Fermented foods and beverages have been a part of human diets for thousands of years, and the production and consumption of these have served as a social engine by facilitating cultural and religious expression, social bonding, and economic and trade benefits. A sequence of organic processes – alcoholic fermentation, malolactic fermentation – arises, bringing the human and bacteria into a codependent relationship. While all foods contain microbes, humans directly shape this microbial ecology through fermentation. These transformatory interactions are of special interest, because they link investigations into how people shape and know the world around them to local knowledge, food traditions, local flora, and microbial taxa.
The influence of these processes can be understood more precisely when looking at the early developments of alcoholic production and consumption: even small-scale societies on the brink of starvation set aside a good portion of their precious grain or fruit for alcohol production. In desperation, migrants whose alcohol supplies have run dry have fermented shoe leather, grasses, local insects – whatever they could get their hands on. This desire even played a social and cultural role in the beginnings of civilization, the development of early settlements and religious ceremonies and rituals, e.g. the Bacchanalia (a Roman festivity dedicated to the god of wine, Bacchus, inducing a sort of madness meant to free you from your normal self through ecstasy). The cultures that do not produce alcoholic drinks inevitably create and consume other substances instead, such as kava, coffee or tobacco, contributing through their respective influences to the celebration of togetherness and conviviality.
A glass of wine, through its taste, smell and texture for example, is the symbiosis of a complex, overlapping system of social, logistical, climatic and environmental conditions connected to a specific region and its customs. Through visits to local and international wineries, the processes of and spaces for alcoholic production and fermentation were analyzed in depth. Through a series of interviews about wine, different motives, traditions and drinking rhythms were identified
The spaces of a winery are designed for the processing of a product that has an intrinsic connection to taste, smell, texture, humidity and heat, creating an out-of-the-norm comfort zone of changing climatic, acoustic and light-variating atmospheres. The topic of ‘hypercomfort’ therefore regains a new meaning in times of strictly tamed, air-conditioned and sanitized spaces, all subject to a form of control. This asepsis of environments needs to be re-examined in light of the current challenges energy consumption is facing.
While trying to reframe the notion of specific consumables through my investigation, their intrinsic value to societies and culture, creating abilities in forms of production and consumption, a space of different sensory experiences have been formed. In the foreground stand the dualities of the pleasurable vs. the mechanic, the idyllic vs. the contaminated, the luxurious vs. the humble, coming together and negotiating the terms of energetic consumption in today's society.
