harvey steiman at large

Wine as a Cultural Nexus

Sna Francisco Museum of Modern Art explores the wine boom from a different angle

Posted: Nov 19, 2010 3:32pm ET

At first the idea was simple, to pull together an exhibition of wine-related architecture and design. But the more Henry Urbach thought about it, the more he was struck by how much wine had seeped into our culture. Urbach, curator of architecture and design for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), let the exhibition morph into something much broader. It opens Saturday and runs through April 27, 2011.

“How Wine Became Modern: Design + Wine 1976 to Now,” is not about bottles and labels, although they are part of it, nor is it about winery architecture or glass design, although those are in it too.

“It evolved into something that would allow the world of wine to become a mirror of our culture,” Urbach said as we walked through the exhibition space on the fifth floor of the museum across from Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. “I asked myself, ‘What is it about wine that it seems to connect with so much else in our culture?’”