The "Big Bang" of Wine :

Galaxies, Planets, and Gardens Exploding After the Harvest

PHOTOGRAPHER Patrick Desgraupes captures the initial fermentation process of grapes with intoxicatingly beautiful results.

FÉLIP VIVANCO 02/04/2024

"There are other worlds, but they are in this one." Paul Éluard's century-old verse has become such a universal motto that it is used to explain all the parallel dimensions we inhabit or to advertise a perfume. Award-winning French photographer Patrick Desgraupes paraphrased the poet and showed that there are other galaxies, and they are in this one, in the barrels where the world's finest wines are born and drunk, in the world's most prestigious cellars. World map.

Enigmatic Images

What Bacchus and Dionysus would have given to see these eyes with their veins, branches, flowers, and sparks, blood red, purple, and blue.

What Bacchus and Dionysus would have given to see these circular images resembling the eyes of mythological figures, with their veins, branches, flowers, and sparks. With their blood reds, purple valleys, and blue mountains. Such sensational, handcrafted, and patiently executed images that demonstrate that human bravery and passion are unparalleled.

The snapshots speak of a first stage, a wild alchemy that goes unnoticed, that follows the harvest, continues on its way, and becomes a miracle that ferments in silence, where the winemakers wonder if the wine will come out as it should.

"This downpour is a flare," also writes Éluard, unwittingly adapting it to the work of the photographer Desgraupes. Because fermented grapes resemble a firestorm, a human iris about to burst, a meteor shower, burning ships beyond Orion like those in Blade Runner. Georges Méliès's Moon. A blossoming black hole, a love that germinates, a drunken, mad, blind love, without a future.

Desgraupes' work, which has managed to infiltrate the great French estates, speaks for itself, but he limits it because it took a path to reach these galaxies that coexist among us: "I was tired of a certain kind of photography, of ancient mechanisms, I wanted to represent the concept of how the universe is perceived. Transformation, because everything that lives, grows, dies transforms over time. It was this concept that preoccupied me. My passion for wine helped me capture this idea."

At first, I didn't know how to do it, but I knew there was something to discover, and I became a spy: it was the perfect landscape."

The artist had left Paris for Provence and knew a few winegrowers. "At first, I didn't know what the process was like, but I knew there was something I had to discover, so I became a kind of spy police, monitoring the harvest process, from picking to bottling. It was the ideal landscape to talk about this DNA, this transformation..."

At first glance, his initial investigations transform into landscapes as natural as they are esoteric, worthy of material artists who juggle textures, tones, and volumes.

What did you feel when you saw what was happening in the barrel? "At first," Desgraupes says over the phone, "the first images shocked me, they moved my heart like the first time I heard Mozart, Jimi Hendrix, Peter Gabriel, or saw a David Lynch's film. It's the idea of ​​transforming art and the path it takes. For me, photographs attempt to tell stories because we need to feed on emotions; we need beacons amid the storms we experience every day.

Cultural references flood the must barrels, acquiring their colors, flavors, and nuances. From the cabin windows of his spaceship, Desgraupes recalls that the writer Aldous Huxley, who had experimented with mescaline, once asked Jim Morrison, the singer of The Doors, why they chose that name for the band.

"And Morrison told him that the doors were a metaphor for the parallel worlds that existed besides our own; that's what I wanted to achieve." Doors, windows, secret passages. It's important to remember that one of Huxley's works is entitled "The Doors of Perception."

Of course, the winemakers, bound by a calendar, tradition, and rituals that work like the hands of a clock, did not always understand at first what the photographer wanted to do and how he had done it. "How is this possible ?" they asked and when they saw the result.

From Grapes to Mars

Patrick Desgraupes won many award for his series 'From Grapes to Stars' in New York, Paris, London, Tokyo, and Luxembourg. The photographic process isn't as simple as it seems. "The broths are always covered, in the dark, and out of sight." I used studio flashes or LEDs because it was almost completely dark, but with the light, you discover an unexpected universe that you have to be careful with. The gases they release—he reveals—are dangerous."

"It's not easy to access certain 'domaines,' especially at this delicate moment of the harvest and the first steps toward winemaking. The little secret is obvious: you have to be invisible, or almost invisible. Among the estates where Desgraupes has worked are the most prestigious, undoubtedly Hall of Famers.

A small selection: the Romanée Conti, Lambrays-LVMH, and Bouchard Père & Fils-Artémis-Kering estates in Burgundy ; Château d'Yquem and Château Margaux (Bordeaux); Château Guigal and Nalys in the Rhône Valley ; and Domaine Jacques Selosse in Champagne...

Desgraupes has created a unique and particular winemaking cosmogony to immerse himself in, oceans that neither Verne nor Bradbury imagined. His photographs could travel through space like Bowie's A Space Odyssey, Elton John's Rocket Man, or Ludwig Van der Weg's Fifth Symphony. Incidentally, the Desgraupes series is titled, in English, "From Grapes to Mars."

Éluard concludes this little winemaker by speaking of the necessity of the absurd in life: "The alteration of logic to the point of reaching the absurd, the use of the absurd to the point of reaching reason." There is nothing more absurd, more beautiful, more useful, and more natural than images, full moons in bloom, botanical gardens where species once thought to have disappeared grow.