This essay entitled “The Wine Drinker as Flâneur” by Jason Wilson is the most pleasurable piece of wine writing I’ve encountered in quite a while. I encourage you to read it, especially if you share the melancholic mood that permeates the piece.
Jason is sitting in Barcelona contemplating his life as a wine writer, having just found out the publication he writes for is laying him off. “What have all the thousands of tasting notes added up to? What is the worth of all these years of writing about wine?” he asks, lamenting “how the old model of talking about wine is basically dead.”
The subtitle explains the problem: What’s the point of understanding wine in an era when people do not want to understand wine?
What is interesting about the piece is the connection he makes with Walter Benjamin’s notion of the flâneur from his work The Arcades Project about late 19th Century Paris:
I started to think of the wine writer as something akin to the flâneur: A wandering connoisseur, a scout, a spy, a consumerist, an idler, yet ultimately a silly, tragic figure—someone out of step with the times who would definitely walk around with a tortoise on a leash, if the opportunity arose. Yet, like the flâneur, the wine writer is wandering a metaphorical city that no longer exists.
Jason is right that Benjamin’s figure of the flâneur is a kind of wandering connoisseur. Be he is more than just a quaint romantic or a Parisian eccentric. Philosophically, the flâneur crystallizes a response to modernity itself. At the heart of Benjamin’s portrayal, especially in The Arcades Project,lies an ideal that is both critical and utopian: the recovery of sensuous experience and reflective awareness in a world increasingly dominated by speed, commodification, and spectacle.
The flâneur notices texture, gesture, architecture, and mood. The slowness is a philosophical stance. It resists the instrumental reason of capitalist modernity, where everything has a price, a function,and a velocity. The flâneur is a kind of urban epicurean—sampling the city, not consuming it. Benjamin shows how the arcades of 19th-century Paris—glittering iron-and-glass temples of commerce—seduced the crowd with spectacle. But the flâneur walks through them not to buy, but to see. To linger. To experience. And in that lingering, he enacts a minor rebellion.
Is a wine writer such a rebel? Jason is perhaps doubtful but not utterly resistant to the idea:
A person like me, who takes wine seriously enough to make a career writing about it, has perhaps embraced certain, specific delusions. The idea that wine is an expression of culture worthy of study and critical attention, an element of the good life—and not just a mass-produced beverage—requires a certain willful poetic faith. Delusional or not, someone like me needs to believe that engaging with wine creates some meaning.
“Resistance takes many forms,” he writes. He goes on to describe a group of artisanal winemakers in Penedes who gave up on Cava to make wine as it should be made—where quality comes first, a form of resistance as well.
Jason is convinced studying wine is its own reward, yet when he tries to formulate what his approach to studying wine comes to, it is basically “endlessly collecting and scribbling fragments and scraps, out to sea with no land in site.”
His melancholia persists.
And certainly there are reasons why his melancholy might be justified. It does seem like the wine populists and “demystifiers” are now in control having arisen right alongside the reactionary populists—against elites, against expertise, against the whole idea of knowledge or truth.
But there is another reason why the study of wine seems less rewarding that Jason doesn’t emphasize—the old rules no longer apply. Wine education today is like studying the constellations with a map from the 16th century—charming, perhaps, in its historical reverence, but hopelessly out of date. The firmament has shifted. The old celestial order of noble grapes and storied regions has given way to a swirling cosmos of varietal experimentation, cross-regional mimicry, and stylistic innovation that refuses to be pinned down.
Once, to study wine was to apprentice oneself to a tradition—linear, codified, and hierarchical. One learned to distinguish Left Bank from Right, Premier Cru from Grand, the taut austerity of Mosel Riesling from the opulence of Condrieu. It was a slow climb up a pyramid of taste, with benchmarks and gatekeepers along the way. But today, that pyramid has flattened into a sprawling, rhizomatic network. Wines from Galicia, the Finger Lakes, Tasmania, or Swartland can equal or surpass their more pedigreed cousins. And new producers in Burgundy or Piedmont are just as likely to throw out the rulebook as follow it.
In this new landscape, education cannot mean memorizing typologies and appellations, because the center no longer holds. Style is no longer tethered to geography, and pedigree no longer predicts pleasure. Wine is pluralistic and polyphonic. And so the old norms—built on the faith that wines should taste a certain way because of where they’re from—has become less a guide and more a relic.
This doesn’t mean the study of wine is futile—far from it. But it requires a different orientation: less toward taxonomy and more toward responsiveness; less about mastery of a canon and more about cultivating sensitivity, discernment, and curiosity in the face of aesthetic abundance. The world of wine is still rich with meaning, but the keys have changed. To find them now is not to unlock a fixed tradition but to join a perpetual improvisation.
And guess who is well positioned to learn from this situation?—Benjamin’s flâneur who cultivates powers of observation without regard for hierarchies, conventions, or good form. Only a wanderer who walks with a tortoise on a leash, who lingers where others rush past, who delights in detours and catalogues the forgotten ephemera of the arcades, can make sense of this new wine world.
The flâneur is not a sommelier in pursuit of certification, nor a collector checking off verticals of classed growths. He—or she, or they—is an aesthete of the irregular, the idiosyncratic, the ephemeral. Where the old model demanded allegiance to maps and pedigrees, the flâneur trusts the slow accumulation of sensibility, of impressions gathered through unhurried encounters: a pet-nat tasted in a backyard, a skin-contact oddity from the Caucasus sipped out of mismatched glassware, a pinot noir that tastes like cherries and iron and somebody else’s memory.
This figure, derided by systems and ignored by markets, becomes unexpectedly relevant in a time when the canon is cracking. Because the flâneur does not seek stability. He seeks texture, mood, contrast, and meaning in motion. He knows that pleasure is not always scalable, and that surprise is more instructive than confirmation.
Wine, once a field of aspiration and order, has become a terrain for drift guided by impulse. The Flâneur thrives—not by knowing what to expect, but by learning how to notice.
I suspect Jason with his “fragments and scraps” will do just fine in this emerging wine world.
Exploring the Philosophy of Food and Wine 