Palette to Palate

Recently, I was inspired by a fascinating argument made by an Impressionist art exhibit: that this artistic movement helped shape France’s identity as the global culinary capital. The beautifully captured moments of food, inn workers, farmers, haystacks, markets, and cultivated landscapes helped romanticize what we now think of as the farm-to-table movement. As I moved through the rooms, I immediately felt that it also helped to inspire the idea of terroir in the wine world - not in a technical sense, but in spirit. These artists weren’t just painting scenery; they were documenting the relationship between people and land, between season and sustenance - isn’t this also how we speak of wine today?

At the Seattle Art Museum’s Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism, this argument came to life through paintings by Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Caillebotte, Lhermitte, and others who elevated everyday labor and landscapes into something worthy of cultural reverence. They weren’t glorifying fine dining - they were creating an emotional response to the relationship between people, the produce, and the land. Nor did the works show luxury; they showed source, and in doing so, they made origin - land, season, human hands - central to how we understand food, and how we celebrate it today. The parallels to wine were clear to me. . .

There’s a certain kind of stillness or presence that exists in great wine - the kind that carries energy just below the surface, and I felt a similar tension when I stood in front of Monet’s Haystack. It wasn’t just a rural subject, it was a moment saturated with light and atmosphere, held still in time but vibrating with life. While the painting is both humble and monumental, it immediately made me think of an aged white Bordeaux - not just for its quiet structure, but for the glistening glow of sunlight on the precisely detailed stack of hay, which mirrors the golden warmth, hay-like savoriness, and layered depth that develop with time in the wine.

Then came another moment that stopped me: Léon-Augustin Lhermitte’s painting of an apple market, where the lighting, the detail, the almost three-dimensional sense of space pulled me in completely; you could feel the heft of the crates, the crispness of the fruit, and the worn cloth of the vendors’ clothes. It reminded me of Vouvray - crisp with expressions of red apple and orchard fruit, and subtle notes of autumnal leaves in the background. The work was rendered with such intimacy and precision that its true complexity revealed itself slowly, like a Vouvray would as it opens in your glass.

In many ways, the exhibit reveals the roots of what we now call the farm-to-table movement. What these artists did visually, today’s chefs and winemakers do experientially; they invite us to care about where our food and drink come from, and to see them as cultural expressions, not just consumables. When we sit down at a chef-driven restaurant, study a wine list organized by vineyard or grower, or taste a dish built around what’s in season right now, we’re participating in a philosophy the Impressionists helped shape over a hundred years ago - one of transparency, origin, and respect for process.

It’s a philosophy that runs deep in wine. As a sommelier, terroir isn’t just an origin point - it’s the felt truth of a place: the minerality of a slope, the tension of a growing season, the patience of a vintner willing to listen more than intervene. When I taste a wine that speaks clearly of its soil, its weather, and its winemaker - I know I’m tasting not just quality, but character. That same reverence for authenticity is what these painters brought to their subjects, not the idealized, but the specific and lived.

Those two paintings - the haystack and the apple market - were very different in mood, but each carried a similar energy: a deep attention to the everyday, a reverence for the work behind what nourishes us, and an ability to hold a fleeting moment in perfect balance. I couldn’t help but to wish to have been able to have paired wines for each of the paintings in the exhibit. The many scenes of farmers and laborers throughout the exhibit brought to mind the small, family-owned wineries I admire most - those who work close to the land with intention, humility, and no need for embellishment. I was reminded of how light, subject, and senses can tell a story - whether through the medium of canvas, kitchen, or grape.