“Surfing and winemaking are forms of following and creating lines—not as a straight path to a destination but as dynamic, ever-evolving processes of engagement.”
After a full day of surfing along the Western Cape with Duncan Savage, one of South Africa’s finest winemakers and a skilled wave-rider, we’re chatting in his Cape Town home over a glass of his old-vine red, salt-burned and sore after six hours in the icy Atlantic. The decidedly average takeaway pizza tastes outstanding with this serious, almost opulent Cinsault. The bottle’s ink-drawn label features a solitary telephone pole and power line extending into a white void. The back label merely says, “Follow the Line, 2021.” It evokes the Japanese aesthetic concept of yūgen (幽玄), when surface simplicity suggests deeper meanings—like watching a formation of geese disappear behind clouds, a ship vanishing behind a distant island, a red leaf falling from a maple.
I ask Savage about the design, my mind still half adrift on the waves ridden at Elands Bay. “Actually,” he says, “it came from trying to find this old Cinsault vineyard in Darling I’d heard about. I kept getting lost down these dirt roads and having to ring the old farmer to ask where it was. After about five calls he’s getting annoyed and tells me very slowly, ‘Duncan, follow the line.’ The power line, that is, which finally led me to the vineyard.” I take a sip and laugh at the image and my tendency to overthink things. Yet I recall Savage’s surfing that day, the clean lines he drew across the groomed walls of water at Elands, the uncanny alignment of form in motion.
Back in Paris, such images and the words “follow the line” play on a loop over the distant sound of waves. The intuition grew into an imperative, a line that must be followed. I trace its genesis back to a book I encountered more than a decade ago during my doctoral studies in anthropology. Like Savage’s red, the book bore a cryptic title: Lines: A Brief History, by Tim Ingold, widely regarded as the most innovative anthropologist of the past 25 years. I remember taking hold of the slim volume and wondering what significance something as ubiquitous as “lines” could hold for the study of humanity? Tremendous significance, it turns out.
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In this work, Ingold argues that lines—whether they are paths we walk, stories we tell, or marks we leave—are fundamental to how humans perceive and shape the world. His notion of the “meshwork”—a tangle of dynamic relationships where life knots, stretches, and unfolds—provides a compelling lens through which to explore the intertwined practices of surfing and winemaking. Both are acts of alignment with natural rhythms, processes of wayfaring through landscapes and seascapes, and stories inscribed in movement. The task is not so much to study lines in themselves but to follow them, join their movements, and trace how they stitch things together. With Ingold’s ideas as a guide, this article follows the lines of a day in the life of a surfer/winemaker, tracing the intersections of land, sea, and culture. Along the way, it explores how these practices reveal deeper truths about our relationship with nature and the art of living itself.
Life is lived along lines
“To study both people and things is to study the lines they are made of,” writes Ingold. For him, lines are not static or abstract forms but fluid paths that emerge through movement and growth. His ecological framework categorizes lines into distinct types, each with its own characteristics and implications. He distinguishes between threads—flexible, knottable lines, like a rope—and traces, which are marks left on surfaces, such as a trail in the sand.
Ingold’s taxonomy extends to cuts, cracks, and creases—lines born of physical interactions between materials. It also embraces active, dynamic lines that move freely without defined beginnings or ends, like the path of a bird in flight, a dancer’s movements, or the growth lines of plants. Beyond the tangible, he explores imaginary and conceptual lines: longitude and latitude, timelines, narrative structures, and social relationships. Life itself, he suggests, is a line—a continuous path of movement and transformation.
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Against the rigid frameworks of geometric thinking, Ingold proposes a world not as a network of fixed points but as a living “meshwork”—an intricate weave of interconnecting lines. This meshwork challenges the dualisms of Western thought (nature/culture, subject/object, mind/body) that fragment our understanding of the world. Instead, Ingold calls for an “ecology of life,” where lines cross, boundaries blur, and no space is truly empty. This perspective invites us to reconsider our relationships—not as separations but as inseparable connections—with environments and with others.
With this meshwork in mind, we’ll follow here the lines of a day in the life of surfer/winemaker Duncan Savage, since it was he who inspired this exploration of lines. Yet our protagonist might as easily be Eben Sadie, Trizanne Barnard, Johann Reyneke, or any of South Africa’s wave-riding vignerons. The Western Cape offers fertile ground for these twin passions of surfing and winemaking, though similar stories and lives unfold along the wine- and wave-rich coastlines of California, Chile, Portugal, New Zealand, and Australia. So, let us take Savage as our actor and the Western Cape as our setting for this fabulation—a creative weaving of threads and traces into a story that illustrates the lifeworld of lines.
Wayfaring along the coastline
Before the sun rises, Savage follows the familiar lines to the coast. Roads, much like trails and paths, act as “lines of passage.” Unlike static boundary lines such as walls and fences, roads facilitate movement and connection. As Proust observed during his journeys from Paris to the Normandy coast, driving on roads allows for a truer perception of the landscape by tracing its natural contours—unlike riding trains, which adhere to flat, predetermined tracks.
Savage, after years of meticulous observation and a clear vision for the wines he strives to create, now leases and manages nearly 20 unique old vineyards scattered across the Cape winelands and into Swartland. This keeps him perpetually on the road, knowing the routes, coastline, and terroir as intimately as the back of his hand. Leaving Cape Town, the road winds through the landscape until the ocean appears on the horizon.
The coastline might seem like one of the world’s more obvious lines, but the boundary between land and sea is far less definitive upon closer inspection. A slower, more deliberate look shows that the coastline—like all lines, whether the black ones on maps or cellular membranes—is porous and permeable.
The coast is a meshwork of intersecting lines: flowing currents, swells and tides; wind patterns and surface textures; migrating seabirds and branching kelp forests; schools of fish, echolocating dolphins, sharks on the scent of seals; sculpted cliffs, dunes, the footprints of people and plovers. Rather than being a bounded place or even an environment (literally, that which surrounds), the coastline is a “zone of entanglement” where pathways—often extending thousands of miles—converge. The shore, too, is not a finished product but a process, a “line of becoming,” continually reshaped by erosion and deposition. More than a place, the coastline is a happening, just as a human being is more verb than noun.
Surfers, like sailors, fishermen, and other coastal inhabitants, develop an intimate understanding of thepatterns that connect the coastal meshwork. As Ingold writes, “The inhabitant is one who participates from within in the very process of the world’s continual coming into being, and who, in laying a trail of life, contributes to its weave and texture.” He describes this way of knowing as “wayfaring,” a process of gathering knowledge and acquiring skills through movement, immersion, and lived experience, as distinct from formal education. Surfers and winemakers study maps and weather charts, of course, but as any worth their salt know, the map is not the territory. The ocean is not a wave machine. A vineyard is not a database.
Savage pulls into the beach parking lot and finds the surf is misaligned. The swell is too west, and an unforeseen side shore breeze is ruffling the waves. He could drive north, where he senses that such conditions would be more favorable. But what about the dropping tide? And is there time between checking on the vineyards in Darling and Stellenbosch and getting back to the winery by the late afternoon? Perhaps he could catch a few waves closer to home in Cape Town after the work has been done.
The surfer’s common predicament further illustrates surfing as wayfaring. Whereas transportation is destination-oriented, implying relocation from point A to B, wayfaring is a continuous journey. The wayfarer is always somewhere, on the way, pausing here and there before moving on, intermezzo. As Ingold writes, “The inhabited world is a reticulate meshwork of trails that is continually being woven as life goes on along them.” Savage reverses his rig and heads toward the old Cinsault vineyard in Darling, following the line as instructed by the old farmer.
Situated 6 miles (10km) from the Atlantic, Darling is heavily influenced by the Benguela Current, which flows along the west coast of Africa, bringing cooling, salt-laden winds. These winds sweep through the vineyards in the warm afternoon, after the morning fog has cleared, and return in the evening, cooling the vines and preserving the acidity of ripening grapes.
For surfers and maritime winemakers, knowledge of coastal dynamics is not merely a theoretical resource but an embodied process, which Ingold calls “becoming knowledgeable.” Over years, decades, and lifetimes of continuous observation, surfers and vignerons master what anthropologist Anna Tsing refers to as the “arts of noticing”—or, more simply, the practice of paying attention.
There is no specific goal or endpoint to becoming knowledgeable; rather, it is an ever-expanding alignment with the world, cultivated through the somatic observation of form and its alignment. This alignment is not the result of the surfer’s or winemaker’s will to impose order—natural forces are far too powerful for that—but a harmonious positioning in relation to the myriad lines of life. Such forms of alignment blur the boundaries between matter and meaning, nature and culture, subject and object, integrating the body and senses with thought, memory, and emotions.
The vineyard is a meshwork
Arriving at the vineyard, Savage walks along the rows. His gaze shifts from the entire plot of 40-year-old bush-vines growing on ancient granite soils, to individual vines, specific branches, and climbing tendrils, and finally zooms out to encompass the vineyard’s broader Umwelt (environment)—the hedges of native bush, the flat plain leading to craggy mountains in the distance. The fog is beginning to clear, having brought cool moisture to vines preparing to receive their daily dose of sun and sea breeze. Like a surf break, a vineyard is a meshwork of lines.
The rows are planted in lines, each extending toward the horizon, a visual rhythm that structures the landscape into a grid-like pattern. But not like a spreadsheet; more like a fishing net tethered to the ground. The trunks of the vines grow upward in lines, their untethered arms branching off into lines of their own, like unfurling umbrellas, tendrils spiraling outward, forming yet more lines reaching for support or connection. Below ground, roots tunnel down and outward. Finding and creating pathways through some of the oldest soil on earth, their proliferating lines are in search for moisture and nutrients. These root lines are not solitary, as depicted in botanical drawings; they intersect with the intricate meshwork of mycelium, a vast subterranean web that links not only vines to soil but vine to vine, exchanging nutrients and signals. The soil itself is not inert dirt but vibrant matter, a living meshwork of intersecting lines of life.
The vineyard, like a forest, embodies a form of consciousness—not in the human, all-too-human sense, but as a living system attuned to the rhythms of growth, decay, and renewal. Recent studies on plant and fungal networks reveal that mycelium acts as a communication web, enabling plants to exchange nutrients, signals, and even warnings. This “wood wide web,” as some scientists call it, suggests that ecosystems such as forests—and, by extension, vineyards—manifest a kind of collective intelligence. Life forms within these systems are deeply interconnected, responding dynamically to their environment in ways that sustain and nurture the whole.
Attuned winemakers know this on a somatic level; the vineyard is not a static plot of individual plants but a dynamic interplay of lines—lines of growth, movement, and correspondence. Above ground, the lines of the vines are mirrored by the lines of vineyard workers who intermittently move between rows, pruning, training, and eventually, harvesting the fruits of this collective labor. Human movements create new, ephemeral lines of care and attention, which inscribe themselves into a vineyard’s story, which is always a story of co-domestication.
Taking care of grapevines—or any crop—is to engage in an act of mutual domestication. Agriculture, as an art of cultivating the realm of the living, is both a form of care and transformation, which also involves intervention and violence. The care and control that defines agriculture is the very origin of what we call culture and what flows from it: civilization, sedentarization, and urbanization; in other words, cities. It is a very narrow view of history and protohistory that opposes “town” and “country,” since there are only towns insofar as farmlands formed. Giving the gift of civilization—that is, civility and elevation—the act of raising crops goes hand in hand with raising humanity, elevating existence well beyond mere subsistence.
In this process, agriculture reshaped evolution, blending nature and culture into a biocultural continuum. To cultivate is not simply to reproduce but to transform, to select and shape life. Culture is that which cultivates, and the connection is even clearer in French, where the same word, élevage, refers to the raising of plants, animals, and wine, as well as to human education. What is also cultivated is a sense of responsibility, though it’s not necessarily perceived as such. Instead, it manifests as savoir-vivre (knowing how to live) and savoir-faire (knowing how to do). This resonates with Ingold’s notions of “wayfaring” and “becoming knowledge,” where embodied care and practice form the basis of existence itself.
The fog line is receding, and sunlight begins streaming through the vineyard. These atmospheric lines are not mere backdrops but active participants in the vineyard’s life, their interplay creating conditions for growth. The vineyard is not simply an open-air factory for grape production; it is a meshwork of collaborating lifeforms. Each knot and their connecting threads—from vine, to root, to human—contributes to the shared project of ripening fruit. Vineyards then are less sites of production and extraction than of co-labor. As plant anthropologist Dusan Kazic suggests, co-labor is a process of mutual shaping, where human and plant lives are bound in relationships of care, collaboration, and reciprocity. Naturally, no such theories are on Savage’s mind as he walks the rows, pruning wayward canes and noting a few areas that will soon require some weeding. Satisfied, he looks up to find the sun is still some way off casting its shortest shadows, so he sets out for a surf break just to the north.
Ubuntu: I am because you are
Arriving at the break, he traces the path of the swell from a bluff overlooking four coves. The ocean is a living canvas of lines, visible and invisible. Much as he read the lines of the Darling vineyard, what surfers call “checking the waves” is a complex perceptual exercise in line following and connecting. The horizon, much more than a line separating ocean and sky, establishes scale, depth, and perspective. The westerly swell, having transformed from its chaotic genesis into long, orderly lines, sweeps through the coves. The swell lines transform into breaking waves when they enter shallow water. Arriving in sets of three or four, the time-space between the waves affects their size and form. The cliffs block the wind, though the ripples farther out—as the vines back in Darling had already registered with their skyward antennae—suggest it’s picking up. Like any attuned surfer, Savage takes all of this in, while simultaneously projecting himself out. This art of noticing is not unlike music. For the unacquainted, order is sensed, but language is lacking. The ocean’s song can only be danced by those who have learned to follow its lines and step in time.
From the cliff, Savage continues studying the four coves. Even before he has physically entered the cool Atlantic, he has extended himself into it. As in art, specifically painting, vision here is a double movement: The eyes both extend the body through the act of looking and open the body to the world through this extension. One sees and is seen. Like the interspace between land and sea, self and other, body and environment, soil and vine are a continuum, aspects of a common flesh. The “and” is simply the connective tissue.
Discussing the way a painter lends their body to the world to transform the visible, the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes, “I do not see space according to its exterior envelope; I live in it from the inside; I am immersed in it. After all, the world is all around me, not in front of me.” Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy emphasizes embodiment: We do not simply observe the world from a detached distance; we live within it, immersed in its textures and rhythms. The surfer, like the painter or the vigneron, is not a passive observer of land- or seascapes but an active participant—or perhaps better still, a correspondent.
This idea of correspondence is echoed in ubuntu, a concept from across Africa that is often translated as “I am because you are.” Ubuntu moves beyond Western notions of individuality, emphasizing relationality and interconnectedness. It suggests that the self is not an isolated entity but emerges through relationships with others and the world. Similarly, the German phenomenologist Bernard Waldenfels, who lived in Africa for a time in his youth and later studied under Merleau-Ponty in Paris, argues that consciousness is not just intentional—directed at things—but primarily “responsive” to things already there. This subtle shift has profound implications: If the world and others precede the self—as ubuntu implies—then the self is not autonomous but relational, formed through co-responding on the level of the body. In surfing, as in winemaking, this embodied responsivity is fundamental. A skilled surfer or vigneron does not impose themself on the waves or the vines but listens and responds to what they offer. It’s a matter of thinking with rather than on.
Martin Heidegger held the similar idea that consciousness doesn’t simply take place in the mind of individuals but is distributed across time and space as presence. “I am never here only, as this encapsulated body; rather, I am there—that is, I already pervade the world and only thus can I go through it.” Heidegger’s notion of distributed consciousness resonates with the contemporary Extended Mind Hypothesis in cognitive neuroscience, which posits that the mind extends beyond the brain and body into the environment.
Coming back to Savage—who, in the course of gazing and taking in the turbulent ocean before him, has already mind-surfed dozens of waves—his body may be on the cliff, but his presence is already out there. He is surfing before he has even touched the water. Just as he is making wine in the vineyard long before the grapes arrive at the winery.
Footprints through the weather world
Following a path down the cliff, on the beach he encounters footprints tracking in different directions. As Ingold observes, footprints are traces—marks left by the movement of people and animals across a surface. As lines that inscribe the passage of time and movement, footprints offer information about who has been there and where they’ve gone. Several sets lead down the beach, branching off and fading into the waterline of the third cove. His eyes track them to a small pack of surfers clustered around a peak. He moves on, following a single set of human footprints, alongside which run those of a dog.
Reaching the fourth cove, he is greeted by the surf dog and plots his paddle out. Punching through the shorebreak, he glimpses an approaching set of waves, a stack of lines that grows taller than the horizon as it nears. Veering right, he just slips beneath the feathering green lines. Now beyond the break line, he pivots left and paddle to the peak, where he is greeted by the lone wave-rider. They recognize one another; their paths have crossed before.
Sitting atop their boards on the fluid surface line where sky and ocean meet, they exist in what Ingold calls the “weather world.” Their lower bodies, submerged in the cold, undulating ocean, sense the subtle shifts of currents and the energy of approaching waves. The bottom contours and composition dictate where and how a wave breaks, and this changes depending on the tide, swell direction and size, wind and so on. As Eben Sadie, respected winemaker and lifelong surfer puts it, “Terroir is to a vineyard what the bottom is to a surf break.”
Above water, their upper bodies are not so much in the airas enveloped by the atmosphere, their faces registering the briny zephyr and the warmth of sunlight filtering through scattered clouds. Spitting saltwater and drawing ocean air into their lungs, they have become marine mammals, conduits between the aquatic and aerial spheres. Hence, surfing does not take place “on” or “in” the ocean but in the midst of the weather world—an intricate meshwork of lines: pulsing swells beneath, wind currents above, and the invisible trajectories of weather patterns all around.
Following and creating lines
A set arrives, and Savage’s companion catches a wave, carving a fluid path “down the line,” as surfers say. The idea of a wave having a “line” to travel down might seem paradoxical: Unlike a road, a wave is an ever-changing aquatic form. Each wave is a unique variation, offering different possible lines for surfers to draw across their open faces. In the absence of any fixed boundaries, the line of a wave is a path of movement that is followed and created simultaneously. Painter Paul Klee spoke of a line that develops freely, in its own time, as a line that “goes for a walk.” In surfing, we might say it “goes for a ride.”
The surfer’s movements leave fleeting traces in the water—vortices spiral off the fins, spray launches into the air. The breaking wave is altered, but these disturbances leave only a fleeting trace, since water is charged with pressure and almost immediately reestablishes its equilibrium. The surfboard itself is a study in lines, its shape and fin configuration dictating the arcs and trajectories it can draw on a wave. Whether gliding or carving, the essence of surfing lies in harmonizing with the wave, merging human and wave into a single, flowing form. Again, Sadie draws a parallel to wine here:
“Wine needs to transport the soil to the bottle just as the rail of the surfboard needs to transport the surfer through the line in the waves. In the old days, the classic old surfers always spoke about taking the line in the wave and the line of the rail of the board. Most youngsters have no idea what these guys refer to because they’ve all grown up surfing thrusters [short, three-fin surfboards]. When you surf an old-school, single-fin surfboard, you soon learn that there truly is only one line in the wave where the board sits effortlessly and one point from which it turns perfectly. With thrusters, you surf where you want and how you want, regardless of the shape of the wave. So, too, with modern, globalized winemaking. It’s wine that has very little regard for the soil or climate.”
The wind picks up, and Savage and his companion head in. Back on the cliff, they join the surfers from the third cove, comparing notes on the session. Beyond words, they narrate with their hands, fingers tracing lines across the ocean and through the weather world. Like surfing itself, storytelling is about weaving lines into a meshwork rather than connecting points in a network. To tell a story is to retrace a path through the world that others can follow, spinning their own threads in the process. As in knitting, writes Ingold, “The thread being spun now and the thread picked up from the past are both of the same yarn. There is no point at which the story ends and life begins.” In this way, narratives are not told about life but are the very pathways through which life goes on. The conversation shifts from waves to wine, because a few of the surfers are fellow winemakers or vineyard managers. All need to get back to work, and Savage throws his board and wetsuit in the ute and is back on the road.
The lines of wine
After checking his Syrah vineyard in Stellenbosch, Savage arrives at his urban Cape Town winery. A winery, like a vineyard, is a meshwork of lines. Pipes line the walls and ceiling; hoses, coiled and stretched, snake across the floor, connecting tanks and barrels. These lines are not mere tools but veins that link the stages of fermentation, filtration, and aging into a circulatory system. Chalk inscriptions on barrels mark time and identity, recording the wine’s path through the winemaker’s hands.
As with a vineyard, Ingold’s theory of lines helps us see a winery as more than a production space—as a living, breathing meshwork of pathways. The pipes, hoses, and vessels are not just functional objects; they are extensions of the winemaker’s hand, tracing the flow of nature and craft. The barrels, with their chalk-marked inscriptions, embody lines of memory, response and intention, linking the past (the harvest), present (intermezzo), and future (the bottle). In this way, the winery is not a factory but a meshwork of entangled lines, where the threads of nature, human labor, and materiality are woven together.
With assistant winemaker Banele Vakele, Savage checks on the white blend, set to be bottled the next day. The bottle itself is another form of line—a vessel of alignment and connection. Its shape is a synthesis of form and function, guiding the wine from the barrel to the glass, from the maker to the drinker. Taking a glass, he thieves some wine from an old oak puncheon. The act of swirling, smelling, and tasting reveals yet another set of lines: the curves of the glass, the spiraling motion of the liquid, the invisible lines of flight of released aromas. Once again, the glass is not merely an object but a site of correspondence; the myriad lines of a wine meet those of the taster. The glass, like the bottle, is a knot in the meshwork, connecting the threads of production and perception.
Reconfirming that the white is good to go, Savage turns to the whiteboard—a surface of inscription, communication, and coordination. Here lines take symbolic form—letters, words, numbers, dates—translating the fluidity of time and intention into actionable pathways that extend well beyond the winery, to shipping paths, logistical networks, commercial relationships. According to Ingold’s conception of lines, writing is less a process of fixing ideas into static points and more one of extending lines into the world. The whiteboard, with its scribbled notes and crossed-out plans, is a record of movement and change—a visual trace of wine’s coming into being.
As the sun sets, Savage sits at his computer to check orders and respond to email. Once again, lines are at work. Finally, before heading home, Savage checks the surf forecast. The lines of the weather map—curves of wind, arrows indicating the swell direction, a wave-like form indicating the tide—are not just representations; they are calls to action. Although he’s tired and there’s work to do tomorrow, bottling the white and racking the red blend, he decides to keep his gear in the car. The cycle will repeat, the lines of work and play intertwining once more, weaving a life lived along lines connecting land and sea.
Concluding lines
Surfing and winemaking are forms of following and creating lines—not as a straight path to a destination but as dynamic, ever-evolving processes of engagement. Like the lines of a wave or the tendrils of a vine, they remind us that life is not a series of fixed points but a continuous flow of movement, connection, and transformation. To surf a wave or tend a vineyard is to participate in a meshwork of relationships: between human-environment, body-technology, nature-culture. It is a form of alignment that proceeds in tandem with the alignment of form.
As Ingold writes, “It is of the essence of life that it does not begin here or end there or connect a point of origin with a final destination, but rather that it keeps on going.” This endless knotting, stitching, and unfolding is what makes both surfing and winemaking not just practices but arts of living—ways of being-in-the-world that cultivate the arts of noticing, responding, and creating. When a wave is ridden, the lines taken don’t necessarily end when it finishes, just as great wine isn’t necessarily gone once the bottle is empty. The lines take the form of a vortex, like that of a wave, which both turns in on itself yet also has a forward trajectory. As I sensed that day on the coast in southern Africa, a place of human origins, intersecting ocean currents and old vines, our experience is elevated when we learn to follow the line.
