THE VINEYARD MAN: Golden Harvest

A trip to Chile isn’t complete until you’ve visited a local vineyard. And from a wine-tasting perspective, it’s a serene escape into pseudo nature. For the vineyard workers, it’s hours of sweat to make the tens and thousands of vine rows come together for an unpredictable harvest. Yet walking amongst the beads of grapes under the golden sun evokes a sense of simplicity and intimacy between nature and people that  is insightful towards our perceptions of effort and success.

There’s a sense of humility carried within the vineyard’s soil and vegetations that make success feel more relative. Sure, financial returns on bottles sold is important, yet a harvest is a harvest and there are certain conditions that we just can’t change. That sense of trusted dynamic with the environment is something that’s been spoken of since the start of human civilization and for a good reason. It speaks to our tendencies to want predictable success, yet that might not always be the best situation. Trusting the unexpected sometimes helps us overcome problems that we perceive as dead-ends. And there’s certainly some beauty in that.

The majestic scale of the vineyard also makes me reflect on our individualistic motivations and how fragmented our relationships are to other people and the environment we live in. There’s a sense of ego we carry around that puts us at the forefront of everything we do. All of a sudden, we easily get sucked up in our problems no matter how many people and resources are behind us. All it takes is one signal or event of ‘tragedy’ to build an emotional bubble around our conscious’.

It certainly doesn’t only take one person to run the vineyard, in fact it runs on a collective support between the workers and the nature surrounding it. Each drop of grape is a component of numerous forces we can’t attribute a single cause to. And perhaps that’s something that we could learn to realize more. That outcomes in our lives are perhaps composed of magical ingredients that take us to where we are and where we will be. And no matter what that is, the harvest is golden so long we let it be golden.

-Matt Chu

Shirt: Etro

Trousers: Topman

Hat: Street shop in Miami

Sandals: ASOS

PC: Jordan Ji