Following the culmination of a degree in Sustainability, Kelly Allen pinned her focus on revitalizing local foodways as means of resistance against cultural hegemony and the mechanization of individualistic expression. Tracing a path of agrarian incarnations in multiple small farms across the United States, Kelly worked alongside numerous Virginian and New Mexican sustainable homesteaders, ran a small CSA (community-supported agriculture) operation off the coast of Maine, and spent a season teaching sustainable arid-lands agriculture at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Deeply drawn to a season spent working as a viticulturist on a small vineyard in Northern Virginia, she spent the years following constantly revisiting grapes and wine as a means of preserving cultural identity through food. Working alongside other winemakers, viticulturists, and professionals in the wine industry, she works as a proponent and spokesperson for the preservation of small-production wine the world over. Every winemaker, every farmer, and every craftsman has a story.
This book is a series of personal snapshots through her time recording those stories. The word Brettanomyces refers to a specific bacterium found in winemaking. It is generally considered to cause undesirable flavors in the finished product, and is known for being notoriously difficult to remove. This essence of permanency and influence is the same infectious quality that Kelly fell prey to in agriculture, save for rather than imparting off flavors to her life, it revealed a distaste for the divide between modernized lifeways and agrarian roots. It also speaks to the gloaming of living life in the periphery. Whether as a marginalized class, as an activist subverting Big Ag, or simply as a woman, Brettanomycesis the image of persistence.
Wine is an agrarian artifact, imbued with historical, regional, and emotional significance. It emerges with incredible multiplicity from ancient lineages the world over, each time echoing moments of deep connectivity between the human and the wild. The same is true of corn, of wheat, of beans, and of the myriad crops that give cultures their colors and textures. Wine is simply the most obvious on the global stage. They all paint the profile of a disintegrating lifeway that is the very heartbeat of what it means to be a human upon this earth.