When we communicate about wine, what message is being transmitted?

Beauty has long been associated with those moments in life that cannot easily be spoken about—what is often called the ineffable. When astonished or transfixed by nature, a work or art, or a bottle of wine, words even finely voiced seem inadequate.

Are words destined to fail? Can we not share anything of the experience of beauty?

On the one hand the experience of beauty is private; it is after all my experience not someone else’s. But we also seem to have a great need to share our experiences. Words fail but that doesn’t get us to shut up.

Some shared responses to beauty seem possible raising our hopes that communication is not hopeless. Most everyone agrees the Mona Lisa is beautiful (if you can actually get close enough to enjoy the diminutive painting amidst the hordes at the Louvre). Most everyone agrees that Domaine de la Romanée-Conti makes lovely wine if you can afford a taste.

But disagreements are just as common. As Alexander Nehamas argues, beauty forms communities of like-minded lovers who share an affection for certain works of art (or wine) and who do find it possible to communicate their obsession. Something escapes the dark tunnels of subjectivity to survive in a clearing where others mingle. But in the process this excludes people who don’t get it. We are often bored to tears by something that fascinates others. Across that barrier words may well fail.

Beauty forms communities of rivals. The contretemps between conventional and natural wine is the latest to divide the wine world. May it not be the last.

I’ve been looking at how the history of debate about the concept of beauty helps us think about the aesthetic experience of wine. (I covered the connection between wine, beauty and mystery here.)

Another feature of beauty that has a long history of discussion is its relationship to change and mortality. Beauty is often characterized as ephemeral—fleeting, inevitably fading and ultimately damaged by the passage of time. Unlike ordinary pleasures, beauty’s ephemerality is especially poignant because something beautiful is irreplaceable, which entails that for something to be beautiful it must be unique. There is no recovery of damaged beauty.

Wine is nothing if not ephemeral. “Ephemeral” comes from the ancient Greek word “ephemeros” which meant lasting only a day. Wine literally lasts only a day once the bottle is open unless you take special steps to protect it from oxygen.

Unfortunately, for most wine consumers, ephemerality means little. But for wine lovers, ephemerality may be the most important feature of a wine responsible for much of its aesthetic appeal. Once the wine is in the glass, aromas come and go. Some last only a few seconds, others appear, then disappear only to appear again after several minutes. The tracking of wine’s ephemera is one of the real joys of appreciating a wine over time—an experience wholly lacking from the preparation of the typical tasting note which involves a few seconds of sniffing and spitting before moving on.

The ephemerality of wine makes sharing it especially poignant. Knowing we have only a few hours to drink it, we devote special attention to how we will share it and with whom. The fact that its time is short makes the experience of the wine more vital. Even if you have squirreled away another bottle, because each bottle ages differently, there is no guarantee you can have that experience again. When drinking an aged wine it is almost always the case that the experience you are having at the moment is the only time you will have that experience. It is surely an occasion worth savoring.

It is though a wine’s aging process where the poignancy of fading beauty acquires exquisite intensity in its connection to mortality. That is worthy of its own post which I will have finished next week.

This post continues my series on whether the millennia-long debate over the nature of beauty can give us important insights into wine quality.  (Part 1 is here)

One of the more persistent themes associated with beauty since Plato and continuing into the present day is that beauty is connected to mystery. Beauty while alluring also withholds something. From the occult light tripping across a Turrell installation, to the pulsating color fields of Rothko, to the strange cadences of Messiaen’s unraveling of bird song, beauty emerges from the sensory surface only to then refer to something beyond what we can experience in the moment. We often describe beautiful objects as enthralling or captivating, as if there were something active in the object to which the perceiver must respond with curiosity. Of course the routine use of “beauty” or “mystery” may be just terminological inflation, just a colorful way of saying “I really, really like that” but if we take the terminology of beauty and mystery seriously at face value it suggests there is something animated in our experience of beauty which invokes the idea of vitality and of something emerging only dimly perceived.

Wine too has this aura of mystery about it. The moment in which you taste something you have never tasted before provokes the suspicion that there is more here than is apparent; the wine and the wine world have more to give; my engagement hasn’t reached its full potential. Beauty draws us in because the patterns we sense in beautiful objects are incomplete.

This anticipation of something more, this surfeit of potential, amounts to a love of mystery. 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 mystery. Wine is inherently a vague object, its 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 and will not sit still for our analysis. It is this mystery that drives people to make wine and study it.

Wines that have the complexity and originality to arrest our attention, to hold us captive waiting for its next move, exuding paradoxical features, redolent of honey and wounds, have this aura of mystery.

Most of the world’s most celebrated wines have this sense of mystery about them. But such wines don’t have to be expensive. This relatively affordable California Norton had that mysterious quality.