Mystery, What Mystery?

I may not have to pose this question to my audience here but it is useful as an analytic framework to grasp what’s wrong with those who are skeptical of wine’s virtues. The question is: Which of the following two worlds would you prefer to live in?

World #1:

At its core, wine is the result of a natural fermentation process, no more complex than bread rising or milk turning into yogurt. The transformation is straightforward: yeast consumes sugar and produces alcohol. Any perceived complexity is a matter of subjective experience, not an intrinsic property of the liquid itself.

Describing wine has become an elaborate performance involving obscure terminology—”hints of wet stone,” “a whisper of leather,” “unctuous tannins.” These descriptions do not refer to objective features of the wine but are metaphorical, personal, and often arbitrary. One could just as easily say, “It’s red and kind of dry” and capture the essence just as well.

Most people who drink wine do not analyze it the way a sommelier might. They sip it, decide whether they like it, and move on. This suggests that the experience of wine is immediate and intuitive, not something that requires study or refinement. If people can enjoy a sunset without studying optics, why should they need to study wine?

Blind taste tests frequently show that people cannot reliably differentiate between expensive and inexpensive wines. This undermines the notion that wine appreciation is a skill that reveals hidden depths; if it were, experts should be able to distinguish great wines from mediocre ones with ease.

Unlike literature, painting, or music, wine does not convey ideas, emotions, or narratives. It does not express meaning beyond its immediate sensory impact. If wine is just a beverage meant to be enjoyed, there is no need to analyze it any further than one would a glass of orange juice.

So if you spend more than $10 on a bottle you’re wasting your money.

World #2:

As we dig into the wine world, we discover that wine is full of surprises.

As tasters, we are surprised by new, unexpected taste experiences that seem inexplicable despite our background knowledge. For winemakers, every vintage is different and poses new challenges that their university textbooks and theories struggle to explain. How a wine will develop in the barrel, in the bottle, or in the glass is unknown even to experts, and predictions about these matters are continually flouted.

Even the nature of what is in the glass in front of you is a bit of a mystery. Wine is inherently a vague object with features difficult to detect even with training. Unlike the clarity of objects directly in our visual field, wine gives us only hints of flavors, scents, and textures. Furthermore, because wine is continually changing, and so are we as we experience it, a wine will not sit still for our analysis. Understanding a wine is like tracking a ghost through fog.

This mystery drives people to make wine and study it. All of this is, of course, enhanced by alcohol, the mild buzz that stops short of drunkenness that enables heightened perceptions, an openness of the self to what lies beyond it. For those who claim wine is just a beverage and wine lovers are pretentious snobs for taking it seriously, we wine lovers have only compassion, or less generously, pity.

I pose this as a choice because in many respects it is. You can chose to ignore the fact that trained experts actually pass very rigorous tasting tests. You can ignore objective findings that wine has approximately 800 aromatic compounds that explain its complexity. You can ignore the fact that making wine is a occupation fraught with uncertainty requiring constant vigilance and deep knowledge to do it well, or that people have taken it seriously for millennia. These are objective facts. Ignoring them is a choice. You can make that choice because you resent snobbish somms or think Connie Connoisseur is a pretentious ass.

But what I think you can’t deny is that world #2 is a lot more interesting that world #1—more intriguing, more mysterious, and more worthy of exploration. Chose boredom if you must but leave the rest of us alone.