We like to imagine wine as something humans make. A product, crafted. The fruit of labor, skill, and tradition. We talk of “control,” of shaping the outcome in the cellar or vineyard. The winemaker as conductor, the grape as instrument. But this picture is a polite fiction. Wine is never just the sum of our intentions.
The truth is—wine has a will of its own.
It slips away from us, resists us, throws surprises at us. A barrel behaves unpredictably. A vintage veers off course. A vineyard reveals a quirk no map or soil test could forecast. Even within a single vine row, subtle shifts in soil or sun can create radically different expressions. This isn’t a glitch in the system. It is the system. And it reminds us that wine is less a static object than a drama unfolding across time.
What if we stopped thinking of wine as a passive material, acted upon, and instead saw it as a kind of co-conspirator? Not quite alive in the biological sense, but certainly lifelike. Reactive. Disposed to act, to shift, to surprise. A participant in its own becoming.
This is what gives wine its aesthetic charge—what makes it more than a drink. Wine ages, mutates, surprises us. It can defy expectations even after the cork is pulled. It isn’t inert. It has moods. It speaks, not always clearly, and not always when we’re listening, but it speaks.
And that speech isn’t just for winemakers. It’s also for those who taste with attention. The enthusiasts who chase obscure cuvées and cellar bottles for years in the hope of witnessing a transformation aren’t just chasing pleasure. They’re chasing anomaly—those moments when a wine refuses to behave and, in doing so, becomes unforgettable.
This makes wine one of the rare cases where nature’s unruliness isn’t a nuisance to be engineered away but the very thing we’re after. Artisan winemakers know this. They don’t try to silence the variables. They collaborate with them. Their task isn’t to dominate the materials but to negotiate, improvise, adapt. And if they’re lucky, to be surprised.
Contrast this with industrial winemaking, which works tirelessly to remove the unknown from the equation. Standardize the grape. Homogenize the taste. Minimize deviation. These wines might be pleasant, even technically sound, but they lack strangeness. They don’t haunt or thrill. They don’t evolve. They simply behave.
That’s why the industrial model can’t explain why wine captivates. It can reproduce a flavor profile but not the phenomenon of attention. It can’t explain why we return to certain bottles, or why some glasses feel like conversations and others like transactions. It can’t tell us why we sip something and suddenly feel time open up.
Because what draws us to wine isn’t just what we know, but what we can’t quite name.
In this light, the aesthetic value of wine doesn’t reside solely in its taste, but in its capacity to throw us off balance—to awaken our senses to difference, to variation, to emergence. To make us feel the presence of something that wasn’t wholly made, but somehow arrived.
It’s a lesson in humility. It reminds us that control is partial, that the world contains agencies beyond our own, and that beauty often lies in what exceeds us. It’s not just that wine “develops.” It’s that it develops in ways we can’t wholly predict or command. And that’s the fascination.
So perhaps it’s time to drop the old opposition between subject and object, between human intention and inert matter. Wine doesn’t fit neatly into that split. It’s made, certainly, but it also makes itself. It has directionality, it responds, it insists. It’s not a blank canvas, but something closer to a landscape—wild, shaped, but never finished.
To call wine “alive” is not a poetic flourish, but an attempt to register the real complexity of the thing. Wine acts, and it acts on us.
And in that exchange—in the give and take, the drift and surprise—something like meaning emerges. Not the kind we can paraphrase, but the kind we feel when we realize we’re not the only ones speaking.
Exploring the Philosophy of Food and Wine 