Gail Skoff’s Adventures Along the Wine Route

Since 1981, Gail Skoff has been strolling through the vineyards and ducking into the wine cellars of France and Italy.

She has had the opportunity to taste the most esteemed wines from many of the continent’s more exciting estates.

But she hasn’t done it, or if she has it’s been more afterthought than intent, not the focus of her visit.

Rather, she has been there to photograph what she finds. Vineyard workers harvesting grapes. Winemakers tapping barrels to draw samples for the careful consideration of her companion, Berkeley wine merchant Kermit Lynch.

“I can’t photograph and taste at the same time. I can’t do that. I enjoy wine at the table,” says Skoff, small and alert, dressed like a black-and-white photo in a drapey style more fitting for the streets of Paris than the cellars of Beaune. (And the wine she especially enjoys at the table is Lambrusco.)

We were chatting soon after she had spent a couple of hours mingling with guests who had come to meet her and to appreciate her wine-related photography in the Peter J. Shields Library at the University of California, Davis.

The gathering was to celebrate Skoff’s donation of her photos to the library’s archives and special collections.

For decades, many of those photos have constituted the cover art for the monthly catalog of Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant of Berkeley, long recognized for its single-minded devotion to European wines, despite being at the gateway to California’s high-profile North Coast wine appellations.

Skoff’s immersion into food and wine photography began in 1981 when Lynch invited her to accompany him on one of his wine-buying excursions to France. They married seven years later.

In 1981, Skoff, a native of Los Angeles, was two years out of the San Francisco Art Institute, where she had earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts.

Her art at that time ran in large part to elaborate, detailed, fanciful and colorful imaginations of artists at work in their ateliers with their models. She also was in the early stages of a 30-year preoccupation with the precise and patient practice of hand-tinting photos, many of them landscapes of the American southwest, Hawaii and elsewhere, an exercise she continued in her adventures with Lynch on European wine routes.

 

But she discovered something new in France, a reverence for food and wine that had not been part of her upbringing in California. The kitchen provisions and techniques she found there intrigued her enough to become subjects for a more direct and intimate twist to her photography, with a growing proportion of her shots in straight-forward black and white. “They were models that I didn’t have to dress,” Skoff recalls. “Ingredients were treated with such respect. They honored food in a way I wasn’t accustomed to. Food became my models, as well as the winemakers.”

For more than four decades, winemakers, farmers, cooks, food – tomatoes, most memorably – have played prominent roles in exhibits of her work, which includes collections at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the Oakland Museum of California.

Her photography also has illustrated such books as Richard Olney’s “Lulu’s Provencal Table,” Paul Bertolli’s and Alice Waters’s “Chez Panisse Cooking,” and Kermit Lynch’s “Adventures on the Wine Route.”

Her own books include “Scenes from Provence” and “Chimneys of Burano.”

As innocent as culinary photography may be, her work stirred controversy on one occasion. The cover of the fall 2002 edition of Gastronomica featured her photo of a dusty farm laborer eating with gusto a freshly picked tomato. When some customers at a Los Angeles bookstore complained that the photo offended them, the store returned all copies of the issue.

To this day, Skoff remains mystified by the negative reaction. “His hands were dirty, maybe that was it. And he was Moroccan, which may have offended some people. I don’t know,” she reflected. “He was having so much pleasure with that tomato. It showed the joy of eating.”

For the most part, her photos from vineyard and cellar in France document a way of life that is personal, laborious, historic, close to nature and slow to change. There’s candor and timeliness to her work, the subjects unaffected, the settings ancient. (Another reason she did not linger to taste wine in the country’s subterranean cellars was that they customarily are dark, damp and damn cold. Then she would wander outside to drift about vineyard and orchard, continuing to photograph.)

If her works show an uncommon intimacy with her subjects it is because they generally aren’t posed. They go about the daily rigors of tending vineyard and coddling wine without paying much heed to her presence. Skoff also has had the advantage of stopping by their estates more than once, each time spending hours about them.

In its humanity and guilelessness, her portfolio confirms that she has fulfilled a goal she set for herself in her wine photography – “to show how other people live…Photography does that, it tells a story.” She is gratified now that when student or researcher comes across her work at Davis they may see a grape-growing or winemaking method unfamiliar to them, prompting them to explore the matter further.

What is her takeaway from all this exposure? “Winemaking in France is much more traditional than it is in California. Every region has its rules. They look to their history. Sons and daughters follow what their fathers did, though, sure, they may riff on it,” says Skoff. “Wine is so complex, interesting, and unpredictable. I like to show things I learned.”

If French and Italian vintners share one thing with their California counterparts, says Skoff, it is concern about the impact that climate change is having on the trade – with winters not as frigid, vines do not shut down to their typical dormancy; and hailstorms are more frequent, devastating crops, she notes.

But one thread of her treks to France that has endured over four decades is the delight she takes in the family traditions she sees. “I am still charmed by sons following their fathers. I love to see the kids taking over.” (One of her own offspring, the couple’s son Anthony, also is involved in the family business.)

Skoff has dialed back on her contributions to the Kermit Lynch newsletter as she enters the next phase of her artful life. Though the couple divides its time between homes in Berkeley and Provence, she is spending more time in Italy, specifically the sculpting center Pietrasanta, where she collaborates with Sarah Monk on a podcast about artists and the materials with which they work (https://materiallyspeaking.com/).

 

(Skoff’s work at Shields Library is to remain on display indefinitely.)