Volnay 1erCru-Champans-Domaine Marquis d'Angerville-Burgundy Photograph - Limited Edition of 7

About the “From Grape to Stars” Project: The series represents vats of fermenting wine seen from above. Every year I work with the most prestigious French wine estates in the three to four weeks following the harvest. It is a work on the concept of transformation, in this case that of grapes into wine, which is found everywhere in the universe. By plunging my gaze into the organic, I show how Man, who is at the heart of this transformation, reveals its cosmic dimension. In this visual metaphor where the vats of wine strangely resemble planets made like us of nitrogen, calcium, and iron I myself transform into “Stardust” to touch, for a moment, the origin of life. This happens most of the time away from light and therefore from the gaze of men... I have to light the tanks with studio flashes or LEDs, since the darkness is often almost total. I lift the lid of the tanks and discover the Universe... I must be extremely vigilant and hold my breath during the triggering, because the alcohol vapors producing carbon dioxide at certain periods of this transformation can lead to instantaneous fainting and to death… I go back in time to capture the DNA of these iconic wines in the early days of their birth. These wines are rare, sometimes almost impossible to find, and some of the winegrowers who produce them are considered Stars. Scientists have shown that the molecular diversity of a wine makes it possible to trace the evolution of its life and to read a “memory” of humans. Additionally, the slow evolution of a wine's chemical particles inside a bottle is, on a smaller scale, similar to the evolution of microorganisms in the universe. These scientists therefore use wine as a model to study the cosmos. Quoting a poet, Richard Feynman, a major physicist of the second half of the 20th century who received the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum mechanics, ended his lectures with this sentence: "The whole universe in a glass of wine" The title of the work is the name of the wine and its winemaker Patrick Desgraupes has become a French landscape photographer recognized for his analog work with large format 4X5 inch camera. He published 5 landscape books between 2003 and 2009, including 3 with La Martinière editions. His work has been shown in the USA as well as in 7 European countries. He made 3 individual exhibitions on Iceland in 1989, 1990 and 1992, and 16 large-format exhibitions with French National Parks & the French Ministry of Ecology, between 2008 & 2015.