Resurrecting the Fermented Christ
Freshly out of college, I began my adventure to Sonoma, California. I was on a quest to nurture my new infatuation with winemaking. After a formative year of studying food and wine in Europe, I signed up to be a seasonal cellar worker at a winery in Sonoma. A ripe twenty-two-year-old, my heart was fluttering with anticipation. As I veered left onto Carneros Highway, within miles of my destination, vineyards began filling the rolling hills. My body felt at home; I was reminded of the healing I had experienced through growing a deeper connection to the land. My dream of learning to tend to grapes and make wine was coming to fruition. I knew my job as a seasonal cellar worker wouldn’t be glamorous, but I looked forward to the hard work and learning ahead.
When I arrived in town, my first task was to meet at the staffing office for work orientation. As someone who didn’t have any formal experience in winemaking, I took one of the only jobs I could get, which meant I was hired through a large staffing agency that worked with bigger wineries to place seasonal workers. Located in Santa Rosa’s business park, the agency’s carpeted workspace reminded me of the DMV. After I completed what felt like hours of paperwork, the representative wheeled over a box TV where I watched multiple OSHA videos with instructions on mass food production safety. This orientation certainly felt different than my experiences visiting family-operated wineries in Italy, but I was determined to learn more about the winemaking process.
Ready for my first day on the job, I laced up my steel-toe boots and headed to the winery. Passing the rows of grapes again, I drove to the edge of Sonoma near the raceway and turned down a winding road. No building was visible from the main road, but as I turned the corner, I realized the eucalyptus-lined hill had been contoured to hide the 50,000-square-foot wine facility behind it. Scanning my badge, I entered the building and walked past a large lab and multiple office spaces, all of which lead me to the lunch room filled with posters about workplace safety and reporting incidents. After placing my lunch in the office fridge, I was taken to the center of production—a warehouse stocked with giant steel tanks, many capable of holding 13,000 gallons of wine.
In the days following, truck after truck loaded with machine-harvested grapes began delivering to the winery. The clusters were dumped, crushed, and then sent through large plastic hoses into tanks. Walkie-talkies in hand, we prepared for each ton of grapes to be pushed through to the next tank. We often dumped bags of commercial yeast into the grape mixture. This would start the fermentation process, as the fruit had been sprayed with a variety of herbicides and pesticides, which kill off the bacteria that naturally initiates fermentation. This was done to keep yields consistent. Spontaneous fermentation is more difficult to control than commercial yeast fermentation, especially when managing high quantities. Because the grapes were often picked overripe, which makes their sugar levels very high, the wine’s finished product could be up to a 20% alcohol level. When this happened, we hoisted a hose up to the top of the tanks and sprayed hundreds of gallons of water into the wine to decrease the alcohol level. Mega Purple was added to alter the color and flavor of the watered-down wines. Oak extract attempted to imitate an oak-aged taste.
Pleasure and wonder had been entirely removed from the winemaking process. We were nothing more than factory workers.
The modern innovation that goes into this type of production is not simple. The technologies are, in many ways, impressive. Each step is calculated to increase profits and eliminate uncertainty. The well-paid corporate “winemakers” would sit in their air-conditioned offices on their computers, calculating the most efficient way to move grapes in and wine out; the goal was to be as profitable as possible. These types of wineries try to produce a consistent product – one that is sure to pad the wallets of mostly white male profiteers. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, the mistreatment of farmworkers and cellar workers is regularly factored into this formula. Their their labor is severely undervalued. In 2020, the annual income for a farmworker in the United States (a third of whom live in California), was roughly $20,000 – $24,999.[1] Many pick grapes in 115-degree heat with injuries they do not have insurance to treat.[2] As a white intern, although many parts of my work were exhausting, I was not expected to work under the same conditions as my foreign-born coworkers.
Most days during my time there I felt depressed as I uncovered a new reality. The magic I first experienced when learning about winemaking came crashing against these injustices and the mechanical extraction of our earth. I became an extension of a machine. I wanted to quit, but I endured my seasonal position until the end of the harvest. I didn’t learn much about the art of winemaking, but my embodied experience helped me make sense of the stories of my people.
Growing up in a Christian household, I often was told that God loved me unconditionally, but the cultural story I lived said that I needed to perform at a certain level, look a certain way, and remain pure in order to receive that love. Individual success, no matter the cost, was the meaning of life. God’s favor was implicitly assessed by wealth accumulation, career or athletic advancement, or social status. I began dieting around age eleven. Constant fears of losing favor and love drove me to live a life of anxiety. And eventually disordered eating. I often prayed to God to heal me from my low self-esteem, and I went to individual talk therapy. But it wasn’t until I removed myself from my culture that I tasted liberation.
When I lived outside of the United States, I experienced alternative ways to belong through slow meals, reverence for the land, and finding deep pleasure in daily life. This way of life was foreign to me. The slowness was startling. Meals were late, long, and full. In Cambodia, I met people whose stories of lemongrass, galangal, and dried fish carried them through a genocide. They knew “the taste of the land.” as filmmaker Kalyanee Mam describes it.[3] In Italy, I learned from vintners who spoke to their grapes and became friends with the complex layers of their soil. These ways of being are not, of course, exclusively found outside the United States, but my lineage belongs to the dominant culture of North America, which for centuries has placed a high value on individual success through exploitative means. Knowing a place, learning the stories of your ancestors, and being captivated by the present moment are not prioritized values in my culture. Spending significant time away from a hurried, anxious culture allowed my body to rewrite new stories of belonging free from the constant pressure of achievement.
Many of the vintners I learned about viticulture and enology from developed their practices through shared generational knowledge. Their goal was to allow the relationships of the land to speak for themselves. Seeking human-defined perfection and controlling outcomes interfered with the magic that was already taking place below the surface. Rather than implementing extensive measures to create a consistent and sellable product, their work was more like hospice care. Honoring the grapes meant allowing them to die in relationship with the microbes around them. This transformative process of fermentation captivated me. When human intervention is minimal, grapes and wine musts harbor a complex microbiome full of bacteria, fungi, and yeasts, all of which plays a crucial role in fermentation. Their presence effects the characteristics of the wine when the fermentation is complete.[4] Who the grapes become in their death is defined by the complexity and diversity of the relationships they espouse during their life. For wild magic to take place, the grapes needed to live and die in relationship with the bacteria around them. Infection was the key to a vibrant resurrection. And when I took part in supporting this process, I felt my body was an extension of this magical becoming. My hand was a part of the wine’s evolution along with the soil, bacteria, and climate.
When I watched others be captivated by the abundance of the land and taking pleasure in her gifts, I found permission to do the same. In this awakening to my entanglement, I became much less concerned about doing the right thing; Ibecame mostly concerned about not missing out on the magic that was in front of me. When I came to know my interconnectedness to all persons—earth, food, animals, and humans—I discovered new ways of freedom that didn’t require personalhealing. The fixed understanding of my singular identity melted and became entangled with the more-than-human world. Implementing positive self-talk routines to grow my self-esteem suddenly seemed obsolete in comparison to the call from the land, which was daily inviting me to a new way of becoming. I no longer needed to strive to have a positive body image because my sense of my body stopped being an image. I discovered myself as an active participant in the living world around me. I didn’t know self-love until I realized the earth loved me and that I was bound to Her.
The way I saw myself shifted. Rather than an individual who believed that her choices only affected me, I began to see myself as intertwined with the more-than-human world. Instead of fixating on personal healing and purity, opening up to my interconnectedness saved me.
Many years later I discovered Joanna Macy’s writings. She speaks of “greening the self,” by which she means to refer to transformation by identifying with the “natural world.” This is a process of realizing that any sense of the “individual self” and a separated “environment” are constructs. She argues that our human pains are a reflection of the Earth’s pain. When we allow ourselves to become friends with despair, rather than trying to individually heal (or suppress) it, we can open ourselves to the deep pain of the more-than-human world.[5]
My two contrasting embodied experiences in winemaking allowed me to see my human pain as one and the same with the pain of the Earth. For most of my time on Earth, my life more closely reflected the grapes’ lives and deaths at the large production site in Sonoma. I allowed myself to be contorted and controlled in order to be an object of productivity. Remaining a “pure” individual, uncontaminated by pleasure, slowness, or grief forced me to isolate myself. I stayed consistent and non-disruptive to prove my value to the Empire. I saw myself as a manicured lawn rather than a wild forest teeming with life. I was split open by grief for myself and the Earth—I didn’t want to live and die as those grapes did. The Earth and I had been imprisoned in contortions of productivity. And how often is this still true? I ache knowing how often I choose the safety and comfort of imprisoning myself (or others) rather than liberation.
But how could this wound be transformed by allowing its infection? I suspect that choosing not to purify our despair is an opportunity to be fermented by the others beyond us. Which is to say liberated. Or healed. Or maybe made whole. But certainly to be returned to ourselves. Perhaps for the first time.
The stories of importance that are retold by the dominant culture in the United States are often individual success stories—the ones of “ingenious” and “hardworking” heroes, saviors, and winners. I recall stories from my church service growing up in which someone “pulled themselves out of poverty” by becoming a Christian and eventually a “productive” citizen. The meaningful conclusion in these narratives is usually centered on that person individually accumulating wealth. The arc toward resurrection bent from individual despair to individual success. These stories of redemption sounded more like unkempt yards becoming manicured lawns rather than fenced spaces becoming wild and interconnected.
The stories I heard in church most of my life said that believing in Jesus alone as my Savior is my salvation. But how could I make sense of the grapes, soil, and bacteria coming alive and moving me? And what happened when their death transformed me? For many of us, the agency, power, and sacredness of plants, soil, air, and food are written out of our stories. How do the stories we tell shift when we believe all parts of our world are animate and interconnected?
Many of the parables Jesus uses are agricultural or culinary-driven. In the United States, most of us do not have daily, active involvement with the land. Or with making our food from scratch. Even worse, most of our food system is built on domination—on control of the land, animals, and other humans. Rather than being shaped by the tastes of the land, our stories are human-centric and individualist. I worry that the dominant cultural interpretations of the land imagery in the Bible become flabby metaphors shaped by our shallow disembodied knowledge.
In her book, The Spirituality of Wine, Gisella H. Kreglinger discusses wine’s history within the church and the United States. In our modern times, we often forget that the Franciscans and Cistercians were formative in expanding viticulture throughout the world. Although viticulture and winemaking were revered and commonplace practices throughout church history, wine eventually became prohibited in the United States. The revivalist movement, whose campaign focused on individual salvation and personal moral purification, rose at the same time as the Prohibition. Many Protestants rallied around abstinence from all alcoholic beverages as an important act of personal sanctification. Ironically, grape juice lacks the natural cleansing abilities that alcohol in wine provides. For many denominations, communion is now often consumed out of individual plastic cups rather than wine in a shared chalice.[6]
If Jesus says his body is bread and his blood is wine, what are we be missing if we are not deeply involved in the magic of these practices? Does our understanding of Jesus’ blood look more closely resemble wine that serves the Empire? When Jesus holds up the cup of wine and says, “This is my blood shed for you,” what do we see in this cup? Do we see the soil, bacteria, yeast, fungi, grapes, rain, slowness, and magic?
I can’t imagine we truly understand his blood as an animate, interactive life force that connects us to the more-than-human world. Blood that quickly purifies us into the images that we strive to be (rather than wild, connected, and entangled beings) seems to be more like a big-box commodity. If our culture sees wine and all the food we grow as something that can be used for individual gains through the oppression of land and humans, why would we assume we would treat Jesus’ blood and body any differently?
This leads me to question my people’s story of the resurrection, where Jesus’ physical rising from the dead is the message of a savior’s triumph. Instead of allowing Jesus to die and return as a part of the interconnected world he loved, did we rewrite the story of the resurrection to avoid our mortality?[7] Does a physical resurrection that saves individual souls bypass our opportunity to let our pain and grief be broken open? Could Jesus’ death be the awakening to his disciples instead of the individual Saviour they were looking for? Could his death be the gateway to their freedom to see their active entanglement to all living things?
Various denominations of Christianity argue around ideas of transubstantiation. Some believe that the wine truly becomes Christ’s blood, and others believe that drinking the wine (or grape juice) is a metaphorical representation. But what about Christ’s blood becoming wine? What if instead, Jesus was saying, “When I die, my blood will become wine. My body will become one with the earth, the soil, the grains, the yeasts, the bacteria, and I will be resurrected in the bread that you eat. Can’t you see that I am in all things? I did not come to save the world. I came to be touched by it. To be contaminated by it. To know the depths of it. Pain needed to be known by another. To be met and felt, not purified. The grief of the world is too great to be cleansed. It never will be. I know you came looking for a Savior, but open your eyes and look around you. Your savior is already here. Let her in. Let her tastes and smells become the balm for your wounds. Let her wonder resurrect you from your individual identities. Stop hiding or trying to heal your imperfections and flaws. Open them up to the earth and let them dance with the microbes around you. You are the magic of the earth if you let it infect you. I did not save the world, but being touched by the world saved me.”
Do our sanitized views of Jesus as Savior keep him from being resurrected? How might we be saved if we let Jesus die?
For grapes to be able to ferment spontaneously without mechanical intervention, they must be in a relationship with all of the living beings around them. To disconnect from the world in an attempt at purification would eliminate their chance to ferment. Wine is not simply made from grapes; it is made from its close interactions with bacteria, fungi, and yeasts. A vineyard’s landscape, climate, and soil all impact what a wine becomes.
In their writings discussing purity and disgust theology, Paul and Billie Hoard introduce the idea of “Eucontamination,” by which they mean contamination for good.[8] They argue that love is a stronger contaminate than any “impurity” we encounter in this world. Jesus lived his life being “contaminated” by lepers, the poor, prostitutes, and tax collectors. Perhaps those whom the elite saw as impure were the lifeforces that resurrected Jesus. The Christ couldn’t become the Christ without blurring the lines of the individual self with the world around him. Maybe God didn’t resurrect Jesus; maybe it wasthe “bacteria, fungi, and yeasts of the world.” [ZS1] Just as wine becomes a collective story of land, bacteria, grapes, and human interaction, Jesus’ resurrection occurred when the disciples allowed their view of Jesus as an individual Savior to die and the collective story of our entanglement with the Divine to resurrect.
What pains are we trying to resurrect through modern means instead of allowing them to ferment and transform?
Perhaps in these times of social and ecological collapse, our most redemptive act is also to collapse ourselves. To implode. To let the bacteria, fungi, and yeasts of this world cover us. Rather than saving our society or our lands, how might sitting in the reality of our collective wounds transform us? Rather than scorning the other political party, how might we accept that we are all entangled in creating the world we live in today? Maybe the contaminants of our world that we’ve been trying to cover up are asking us to let them in. Maybe they can ferment a collective reality beyond our individual salvation.
May we eat and drink the flesh and blood of the earth. To know her, to love her, and become her.
[1] Farmworker Justice. “Who Are Farmworkers”, 2024, https://www.farmworkerjustice.org/about-farmworker-justice/who-we-serve/
[2] Farmworker Justice. “Stories from the Field: The Story of Marisol”, 2024, https://www.farmworkerjustice.org/stories-from-the-field/marisol/
[3] Kalyanee Mam. ស្គាល់ មជាតិ Knowing Your Taste: A Companion Essay to Taste of the Land, Emergence Magazine, September 26, 2024, https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/skal-cheate-knowing-your-taste/
[4] Cátia Pinto, Diogo Pinho, Remy Cardoso, Valéria Custódio, Joana Fernandes, Susana Sousa, Miguel Pinheiro, Conceição Egas, and Ana C. Gomes. “Wine Fermentation Microbiome: A Landscape from Different Portuguese Wine Appellations.” Frontiers in Microbiology 6 (September 1, 2015). https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2015.00905.
[5] Joanna Macy, “The Greening of the Self,” essay, in Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth, Second Edition, (Point Reyes, California: The Golden Sufi Center, 2017), 151–62.
[6] Gisela H. Kreglinger. The Spirituality of Wine. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2016).
[7] For more on letting Jesus die see: Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine. (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2022).
[8] Billie Hoard, Paul Hoard. Eucontamination: A Christian Study in the Logic of Disgust and Contamination. The Other Journal, Issue 32, 2020, https://theotherjournal.com/2020/10/eucontamination-christian-logic-disgust-contamination/