To celebrate the 10th anniversary of his Domaine Piéblanc in Gigondas, Mathieu Ponson collaborated with photographer Grégoire Eloy on an unusual artistic project. Chris Howard explores the philosophy and themes behind “Two Steps from the Sky.”
As he descends from his mountaintop, Zarathustra arrives to a city at the edge of the forest and enters its marketplace. It’s a modern city—meaning it’s all a marketplace. There, he begins to address the crowd.
“I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth. […] To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing,” he goes on to declare. “The overman [Übermensch] is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The overman shall be the meaning of the earth!”
Nietzsche’s Übermensch goes over by going under: “I love those who do not know how to live, except by going under, for they are those who cross over.” In other words, the meaning of the earth lies beneath our feet. The overman does not hanker after the elsewhere or the far off but rediscovers the ground on which he stands as the ground of our mortal sojourn on this wandering planet we call Earth. Let us recall that the word “planet” comes from the Greek planētēs—that which wanders. We live on a planet: a wanderer. Our Earth strays through the universe, and that universe is our theater of aberration, where entities pay recompense for their defection from the origin. Outside the sheltering matrix of the boundless, everything is open to impact, violation, annihilation. Atoms, asteroids, animals, and whatever else is exposed to being bears the error and terror of errancy.
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St Augustine described us as “strangers on this Earth,” but perhaps the call was not to admonish our estrangement but to rediscover our belonging here. Under the sheltering sky, we dwell on terra firma, despite our wayward spirits. Thankfully, in our human condition of shelter and exposure, ecstasy and immanence, there is wine to remind us about the very humus from which we came and for which we are named. Such a descent involves what the poet Gary Snyder described as “digging up the old ways so as to know the ground you’re on.” He called this regrounding project the “reinhabitation of place.” Reinhabitation involves becoming native to a place by becoming aware of the specific ecological relationships that operate within and around it. It means understanding activities and evolving social behavior that will enrich the life of that place.
We’ve not done a very good job of reinhabitation since Synder wrote those words, nor in the 140 years since Zarathustra preached the meaning of the Earth in the marketplace. We denizens of the contemporary marketplace have become ever more the exhabitants rather than inhabitants of homeland Earth. And few among us would know how to give a radical answer—radical in the etymological sense of radix, the Latin word for root—to the question that opens Emerson’s essay, “Experience”: “Where do we find ourselves?”
Some of the best-positioned people to answer that question are the vignerons we celebrate in the pages of The World of Fine Wine. In their deep attunement to terroir, they serve more than wine, acting as our terrestrial guides, as do the artists with whom they sometimes collaborate. One such case is that of Mathieu Ponson of Domaine Piéblanc in Gigondas, and photographer Grégoire Eloy, who together embarked on an artistic project titled “Two Steps from the Sky.”
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A vocation of care
Mathieu Ponson embodies this spirit of reinhabitation. At age 43, he made a radical shift from running a successful IT firm to becoming a vigneron, driven by what he describes as “a deep desire to express creativity and return to nature.” Growing up in Cornas, in the northern Rhône, within a family of epicureans, planted the seed—but his path to becoming a vigneron was unconventional.
In 2014, this self-taught wine grower established two domaines simultaneously: Domaine des Crêts in Burgundy’s Ozenay and Domaine de Piéblanc in the southern Rhône. The latter takes its name from an ancient stream that once flowed from Mont Ventoux—a choice that reflects Ponson’s commitment to place over market appeal. Though the stream runs dry, its path remains visible—tracing a line from sky to slope, past to present, water to wine.
Piéblanc’s terroir speaks to Ponson’s vision of wine as both art and agriculture. The estate stretches across three appellations: 10ha (25 acres) of Ventoux vines at 985ft (300m) on the northern hills of Caromb, complemented by holdings in Beaumes-de-Venise and Gigondas at the foot of the Dentelles de Montmirail. The wide diurnal temperature range at these altitudes allows him to achieve both freshness and ripeness in his organic-certified wines. Here—among pines, oaks, olives, and wild Provençal herbs—Ponson has not just established vineyards but created a new life, replanting his family in this vast garden.
What distinguishes Ponson’s approach is his total immersion in the life of the domaine. From designing the winery to working the vineyards, from making to selling the wine—he does it all. His success is largely to do with his will and ability to learn how to learn. It also stems from his habit of listening. For Ponson, the opinion of the youngest worker holds the same value as that of the seasoned expert. Listening to everyone with equal attention and respect, he is open to change.
Ponson’s ethos reflects a firm commitment to context—the aesthetic textures that make wine a cultural artifact rather than a mere product. He washes his bottles before labeling, sends handwritten notes to customers, and has built a vinous sanctuary in the heart of Gigondas. He is in the cellar every day not only to work but to feel. His decision to invite an artist such as Grégoire Eloy into this space reflects a deep understanding of wine as a source of meaning and creativity. Based on what we might call aesthetic pragmatism, beauty and goodness guide most of Ponson’s decisions: Will it be beautiful? Will it bring beauty? Will it be good? Will it do any good?
Drawing with light
Like Ponson, Grégoire Eloy’s path began from a very different place. Born in Cannes in 1971, he abandoned a career in finance in favor of photography. Also self-taught, since 2003 Eloy has turned his lens from human conflict to natural processes. His early work (2003–13) took him through Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, documenting post-Soviet landscapes of ruination and recovery. From 2010, his focus shifted toward “primary phenomena”—collaborating with astrophysicists studying dark matter, seismologists mapping invisible fault lines, and glaciologists measuring ancient ice cores. For a visual artist, he is uniquely concerned with the invisible.
Eloy’s methodology mirrors his philosophical stance. Working with both digital and analog cameras, he creates photograms by placing objects directly on photosensitive paper, generating cameraless images that reveal unseen dimensions of familiar things—from rocks to raindrops. He experiments with hybrid printing techniques that blur the line between documentation and interpretation. These innovative methods echo the scientific work he documents.
Prior to his residency at Domaine Piéblanc, wine was never one of Eloy’s subjects. This, along with his singular style, is what sets the resulting collection apart from typical wine photography, with its candlelit cellars and verdant vineyards. As a member of the renowned French collective Tendance Floue and recipient of the Prix Niépce Gens d’Images, Eloy brought to the project the same rigorous experimentation and philosophical depth that characterizes his scientific work.
Leading up to Domaine Piéblanc’s tenth anniversary, Ponson commissioned Eloy to document the region and winery through the seasons. Together, they structured the project around five themes: earth, sky, slope, water, and hand. Close collaboration between artist and host is unusual for such residencies, says Eloy, but the work was elevated by ample time together in place and dialogue.
Not all artists like concepts, based on the notion that language divides and prefigures the world. Eloy, however, often employs them to guide his lens. Between the laces of Caromb and Mont Ventoux, the terraces of Suzette, and the plateau of Gigondas, Eloy roamed on foot and by bicycle, sometimes racing to capture an approaching storm or a fleeting light. As in all his projects, the process was deeply embodied. Through this immersion and exposure, the resulting collection of images could only have been made by one who goes under and crosses over.
Several of these images now hang above steel tanks within Piéblanc’s minimalist winery—nicknamed la péniche for its resemblance to the flat river barges of the Seine. A book (Filigranes Editions, 2026) and an exhibition are in the works. I’m not sure exactly what Eloy and Ponson had in mind when they initiated their project, nor do I intend or pretend to offer a definitive explanation. But I will offer a few thoughts below.
Gathering the fourfold
While the project was framed around distinct themes, there is a unity that brings a single if multifaceted concept to mind—what philosopher Martin Heidegger called “the fourfold” (das Geviert). For Heidegger, the fourfold names the gathering of earth, sky, mortals, and divinities. This gathering isn’t simply an addition of parts but an interweaving where each element is illuminated by its relationship to the others.
In Eloy’s work, we see this gathering manifest through the elements that constitute terroir. The soil and slope are earth—not merely as physical matter but as the nurturing ground that bears and brings forth life. The light and rain belong to the realm of sky—the domain of weather, seasons, and celestial movements. These aren’t just meteorological phenomena; they represent what Heidegger described as “the journey of the sun […] the favor and inhospitality of the weather.” The way light falls across a hillside, how rain seeps into soil—these are moments where sky and earth meet, and where wine begins coming into being.
The wonders of nature are one thing, but what of ourselves? As St Augustine observed in his Confessions: “While men go abroad to wonder at the height of mountains, the vast compass of the oceans, the circular motion of the stars […] yet they pass by themselves without wondering.” Perhaps nothing should awaken a sense of wonder at ourselves more than our own hands. The success of the human hand lies in its incorporation of three distinct attributes into a single structure; it is a tool not merely for manipulation but also for knowledge and communication. The hand acts, it knows, and it speaks.
The hand is also an existential image of what Heidegger calls our “thrownness.” Unlike other beings, humans are thrown into the world, conscious of both their mortality and their broken relation with nature. This separation, paleoanthropologists suggest, began quite literally with throwing—specifically, with throwing stones. The story takes place in the well-known setting of the African savannah, where environmental conditions played a decisive role. Due to climatic changes, the hominids were forced to switch their biotope from life in the trees to life on the ground. This was a change with dramatic consequences.
In the open flatland, the hominid group was unusually exposed to predators and at the same time bereft of their old strategy of escaping up into the trees. As they began walking upright, their journeys between scattered waterholes and scarce clusters of trees were extremely dangerous adventures. What should our hominid ancestor do when apex predators such as the great lion or the saber-toothed cat swiftly approach? Should they choose flight or fight? Both options were a dead end, because they were neither fast nor strong enough. In their precarity, desperation may have forced the hominids to find a way out. They began throwing stones. Here was an option that was both flight and fight. They found a way of fighting that created the distance that could not be achieved by running away. Chances may have been slim in the beginning, but once throwing techniques and hand–eye and group coordination improved, the success opened up a new and irrevocable evolutionary path. In short: Hominids threw themselves into existence as human beings when they began throwing stones.
From stones to spears to other projectiles. The two-legged stone-thrower went on to become a firestarter to a wall builder, to a global arson. The hand picked not only the garden apple but wild grapes. It made baskets to bring them back to camp, where fermenting juice collected at the bottom. The hand went on to make ceramic jugs to store and shelter wine from the ravages of exposure. The hand painted the caves at Lascaux and later the Mona Lisa; it wrote every word of every book, every note of every musical score, and every mathematical equation.
The undetermined animal that threw the stone and bone went on to pull the trigger, dial the telephone, drop the bomb, launch the satellite, click the shutter, and tap the touchscreen. A direct line extends from the first stones thrown to today’s fingertip operations. Hence, Ponson and Eloy were onto something when they selected the hand as key subject for their project. What, we might ask, is being gathered in Eloy’s images? It’s not merely a documentation of the components of terroir, but their unity. Each element refers beyond itself: the slope isn’t just gradient but how earth reaches toward sky; light isn’t just radiation but how sky reveals earth; the hand isn’t just manipulation but how mortals dwell between earth and sky, among divinities.
The divine dimension manifests here not in any conventional religious sense but as an acknowledgment of mystery, of that which exceeds our rational calculations and will to control. In wine, this appears as the ineffable quality that emerges from the interplay of all elements, something that can be felt but never fully explained. Eloy’s photographs capture this gathering not by trying to define or analyze terroir but by letting it show itself.
Eloy’s photographic techniques themselves mirror this poetic gathering and bringing-forth. (The ancient Greek technē, from which we derive our word “technology,” originally meant “craft” or “art” as a form of revealing the world.) His use of long exposures, particularly in capturing the movement of clouds doesn’t merely record time but reveals the ongoing dialogue between earth and sky. These photographs—in the literal sense of “drawing with light”—reveal not just weather and landscape but the very rhythm of being.
Having mastered the craft of photography, Eloy has turned to more experimental forms that strip the medium to its essence. Photograms, which he describes as “taking a picture without a camera,” reduces photography to its most fundamental elements: light-sensitive paper and light itself. The technique can only be performed in darkness or during the liminal hours of dawn and dusk, as Eloy did over the course of one morning in Gigondas, from the dark of 4am, through dawn’s light around 7am. By placing a rock consistently in the same position before sheets of photographic paper and triggering his flashbulb, he documented not just changes in light but Earth’s very rotation—or what TS Eliot called “the still point of the turning world.”
What emerges is not so much a picture as an event—a luminous inscription of a moment in time. When rain falls during the exposure, for instance, each droplet leaves its trace on the paper not as a representation but as a record of its actual presence. This differs fundamentally from a conventional photograph of rain, which captures the appearance but not the physical encounter. Through this tactile approach, photography goes beyond documentation to participation in Earth’s vitality.
Sheltered exposure
Only in the mortal world—the world that lies on the earth and under the sky—is there anything to live for, since only in that world is there anything of value or significance. Only in that mortal world do things stand out as what they are; only in that world do things shine. Shining is exactly how Heidegger describes things as they are disclosed within the tangled unity of the fourfold. Things shine, and in their shining they illuminate themselves, the world, and the humans who care for them. In shining, things illuminate the human communities in which they find their coming to presence.
According to a close confidant, Ponson feels better on the outside than on the inside. One also senses this in Eloy, and perhaps it’s the case for most of us. To be outside is to be exposed; and if you’re not exposed, you don’t exist. Like the shortest shadow at noon, we realize ourselves most fully in this exposure. Everything comes to us from this generous, boundless, and terrifying opening. Under the sheltering sky on our wandering planet, boundaries between the terrestrial and the celestial blur. Every atom in our bodies, in our glass of wine, and on our planet has stellar origins. Every time we see an object, a landscape, or light reflecting off a river or ocean, we have a star to thank.
At its most basic level, life essentially refracts the sun, either through photosynthesis or through photoreceptors in our sensory cells and organs. Hence, we are as solar as we are earthly in nature. Both Ponson and Eloy share something of Dionysus and Apollo. There’s a lightfootedness to these aerial spirits but also a deep sense of grounding, a faithfulness to the earth. They share the somber, penetrating gaze of Apollo, yet there’s a youthful softness at the edges of their eyes, and the corners of their mouths wear a faint smile that appears only under natural light. Perhaps it is in facing our thrownness, our human condition as between shelter and exposure—of never being fully at home—that we truly dwell in the world. If we believe Nietzsche, the sun needs us as much as we need the sun. Before Zarathustra descended from his mountaintop to address the people in the marketplace, he turned to the east and asked, “You great star, what would your happiness be, if you had not those, for whom you shine?”
