How to Lead a Good Wine Life

So you’ve finally had the opportunity to taste Screaming Eagle, La Tache, Chateau Lafitte—whatever your most aspirational wine is.

What next?

For wine lovers, how we answer that question determines whether our lives will be satisfying or not. But much depends on the relationship between desire and pleasure. There are at least four ways of looking at this.

According to one ancient view of the relationship, desire renders satisfaction impossible. Desire always strives for something more and is thus unhappy with what it possesses. You’ve had the best but it’s not enough. You can look forward to a life of disappointment. Nothing can measure up to that peak experience but you soldier on anyway hoping to find that elusive “best” wine.

Alternatively, but no less pathological, (#2) perhaps pleasure snuffs out desire. Desire vanishes once you’ve had the best. There is nothing left to strive for. Why bother. You walk away having lost your love of wine.

Down those two paths there is only conflict and unhappiness, our emotional lives afflicted with an unresolved conflict between pleasure and desire.

But perhaps we ought to think of the object of desire differently—not as an obsession with a particular wine but as a desire for a wide range of experience. Expanding our desires on this view means gaining ever greater opportunities for pleasure perhaps from unexpected source.

There are two ways to look at this as well.

(#3) Think of a desire that is perfectly filled at every moment yet without ceasing to be desire. We learn to love the activity of tasting itself, especially the development of our capacity to taste, and in a world filled with good wine such satisfaction is easy to achieve. Some wines are better than others. But it is the activity of tasting itself that gives pleasure

Or (#4) perhaps we love the constant search for something better. What we enjoy is precisely the impossibility of satisfaction. Pleasure arises from the movement of desire itself, the thrill of the hunt.

Either of the last two options can be a satisfying way to live. I’m more of a #3 guy but if you have the time and money #4 can be a good way to live.

In any case, avoid the first two.