Worth a Thousand Words

I've recently been batting around sad ideas concerning modernity and culture, specifically how technology interfaces with wine.   I'm seeing wine--which I'm so heavily invested in studying right now--as a microcosm of the world at large.  Perhaps something as simple, widespread, and as perennial as wine could be a useful touchstone in discussions of future.  What makes a wine good or worth money?  What do we consider to be an improvement in wine technology?  Is it machine harvesting as many perfectly ripened and lab tested grapes as possible and producing as much wine as we can make bottles?  Whatever happened to the honed generational skills of the farmer?  What about terrior?  Where does mechanization take the romantic--and indeed appealing--element away from wine?  How much does the romanticism matter, so long as we have the convenience of inexpensive and well-made wine on our grocery store shelves?
From the slow food movement to vintage clothing to handcrafted, biodynamic wine I'm seeing these reactionary trends within my generation that has seen so much technology advance so quickly.  NASA is trying to start a "space tourism" industry, and we still can't grasp the genetic mutations that sometimes occur in grapevines.  We're churning eggs out of chicken-powered factories, and can't wrap our heads around the fact of skyrocketing obesity and cancer rates in the developed world.  It all seems too much too fast, at the expense of complex systems that have developed over millenia...  and cultures that have been in place for thousands of years.

These thoughts swirling after a particularly aggravating viticulture class, I stumbled across this photographic essay on spiritual life in Bali, with commentary from the artist John Stanmeyer: 

"The Balinese culture is under severe stress from development and modernity. How much longer will the Balinese even be speaking their own language? How much longer will people be able to read the ancient Sanskrit texts?
I’m intense and passionate about it because I do feel in some regards, around the world, we’re having cultural genocide. Cultures are vanishing. We’re homogenizing ourselves across the planet. We have language loss on an epic level and we have cultural loss on an equally epic level. And that I find to be tragic, especially when you have rich, ancient cultures that haven’t changed for so long but now are on the verge of a breaking point."

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/high-balinese-ritual-low-holga-technology/

And so, what to do?  When is globalization a good thing?  To what extent....