"How Wine Became Modern" exhibit opening at SF MOMA

Ensconced within a multi-room wing of the museum’s fourth floor, “How Wine Became Modern: Design and Wine 1976 to Now,” will run through April 17.

“The exhibit tries to balance didactic and intellectual content with the more sensory and experiential,” said Henry Urbach, the exhibit’s organizer and curator of architecture and design. “Which seems very wine-like.”

In doing so it contains key artifacts, such as the two winning California wines from the Judgment of Paris — Chateau Montelena’s 1973 Chardonnay and Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars 1973 S.L.V. Cabernet Sauvignon — as well as an original copy of the “Time” Magazine article touting California’s seminal triumph over the French wine world.

“This is everything around wine, the visual and material culture,” Urbach said. “We began with a set of questions about why does wine attract so much cultural activity? We’ve seen important new wineries all over the world by some of the world’s leading architects. We’ve seen wine labels by important artists and graphic designers, wine glasses, wine media, movies related to wine, books about wine. There’s so much activity around wine, it’s not really like anything else that you eat or drink.”

That provoked a lot of research on the part of Urbach, in partnership with the architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, who were behind its design.

“We’ve tried to identify what it is in culture that makes wine so important and so appealing,” he said. “One of the ideas that we’ve been looking at is that wine stands for a kind of authenticity and rootedness. Wine comes to be what it is now in the global period. 1976 is our starting point with the Judgment of Paris, but that event came at the right moment. It can easily be seen in the context of many other events at that moment that were changing the world.”

U.C. Davis scientists were tapped to help understand other in-depth sections of the show, including “Modern Production,” a visual peek into the myriad additives that often play a part in the making of wine. It’s a reminder to visitors to think about the science of wine and to know that how additives do or don’t make their way into a wine can be a touchy issue, with purists on both sides.

“We touch on additives. We have tannins and yeasts and enzymes, oak chips, oxygen,” Urbach explained. “There’s really a debate about this, what is natural about wine, how much intervention is proper. We’re not taking a position, we’re just letting people know there’s a debate.”

Also often debated is the concept of terroir, that a single vineyard in a single location may yield something very specific when its grapes become wine. To illustrate the thought, one gallery features actual soil samples from 17 different vineyards around the world known for their particular terroir — including the famous Robert Mondavi Winery vineyard called To Kalon in Oakville.

Along with the rocks are real-time temperature and other microclimate data on each vineyard, along with subjective commentary from the landowners and winemakers who work with these plots of land.

“The idea is you can taste place,” Urbach said. “That goes back to this idea of rootedness and authenticity. As wine has become global it has also come to represent something very local that people still need and are interested in.”

The interplay of wine and design then takes full force in another section of the exhibit that groups hundreds of bottles of wine on the wall, all chosen because of their labels, which are then categorized by several types of identity — Cheeky, Good + Evil, Truth or Consequences.

Nearby is also an elegant dispaly of glassware - wine glasses, decanters and carafes. A slow drip of red wine from the ceiling above gently fills the display case, providing a liquid backdrop to the exquisite designs.

There is much more to absorb visually, including a look at winery architecture, so it’s a nice segue once the gallery winds itself around to the Smell Wall. There, translucent, suspended flasks each filled with wine invite viewers to become smellers. There they finally come into direct contact with the liquid itself and have a chance to think about what wines smell like and what words can be used to best describe them.

But that’s just a tease for the exhibit’s end, an “invisible” work by smell artist Sissel Tolaas. Within a slight opening in a museum wall, the artist captures the aroma of a full bottle of the “perfect” wine (one of only two bottles awarded 100 points by wine critic Robert Parker in 1976). Lean in as if for a kiss; the perfect wine will be there.

Virginie Boone is a freelance wine writer based in Sonoma County. She can be reached at virginieboone@yahoo.com.