Give Wine Your Full Attention

Jason Wilson’s article “How Good Wine Rewards Your Attention” is insightful about why wine is so important to those of us who love it. He compares attentive drinking to the discoveries he made while staring intently for several minutes at Whistler’s Nocturne in Blue and Silver.

But for me, that’s when I turned off my art-history brain, shut down any sense of purpose, and simply started looking. I looked at the faint lights in the upper right, wondering if there was some kind of bridge or contiguous land. I focused on the shadowy building in the far right, with a tiny light on—was it an office? A home? I spent a good couple minutes looking at the various colors used in the water, and at the detail of the plants in the bottom left. Several minutes I cannot even account for, since I just sort of let my subconscious wander.

A similar experience can be had while  attentively drinking a glass of wine:

That means, for at least a few moments, leaving behind what you “know” about wine, and simply smelling and putting it in your mouth. That attention is followed by the most important part….free associating to create some kind of meaning.”

Wine is of course about sensory enjoyment but it isn’t limited to that. Those heady aromas and textures, helped along by the alcohol, free the mind from its conventional associations and habits if you allow it to roam without constraint.

We live in a world where our attention is continuously hijacked by ubiquitous media and people who demand  our eyeballs and our cash. Wine is one way we can shut out the noise, bring stillness to life, and use those heady aromas and textures to think thoughts uninvited, taking any route, starting from anywhere, thoughts that are  yours and yours alone.

As T.S. Eliot wrote:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time (T.S. Eliot]

It can be done without a suitcase or plane ticket—just a good bottle that makes you think.