Stray Philosophical Thoughts About Wine
Once in a blue monday I get this itch which I have to scratch. Every pretentious thought about wine that I’ve ever had comes bubbling to the surface and has to be skimmed off. (How many metaphors is that?) The subject of wine is intoxicating and full inebriation is achieved when one strays into the realms of philosophy. It always comes back to the same question: wine has inspired artists and philosophers but is it art or is the question itself a load of Jackson Pollocks?
MUSINGS AND MEANDERINGS
Elegance is reduction, simplification, condensation. It is spare, stark, sleek. Elegance is cultivated abstraction… (It has) clarity, order, proportion, balance...
Elegance in wine is the cool, effortless beauty of nature gently extracted and clearly and cleanly rendered. We enjoy wines that retain this sense of effortless proportion, which are pure and finely delineated, in which the wines are stripped to their essentials. Pinot Noir arguably, at its finest, is condensed terroir, combining the mystery of the grape with clarity and proportion. Elegant wines have a delicious tension, there is nothing superfluous in them, the integration is sublime – these are the qualities that define the natural essence of the wine.
I assume the senses crave sources of maximum information, that the eye benefits by exercise, stretch, and expansion towards materials of complexity and substance . . . conditions which alert the total sensibility — cast it almost in stress — extend insight and response, the basic responsive range of empathetic-kinaesthetic vitality.— CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN
My best and most intense responses to wine are when momentary apprehension causes a reaching out towards Truth. My senses are intrigued and challenged and so I am impelled to investigate, refer back, question and allow my imagination and fancy full rein. The more we drink interesting wine the more we exercise our senses and cause each node of receptivity to tremble; we create a response to meet the aesthetic. This is art, the dissolving of boundaries between the self and what the self perceives, activating a vital, surging response. Appreciation is truly creative as one seeks to draw out the essence of that which one apprehends.
...if we connect to our passion, that in itself will be regenerative; we won’t have to wait for the energy, it will be there. But how do we connect to that passion? One of my favourite phrases, which a friend taught me, is that we need to pay “exquisite attention” to our responses to things—noticing what makes our flame glow brighter. If we pay attention to those things, we’ll be able to catch the flame and feed it.
The passive response to wine is one whereby you feel that wine should surrender its secrets without the need for commitment. Just as poetry has been described as the “exquisite expression of exquisite impressions” so, if we want to appreciate wine to its maximum, we must be also become poets and channel our responses to find that regenerative passion. Being in touch with our senses allows us to experience the transformative, redemptive quality of art. Being in touch with our senses allows us to connect momentarily with great wine which is surely what we aspire to when we take wine seriously.
Mass production strips every image of its singularity, rendering it schematic and quickly identifiable, so that it resembles a sign. A sign is a command. Its message comes all at once. It means one thing only--nuance and ambiguity are not important properties of signs--and is no better for being hand-made. Works of art speak in a more complicated way of relationships, hints, uncertainties, and contradictions. They do not force meanings on their audience; meaning emerges, adds up, unfolds from their imagined centres. A sign dictates meaning, a work of art takes one through the process of discovering meaning. In short, paintings educate but signs discipline; mass language always tends to speak in the imperative voice.
— ROBERT HUGHES in The Shock of the New.
One could apply similar distinctions to wines. The commercial imperative of the average mass produced brand is to eliminate doubt, to make a statement, and persuade the consumer that they can be defined by their choices. Such wine is not art, nor intended to be, but functional and reliable, wine for the sake of quaffing and sloshing. It must have the quality of inertia and point in a single direction. The designer (or winemaker) becomes the sign, the packaging is more important than the content. Real wine is, in every sense, fluid, uncertain, mutable. It provokes different responses in different people, it suggests rather than cajoles and unveils itself in its own time rather than presenting itself brazenly. Apprehending the wine combines observation with intuition - this is the aesthetic response. Great wine like great art makes us understand a little bit more about the way we experience the world. Great wine again like great art has a moral component in that it inspires us to seek and make connections; it makes us think and thus educates us, whereas the brand tells us what we should be thinking – and should be drinking. What is real art (in wine) is not the external form, but the essence . . . it is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface.