This essay is part of our column, A Taste of Climate, that considers the intersection of food and climate.

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SURFACE WATER

Growing up in the drought-prone state of California imbued me with the constant awareness of the currency of water: how much water I have access to at a given time, from where and how it was diverted, how much seems ethical to use and for what purpose. Yet I live with the complex reality that being in water or near water has always brought me immense relief. 

At the times in my teens or twenties I needed to make an important decision on the direction I wanted my life to go, I’d flock to bodies of water, sitting on mist-caressed Ocean Beach in San Francisco or perhaps the much sunnier Avila Beach on the Central Coast, the slush-gurgle-unfurl motion of the waves churning my thoughts like a washing machine.

Late ’90s and aughts Bay Area: the weather of my youth was often either rain or fog, infusing a mysticism and verdancy to the landscape rather than bogging down my imagination. I studied the symbols on the water cycle chart in grade school as if it were the cousin of a mandala.

RECHARGE

My therapist might say I’m often seeking “balance”; I tend to think of shared energy within systems, cycles, and relationships. From a young age, the concepts of karmic order and eternal return intrigued me, that both an individual’s actions and their intentions affect their current life, and might extend into future lives. If this be your only reason to care for building community, we have each been a version of our parents, our lovers, our enemies. Incarcerees and refugees. A noble boulder, a wild hog, a lonesome tree. 

Over the years, my closet filled with polka dots and I tried to draw a perfect circle whenever I picked up a pen. Naturally, I chose an ouroboros as my first tattoo when I turned twenty, twisting my neck at parties to kiss the snake’s little head resting at my shoulder.

GROUNDWATER

I was not raised with religion, but still had to work to untangle my experiences with shame, dysphoria, and grief from a diagnosis of cosmic punishment.

With the help of art, I came to see them as consciousness-building opportunities toward ego dissolution, to build bridges toward the infinite others throughout time who believe they are alone.

SURFACE WATER

In senior year of high school, I was accepted into California Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo and I chose to study wine & viticulture with a concentration in enology, the chemistry and methodology behind winemaking. As an only child, I had at that point spent many moments looking out over dusty Russian River vineyards while my mom and stepdad tasted wine inside the cellars, and had also spent many evenings around a long wooden dinner table listening to them discuss everything from local progressive politicians to movies to novels with their friends of several decades. Wine was always at the center of the table; if someone reached to refill their glass, first they would refill the glasses of others. 

Where many of my classmates came from successful agricultural and farming families of the Central Valley and southern half of the state, I chose winemaking as a way to support the kind of commitments and important conversations I saw happen around the communal dinner table. I was also choosing a relationship to fruit, to the microscopic creatures of the land, to shake hands with canes and tendrils, to fall into bed heavy with exhaustion from physical labor, for my body to be of that use.

RECHARGE

I remember being wet about 85 percent of the time while making wine. A great portion of the work of a cellar hand—not quite seasonal intern, not yet assistant winemaker—involves the sanitation of every surface of a cellar that our wine might come in contact with: scrubbing the inside of silver tanks until they shine like precious antiques and running various acidic and basic cleaners through tank hoses, pumps, filters, clamps, buckets, and glass carboys. A “clean” fermentation requires accuracy with only the microbes winemakers have approved or added themselves affecting the wine: the specific lab-grown yeast strain and the precise temperature, or even mineral content, of water.

During harvest season after many tons of wine grapes had been hand-sorted and sent tumbling through a rotating metal drum perforated with holes that separated them from most of their stems, the grapes were then dumped into the top of an enormous pneumatic wine press, which might hold 2,000–5,000 liters. The membrane inside the press would pressurize with air to squeeze the grapes of their juice. When the juice had been wheeled away and it was time to clean, I was the happiest volunteer to get inside.

The machine was unplugged and the key held by a team member so the press could not be accidentally turned on and a cellar hand squeezed of their juice. The membrane was depressurized into a series of folds which it was my job to ensure were free of any seeds, skins, or lingering stems. I loved to place the nozzle of the hose at one end of the fold or rim of a metal screen and blow the skins out the other side, like the spray of a tubular wave in the ocean. Wearing yellow rain gear, I could sing to myself in there, where no one else could hear over the din of the warehouse—“Singin’ in the Rain” was natural because of the uniform.

Around the cellar I’d feel like a mountain climber with a tank hose slung over my shoulder or I’d feel like a sharpshooter with a water hose in my hand, eyes narrowed looking for errant grapes to spray into the drains that lined the concrete floors, the same floors I’d pressure-wash at the beginning and end of harvest, walking the machine slowly and methodically across the tannin-stained granite, the brush heads leaving soft beige lines in my wake, my brain stained instead by the poems I wrote in my head.

GROUNDWATER

When I was a girl, the “selfhood” I was promised often felt shrink-wrapped: highly visible, yet prepackaged and ungraspable. Though I didn’t have the words yet, I longed for connection, for lived experience and responsibility to close the gaps.

Blood under skin—

consciousness under bone—

groundwater under rock—

SURFACE WATER

Currently, 75 percent of California’s rain and snow settles in the watersheds north of Sacramento, though 80 percent of the water demand comes from the southern two-thirds of the state. Every several years the state releases their Climate Change Assessments. A study included in the assessment estimates that without intervention, California’s agricultural production could face climate-related water shortages of up to 16 percent in certain regions by 2050, and by 2100 water supply from snowpack is projected to decline by two-thirds.

In a recent article titled “Does California wine use too much water?,” San Francisco Chronicle’s senior wine critic, and one of my favorite wine journalists, Esther Mobley interviews several UC Davis professors to understand this question. When compared to some of the state’s other crops like almonds, pistachios, and alfalfa, California wine grapes don’t use nearly as much water, but “agriculture overall uses about 80 percent of California’s developed water supply.”

“As the state attempts to combat the effects of climate change, it’s essential that farmers find ways to get by with less,” says Mallika Nocco, an assistant adjunct professor at the UC Davis Department of Land, Air and Water Resources and an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, however “regenerative farming practices—which are becoming increasingly popular in the wine industry—may make crops more water-efficient.”

RECHARGE

“Every fiber that composes my flesh seeks sharper action,” Etel Adnan once said on television. I have the desire to write something serious and impactful about climate change, something which represents the ongoing abuse and violence done to the Earth, a reflection of the violences settler colonialism and late-stage capitalism inflicts back on our species.

I’m writing this in the year 2025 when the Moon has made the list of the world’s endangered cultural heritage sites. Everyone I know is suffering from climate grief and the insecurity around planning for a future, a future in which my parents may have to leave my home state as climate refugees when, as the title of Mitski’s latest album is so aptly named, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We.

So many I know not in Los Angeles posted this unattributed quote on Instagram and Twitter, early this January while we watched Los Angeles burn: “Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.”

“We who are not there, witnessing from afar, in what ways are we mutilating ourselves when we dissociate to cope?” asks Isabella Hammad in Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative.

GROUNDWATER

I’m suddenly crying in couples therapy, then afterward, decide to exercise, smoke a joint, take a hot shower where I scrub myself new, then lay naked on our bed needing to read the first canto of Dante’s Inferno. Some days I’m absolutely incapable of staying still, pacing the apartment, picking up the pilled sweater, the empty water glass, the nest of charging cords, wanting to hold it all. 

People studying my face for the first real time have said, “I can see the sadness in you.” My father says, “You were such a serious child.” Yes, I’ve been sad and so serious since the day I was born. Living with an apocalypse brain, my cells were infused with, changed by grief. Feeling the days numbered, I want to say yes to any sliver of joy or pleasure. I intensify every attachment until I can no longer discern my center, like riding a boardwalk thrill, until my particles settle again, the app on my phone flashing to remind me I’ve “exceeded my monthly budget” in every category.

SURFACE WATER

“Warmer temperatures are raising evaporative demand—or the ‘thirstiness’ of the atmosphere—which increases crop water requirements and decreases runoff and available water supplies. Groundwater is an important drought reserve, but overpumping threatens long-term supplies,” according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

In hot and arid viticultural areas such as Paso Robles, where many vineyard managers rely on dry farming, groundwater overdraft is leading to declining water availability. Dry-farming is an agricultural technique that relies on aquifers of natural rainfall rather than irrigation of crops using freshwater. A component of a larger vineyard management system, it tends to yield less grapes overall, but grapes are reported to have “more concentrated flavors, lower sugars, and have a better expression of the vineyard site (known as ‘terroir’). These quality characteristics can produce wines with lower alcohol, more minerality, and balance. Some of the finest wines California has produced were made from dry-farmed grapes, including the wines that won the 1976 Judgment of Paris.” As Mobley also states, “It’s counterintuitive, but sometimes drought years coincide with excellent wine vintages.”

There are other earth-conscious choices a vineyard manager might make and vineyard certifications they might pursue that can arguably affect the sensory components of a wine. “Biodynamic” wines are often made with a holistic, anti-chemical approach to agriculture. “Organic” wines are made without using prohibited substances or genetic engineering. Whichever method, minimizing or eliminating the use of vineyard chemicals, such as pesticides and herbicides, encourages the health of micro- and macroorganisms in the field that perform many ecological functions, such as “decomposing organic matter to providing minerals to vine roots.”

“Natural” winemaking is a loose term to indicate using native yeasts (those already found in the air, on grape skins, and on surfaces in a winery or cellar) in the fermentation process and minimal to no added sulfur dioxide in the winemaking process. Some of my favorite natural wines have an unbridled personality when you smell and taste them, knowing this wine may taste quite different the next day or the following vintage. One of my favorites is a Cabernet Franc called Le Bon Petit Diable (“the good little devil”) by Domaine des Sablonettes, which caused me to exclaim, “Root beer! Cocoa! Bell pepper!” the first time I tasted it and to talk about it for days. Its label features a child in a bat costume, jumping carefree through a mess of fall leaves.

RECHARGE

In the ’70s, my father was just a boy, the only son from one of the only Asian American families—let alone Japanese families—in the predominantly white suburb of Lansing, Illinois. When I was a teenager, he admitted to me that my grandfather never praised him, believing praise might arrest like overgrown vines, ensnaring my father in a state of complacency. I inherited this scarcity mindset from generations of other Japanese Americans post-WWII incarceration, who had to negotiate the social and political guardrails imposed by whiteness.

My father rarely praised me as a child. It took until I was in my late-twenties for him to confirm his support and love. Time as a ring, spinning in the background like the sun.

The love-labor of wine, along with the unfurling of my queer identity and eventual transition into writing as my primary vocation, trained me to see through a lens of abundance: that the need and the joy of getting dirty, and a daily, respectful attendance, as well as a curiosity in unruliness and transformation, are all crucial to living well, loving others, and creating with regularity.

GROUNDWATER

There are drought years in our lives—some individual, some collective—when we might be tempted to only water ourselves if it comes our way. When we might have to rely on some buried well of strength, our own groundwater, hopefully not overpumped when we need it. 

I try to balance the need for radical action, to direct my body toward a target, deprioritize comfort and devote my energies to protecting the most vulnerable creatures around me, with the very real need for nourishment, gentleness, and rest. Preserving time for small, harmonic kindnesses.

SURFACE WATER

A recent Nature Reviews Earth & Environment article on the impact of climate change on wine production reports “about 90 percent of traditional wine regions in coastal and lowland regions of Spain, Italy, Greece and southern California could be at risk of disappearing by the end of the century because of excessive drought and more frequent heatwaves.” Grape harvests have advanced by two to three weeks on average over the past forty years in most wine-growing regions around the globe. The study further posits that “the effect of climate conditions on grape composition at harvest (and thus, wine composition and quality) seems to be even more important than the soil type,” i.e., terroir.

Though vineyard managers and winemakers can adapt their production styles to increasingly shifting climates, adapting as humans who’ve built families, communities, and other roots in a specific location is more complicated. Shalini Sekhar lives in the Bay Area with her family and is the winemaker for Waits-Mast, Xander Soren Wines, and her own fantastic label Ottovino, as well as consulting winemaker at Neely. A supervisor of mine turned friend, she was not born into a multigenerational wine family, but was drawn to the craft of winemaking and the end product in the glass as “a moving target,” requiring constant adaptation over an investment of time.

When I asked her perspective on the urgent challenges of climate, she offered that as a first-gen Indian American woman, compared to the predominantly white male-dominated wine industry, the story arc of having to leave behind a place and move to a brand new landscape still ripples in her ancestral memory in ways she finds fortifying for whatever work and change is ahead: “At least we have a model of what it takes to completely change your life.”

RECHARGE

Apocalyptic eventualities and reinvention have been just as much an element of the Californian lifestyle as hailing golden hour or heirloom produce.

Armistead Maupin, the author of the ten-volume series of novels, Tales of the City, shared the theory that San Franciscans are “reincarnated citizens of the lost city of Atlantis.” In the late ’90s TV adaptation, this theory is written into the dialogue of one of his central characters, Anna Madrigal: “Now we’ve come back to this special peninsula on the edge of the continent … because we know, in a secret corner of our minds, that we must return together to the sea.”

GROUNDWATER

If you had to leave, what would you miss about Earth?

This was the organizing question for an evening of experimental short films my dear friend and artist Faith Arazi programmed years ago at Artists’ Television Access (ATA) in the Mission District.

When I meet the dazed eyes of someone bursting out of a restaurant into the rain, looking satisfied like, “food = energy!”

Eating a cold barbeque spare rib in my underwear; outside the kitchen window, the first major snowfall of the winter.

The sound of salt dropping on the skin of a perfectly fried egg, like the sheets of ice that made up a frozen lake in the first days of spring.

My child-hand in the touch pool at the Monterey Bay Aquarium as the smooth back of a small manta ray glides under it.

Wally and I crying about Ram Dass saying he “doesn’t love people specially,” but that there’s “special work to be done” with each person.

Texting the person whom I love and live with that I’m on my way home. Having someone to report to, who is my witness.

When I was on acid in the decaying wood house staring at the stainless steel oven and I said, “I’d be ok if this were my last day.” What I meant was, “I’m so happy, I don’t care what comes after this.”

If we had to leave     what would we miss?

In the meantime     what will we protect?