Burning Man At 50 - Five Gen ΑΩ Women Who Are Changing Wine and the World

Reporting from Black Rock City, August 31, 2036...

This is Leia Rippley; I am now 85. And as they say, 85 is the new 30, thanks to nano-extenders and the little solar generator that keeps my heart pumping. With global warming, there is plenty of sun, and Black Rock City, with its average temperature, this time of the year, at 125°F, my heart has another 40-50 years. That is if Terra does. Fortunately, I also had a vortex personal cooling rib-cage installed in 2025, and have only had to rebuild it three times. But, it’s all good, I’m cool.

First, I must report that we have succeeded in reducing greatly the number of men in the world. Women now outnumber men 15,000-to-1. With a world population of 15 billion, there are 1 million men left. They are used mainly for their semen. But we are showing great advances in the production of synth-sperm, and within a generation we’ll have no need for men for that purpose. Of course, they are now a vanishing species, having endangered most of the living world for the 30,000 years in which they were dominant. We women have evolved, and no longer have the emotional need for males. We supply one another with greater warmth and comforts, and surely our more intimate acts have a better balance, in which both (or more) involved in the act enjoy satisfaction over a period of time lasting longer than 5 minutes.

But enough about me. I’m at Burning Man 50, and this year we are actually going to burn a real man. Dick. He was found to be genetically deficient in empathy and way below the intelligence quotient that is needed in order to support the resources to keep him alive. Fortunately, he died in his sleep and his will stipulated that he be cremated. How retro! So, we’re going to light him up! 1 down, 999,999 to go!

I’m interviewing the new generation, Gen ΑΩ, about current wine preferences and practices. There is no longer a wine industry, the 3-tier distribution syndicate having been purged along with the 5,000,000 or so men who worked (or wrote) in the wine trade. As well, p.r. folks are long gone, having been replaced (and improved) by the recent generation of AI, known as AI-Ѹ. They know who to send notes to, they no longer “curate” anything and have eliminated wine reviews, wine scores, bloggers and anyone who ever wrote about wine using the words “blown away” or “pét-nat.” Unfortunately, a few women were accidentally eradicated in the extirpation, but the scrubs were able to gather enough zDNA and they will be reconstituted in the future.

At Black Rock, Burning Man has taken on a new dimension in its maturity. No longer are there outdoor seminars with people droning on endlessly about rock music, conceptual art or the glories of grenache. How boring! Instagram is long gone, cell phones are long obsolete, having been replaced with comm-imbeds. It is now impossible to take a “selfie.” Well, there is one way around and that is to stare in a mirror and blink one’s eyes in proper sequence to “record” an image. Oh, yes, cameras are long gone too. It’s a great time to be alive. And thank Bacco, the body still craves alcohol.

Five women who are changing wine and the world:

“I’m the winemaker in the Femaly. This year, after The Burn, me and my team are heading to Sardinia to work with robot jellyfish where we will make a retro version of late-harvest Ansonica by taking the harvested grapes down underwater 20 feet and letting them dehydrate. It will be great fun to take grapes underwater to dry them out, yes? Well, after last year, when we made Petit-Syrah ‘booch, which reminded one of the elders of something they used to call rosé, we had to ‘notch it up. It was very fragrant, and at 15% very low in alcohol. My team makes all the wine for our FEM-clutch, which is 35 strong. We are all here at camp, providing liquid refreshment and mind-healing. I like wine, but I don’t love wine. Consumerism (and the last gap of Boomer-Gen) in the early 21st century all but destroyed the world. We like a light touch with the world, and with our wine. We constantly come in for our red wines at under 18%, and source mainly from the Okanagan and the Tongass AVA’s. We get a lot of low yield (7-10 tons per acre) grapes that consistently come in at low brix of 45-50. Of course, it’s a little trick with the late harvest grapes in early August, if we have a stuck fermentation, some of us cannot come to Black Rock. But in a year or so, we’ll leave a couple of the Male-bots to “man” the AI community and make sure their batteries don’t get too low. Then we can all come to Burning Man, which is our big yearly holiday. And also, when we show the new releases of vin-‘booch.” – Oktavia Legwynn

“I’m a performer and my energy is attuned to the Jovian lunar microwave transmissions. For that reason, I’m a proponent of the Fierce Jovian Primal-Flo. I don’t know if one would call it wine as older Genz might know it, historically, but it’s a natural extension of the flo-mentation process, via microwave transmission through space. We’ve come up with some great vintages, and we are really excited about piercing the space-time continuum to gather similar transmissions from other galaxies millions of light years away. Imagine having a “wine” that was made 35 million years ago?” – Enola Euporie

“Now that Black Rock City is one of the coolest places on earth, we conkokted a vineyard, out from the Playa, near the hills below Granite Peak. An old Gen-X-er, who made a wallop of money on cryptocurrency in 2019 gave us access to the land, and we quantum-grafted rare and ancient Cabernet Sauvignon grapes onto the local bramble bushes. It’s been an interesting union between the native and the endangered. We opted for a protracted abridgement for the fermentation stage, so we could have the wine ready for Burning Man. In the lab back in Alameda, we congenitally interweaved in the requisite oak aging gene, which gave us a wine that had sexual fluidity - young but ready, mature but without the need for time. As most of us already know, here on Terra, time isn’t something we have a lot of faith in having. The future is dead, but that doesn’t mean we have to drink that crappy chenin plonk the masses mix with their aloe-gels. Man, those people don’t know how to drink. Cabernet, the endangered wine, is my favorite drink as we watch the asteroids hit the playa.” -Kalima Ændringer

“When we went to France, we had no idea that we would be making wine with cannabis. After all, that phase passed pretty fast in the 2020-2024 period of dRrevolution, brought on by the global pandemic that began in 2019. People were more interested in getting a home than getting high. They wanted stability. They eventually shuttled most of the politicians to Mars. And brought back the farmers. Yes, we all suffered during those years and marijuana went the way of tattoos and twitter, into the dustbin of history.

“But one in our klatsch remembered something his mother had told him, that it was good for the pains of childbirth. So, we decided to try an experi-ferment. We were in the Montrachet vineyards when an ancient woman came from her cave and offered us food and drink. Mixing a little of the goo we had from our klatsch-mate into the white wine, it was an X-ALT-ation. And that was how Chanvré-Montrachet came into being. It is being served at the Flying French Nun’s Enkampmənt, have you tried it yet?” - Lyra-Mae Tempête

“I was born with male genitalia, but my zDNA revealed I was meant to be a woman. My mothers were very understanding, and I’m glad they didn’t kill me before the 3-week trial period passed. Eventually, through Femtotechnology, the useless appendage decorticated.

“What my two mothers didn’t tell me, until I was old enough, was that their families were large landowners (and winemakers) in California, near Modesto Beach. From what I can tell, by culling through quantum-fiche files, my family made most of the wine for the then-United States. They also made a lot of money and eventually moved to Mars, where they started the largest distillation factory off-world. The winery was since converted to a desalinization plant, and the family quintupled their fortune, now worth over ₸8 quadrillion TaoTao (1/5 of all the human wealth on earth).

“I have this project with my six life-partners that we call ‘Seveneves’ (all of us have different zDNA profiles, reflecting the widest degree of cultural diversity that is possible on Terra). When people wanted to get wine 25 years ago, they went to a store to buy it. The store got it from a larger warehouse, who got it from a large wine company. It made the product ridiculously expensive, and it made people like my family enormously wealthy. Me and my mates now aim to make sure everyone, from Luna base to Mars to Eos, can have wine with a wide range of cultural zDNAversity, and for a fair price. Tonight, we are sponsoring the Big Burn (Sayonara, Dick!), and everyone goes away from the Playa, when Burning Man is finished, with a 7-pack of the iconic and rare Seveneves Black Rock Barefoot. It’s our little way of giving back.” - Archer Gallo