intelligence anyway, and that proving or disproving that notion is impossible. WTF. Yikes.

We are disconnected from Truth by AI, deep-fakes, advertising, profit-motivated journalism, fear-mongering, and an Orwellian insistence by our leaders, political and cultural, that we not believe our own eyes and ears and minds. What we saw was a “false flag.” A conspiracy. Follow the money down the rabbit hole. Suddenly we all know what the term “gas lighting” means, and it seems to be occurring everywhere.

And we are alienated from God, from Mystery, from the Force, the Spirit, and the One-ness—whatever you want to call this concept—by our own egos and the illusion that we are all separate individuals competing for finite resources in a zero-sum game of (mostly) global late-stage capitalism and corruption. Too often, we fail to see our humanity in one another, in its universality and interconnectedness.

Hold up. So, maybe wine isn’t frivolous folly after all? Sh*t, maybe it’s the most important thing there is and the answer to all of our problems—the one path back from the brink and into the garden? (Okay, this is all over-the-top already — maybe that’s a bit too far…)

But ponder for a moment all of us, at once, putting down the phones and returning to the dinner table together to share a meal and a bottle of wine… with friends, with foes, with family, with strangers. Enjoying a delicious meal and a beautiful bottle of the world’s oldest, most sensual, intoxicating elixir at a shared table, instead of the garbage and anxiety and rage fed to us in bits and bytes by our media. Think of the conversations, the understanding, the common ground, the shared experience and consciousness, the forgiveness, the Love. The connection.

We know we are preaching to the choir with this stuff, but I guess we are encouraging a bit of proselytizing as well. At least trying to give you some of the language to turn on the uninitiated.

We made a conscious decision when we created Black Sears that these things would be our goals: to create Meaning, to foster communion, and to choose Joy. It’s why we only make a little bit of wine. It’s why we sell our wines directly to our customers. It’s why we host visitors at the winery. It’s why we’ve met most of you in person and shared not only our wines and this place, but also ourselves with you. It’s why we have a wine club. It’s why we write stupid, long-ass slightly-tongue-in-cheek blog posts with highfalutin philosophical concepts that may or may not serve merely to justify the fact that we love wine and all the fun, wild, interesting people—you all, mostly—that we get to share it with, a whole, whole lot. We are seeking meaning too, and this is the way we have found it and made it significant. So thank you all for being integral to the mission and sharing yourselves with us.

So let’s raise a glass and toast to you and to wine itself. Let’s drink with one another because that is what wine has always been here for. Because the 750ml bottle insists upon sharing. Because the endorphin release during that second glass is pretty much the same neurochemistry as laughter or a smile. “Wine is bottled poetry,” Robert Louis Stevenson once said.

It is nature civilized and civilization naturalized. The same resolution of tension and paradox that defines the human experience.

It is sunlight and storms and all the cycles of life and the universe transformed by the oldest biotechnology we possess (fermentation) into the thing we raise when words alone are not enough. Eight-thousand-plus years of humans seeking Meaning, confronting the same joys and griefs, the same struggles and triumphs, have all, time and again, returned to wine, and never set the glass down. Now isn’t the time either.

So… yeah.

Cool.

That’s why wine… for us anyway.