A few years ago I had a brief exchange with a food technologist colleague during a thesis defense session. A student was presenting her work, on which I was the advisor in question, discussing taste as an intersubjective and negotiating value. At one point the technologist blurted out, in an attempt to highlight with deliberate sarcasm something that, having never contemplated, he found to be contradictory: “In other words, this is supposed to be the objectivity of subjectivity!” I politely replied, explaining to him in a collaborative and peaceful manner that it was precisely the case. To no avail, of course. Academic patience, a degree of which I retained at the time, has accompanied me for large parts of my life. However, the desire to be just, true, and even a bit cruel subsequently emerged. This is why I am writing these lines and am doing it drinking a Dettori Tenores: a slap in the face, a violent slash that ends up caressing me. A strong, almost ferocious sweetness. With every caress there is a drop of blood—this wine opens up in me a universe of vulnerability without any weaknesses, an unsettling openness in which I feel things simply with all their force but without needing to understand them. To meet with wine, I have needed to take a longer path, one that I am presenting to you here and now in this chapter. A path that, at a certain point, goes up and down. You rise up, you gain a vantage point, and then, descending, you lose it again with a conscious enjoyment of that disappearing illusion, of that reborn journey. Others may follow different, immediate, and more artistic paths, but this is mine and I offer it up to the reader.
Why have we created objectivity? When did we start needing it? Objectivity comforts and places us at a safe distance, but its invention is not obvious and inescapable within human history. I don’t mean that it’s better or worse, just not inescapable. Ethnography tells us about the actual existence of communities where the world and what inhabits it are not perceived “objectively,” like something in front of us and at a distance. Objectivity is a special category that we have invented as the ambassadors of logic. Even here in the West, as children or when we are dreaming, we have no need for objectivity because we have no need for a safe distance. If anything, during the first years of our existence or while we sleep, we want to encounter the unknown or the new without any safety nets. We Westerners, however, and in particular we modern Westerners, have decided to rigidly separate childhood time from adult time, dreaming from being awake, our imagination from reality. Imagination itself is calibrated on adult perceptions, and there are very few aesthetic theories based on childhood since art too has something to do with the adult world of well-defined reason by providing it openings. In adult and waking time, therefore, we perceive according to an “objective” model. This allows us to distinguish between truth and falsity. We think, build bridges, laser machines, information systems, and many other things with true objectivity. Nonetheless, and effectively truly, bridges can also be built where—in many communities studied by anthropologists—there is no rigorous demarcation between dreaming and waking, fantasy and reason, clock-time and time measured by tasks, by doing what our life commits us to do. In spite of this, it is believed that the existence of such artifacts depends entirely on the possibility of knowing objects with analytical exactness without which, it is held, nothing of all this would exist. Above all, however, we cultivate the illusion of control over the things of the world through objectivity, and this is reassuring. And since we have metabolized, as if they were drinking water, the connections between the evidence of our knowledge of the world and objectivity, everything we want to know, including ourselves, is elaborated and perceived as an object.
To perceive objects means, above all, to perceive the world as a collection of independent things: ourselves on the one side and a house, the ground under our feet, the sky above us, on the other. Language favors, or rather is the illusion necessary for, this separation: a world populated by objects that can relate the one to the other but, by rights and de facto, are discrete entities. On the other side of objectivity, in this dualist model, stand subjectivity and its phantoms. Subjectivity is characterized as uncertain, untrustworthy, and insecure. Subjectivity stands at the margins or is even removed from true knowledge and is accepted only if it can be tamed by means of grids, tables, or categories that are made to correspond to the “objects.” Without grids, tables, or categories—without “systems”—subjectivity might be allowed to circulate within limited territories, in well-defined spaces where there is no question of bridges, lasers, information systems, or biomedical equipment. Within this model, subjectivity is free only in dreams, in the imagination of poets, in children’s drawings, or in the questions of taste where, it is said, it is pointless to dispute. Disputing means arguing, and in order to argue you need conceptual schemata and a stable and fixed language that permits arriving at neutral, shared, communicable, and definitive truths.
To define/definitive/definition: the ambit of objective knowledge requires being able to distinguish and to be precise. Today this model is even proposed for the adult world of wine culture and expertise that is usually objectified, beginning with acquired instructions shrouded in grammatical descriptions of presumed universal validity, in order to appreciate in a distinct and distal way. We are following a different path, placing ourselves on a different level. This does not mean pleading the case for something untrue, of course. It means beginning to perceive what is true beyond the cloak of the objective object. This does not mean that here we will be arguing against objectivity but, rather, that we will be avoiding it with joyous impiety. If arguing aims at being right according to the measurements of objective knowledge, which means that only what is measurable can be true, a different approach permits us to draw a different picture. The very questions we pose ourselves can be challenged, as Wittgenstein suggests when he asks us to dissolve rather than resolve a problem. In this way we might discover that there is something substantially more real than objective knowledge. Objectivity, on the other hand, is not a simple or evident fact—as some philosophers have shown us, even what is a given is a myth in its own right. If we observe things with the unarmed gaze of childhood, we will find a world inhabited by beings that are very different from one another. A stone, a dog, the wind, water, hair, teeth, and a smile, copper or grapes, railway lines, airplanes, and ships, newborn babies, milk, leaves, a tornado, cars and bridges, billboards and rain, the sea and the sky. It was only at a certain moment, and according to a specific evolution, that human thought began to consider defining, grouping, and abstracting these multiplicities, putting into classes and knowing in the same way, with the same instruments and the same language, the undefined list of the things of the world in which those just named represent a minimal part. Above all, however, our mind has performed an inversion of logic—in modern philosophy, these limitations, from the relationships to their ending, have been called “transcendental” or, that is, that before these concrete entities there has to be something that makes them possible. Let us consider, for example, the notion of space: an empty “container,” the condition of everything that effectively takes place there, of the places, of the sky or the earth, of the roads and paths that would appear to be secondary to or dependent on space per se. This also occurs with wine. Before the encounter with this individual wine, I need its “wineness” as an object, and this generates the question that prepares the field for objectivity as such: “What is wine?” But are we sure that this passage is absolutely essential?
Epistenology promotes a different model that is both practical and theoretical. One of the consequences of what I am proposing is, for example, that I prefer to drink a bottle of wine in its entirety if the encounter is gratifying, rather than tasting ten or twenty different wines in order to analyze, compare, and evaluate them as objects. I am very aware of the need for criticism, comparisons, and judgments. And I am equally aware of how necessary all this is if we interpret wine as an object, subject to the market, for example. Nonetheless, this project, epistenology, aims to propose another, complementary, if not alternative, possibility for the wines encountered. From a certain standpoint, it can also be seen as a criticism of criticism, for taking charge of life rather than delegating it.
Adherence to the myth of given knowledge and objectivity relates not only to the process of passing from infancy to adulthood but also to the very movement that produces that uniform idea of “history.” Nonetheless, as noted by many historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and even philosophers, the path that has led to the objective paradigm of modern science, based on analytical and experimental methods, has been anything but straightforward. Mathematics, physics, and chemistry have evolved by interweaving with contextual questions and problems relating to the more complex social and cultural processes: they cannot be understood by placing them within brackets and ignoring their origins and journeys, which are anything but neutral and abstract. The strategy of measuring many of the entities that make up the world using the same instruments—abstraction, the reduction to numbers and quantities—has not been inevitable but the outcome of a journey, a contingent necessity without a cause. Subsequently, there has been the elaboration of that which we define as “reality” on a stable and fixed basis. Modern knowledge about wine has undergone this same journey by being set into the same model. Let us try to set it free.
Of course, in modern, Western culture it has been immediately evident that at least some of the elements that constitute the world contain and express different qualities that cannot be reduced—even within an objectivist perspective—to analytical exactness. The birth of modern aesthetics in the eighteenth century corresponded to the human, all too human, need for reserving to it a specific space. Locke, Descartes, and Galileo defined phenomena such as colors, smells, and tastes as secondary qualities because they did not possess sufficient solidity and stability to be included within the scope of clear and distinct, neutral and perfect science. These great scientists and philosophers and, as a consequence, also great mythographers produced their fantastical narrations, calling up, on the part of other thinkers, the need to build a specific and integrative space for the considerable part of our lives that includes emotions, sentiments, and passions; imagination, narration, and poetry. In other words, all these forms of encounter in which the knot produced by the interweaving of different elements inhabiting the world cannot be understood through rational analysis and according to the dualist subjective/objective model, but by means of a relational perspective.
Would we ever define an experienced interhuman relationship as objective? A relationship can be real or not real, banal or profound, complicated or superficial, but it definitely cannot be objective. Let us consider the possibilities opened up by some of the elements in the random list just mentioned: when we take a dog out for a walk, when we play with a child or sniff a flower, we do not perceive the grains of time passed in terms of objectivity but in those of truth, intensity, emotion, pleasure, boredom, or unease. Friendships and love relationships are real or not real not insofar as they are more or less “objective.” The thought of objectivity as the outcome of a presumed, neutral knowledge makes no sense at all. In effect, in a relationship, there is no neutrality: we know something of the world, something other than ourselves with all that this implies. “Subjects” are substances that we encounter and, at the same time, are both the outcome but also the producers of relationships. Clearly, within the relationship, the idea of putting aside, removing, suspending the subject never even arises. It is in this way that we know ourselves insofar as we live by and in this relationship. We participate, not considering it, for this reason, as false or uncertain since the truth depends on something different. Relationships are interweavings, the effects of encounters, processes that give rise to stories. What strikes us and endures in a relationship is its narrative quality, its style, and its singular and irreducible nature or, in other words, precisely what objective knowledge wants to remove because it is unessential. Knowledge as a relationship, an encounter that interweaves lines and processes, however, does not possess essentiality as its motive because all that occurs is both pertinent and important. The model of the relationship thus permits us to pass from a world occupied by subjects and objects to a world inhabited and animated by living substances.
If the model of objective knowledge aims to neutralize, removing fluid differences, living characters, and singularity from consideration because what it wants to create is a universe of static generalizations, relationship is created in the world of elements lived here and now and then passing away. As dualism and division, at least in most Western modern philosophy, ask for distance, then objectivity requires a representation, a faith that delegates: if that which I know must have a general value and must not relate solely to the specific nature of my current experience, this universal abstraction must be constructed elsewhere. We entrust ourselves to others and delegate to them when it is a question of exact and analytical knowledge because we do not have the tools for measuring it directly. The Earth appears to be flat, but we know (a knowledge based on trust) that it is actually spherical. In the laboratories of the infinitely small and in the centers studying the infinitely large, where those great prosthetics of the human eye that are microscopes and telescopes hold sway, scientific development requires competencies, great ability, and machines that are unavailable to ordinary, daily life. Of course, I do not intend to question the absolute importance of such models. As the crystallizations of complex processes made by genius minds, these are wholly legitimate mytheme in a life conquered and gradually constructed with effort, at least within our culture and society. The point is that these trajectories are determinate perspectives and not the only way to experience and experiment with life. I want to suggest an alternative path with and through wine because I believe that this now produces useful and alternative strategies that fit better with the demands of the world we inhabit. Again, this does not mean overturning arguments or replacing one hierarchy of thought with another. It means trying to see things from a different perspective, in a relationship where there is no need to delegate to others the knowledge that we receive, accepting it as an objective given. In some cases and for many people, delegation is comfortable; it removes some of the burden of life. Even representative democracy is a delegation device that legitimates the power of some. No one, however, gets any delegation in a relationship. We place our trust only in the element encountered and that lives intertwined with us. We do not place our trust in third parties because relationships have a sense and produce knowledge only if experienced and appreciated directly, live. The knowledge produced in effective relationships is called living experience or, even, ways of life. With wine, we can create new symbols and forms of life, as long as we accept it not as an object but as a fluid and living substance.
Wine is not a knowledge to be objectified but an encounter to be experienced. It is not about the acquisition of data and information according to an established grammar and syntax but about the creation of images and trajectories. I love wine because it bestows on me the constant amazement of triggering possible relationships, a vastness of images that I unfold and in which I find and produce continuous correspondences. I drink to reconstruct and create a fiber, to illuminate the hidden connections between the disentangled things of the world.
I recall that sometimes, as in the house with the low ceiling, pink Champagne gave us the keys to a hard-earned intimacy. Other times, as in the restaurant of the aromas in Milan, an Altura del Giglio swept us beyond the distinction between public and private. That wine provided us with a total exposure of our most intimate being, because no one could see us. We were invisible while in full sight. The Altura protected us because it tied a knot, which allowed us to perceive everything while we were in a nonobjective but relational and atmospheric mode.
You might object that this evidence tells us nothing about wine “as such,” and it is merely a personal narrative. But this is precisely the point, because wine “as such” does not exist, and to pretend it does means placing it with both feet in the sphere of the dualist paradigm, the subject on one side, the object on the other. This wine does not exist as a banal “element” as such; rather, it is the relationship that is banal. Then there are elements that favor and encourage more beautiful and gratifying relationships. Therefore a live and vital wine and an intelligent and sensitive companion are encountered and trigger a relationship where something like a “great wine” emerges. As far as I know, only those wines, those determinate bottles that I have encountered along the way, exist. A “cheap” wine and an “expensive” one: these categories do not hold any “objective quality” measure, as quality is what one encounters, recognizes, and simultaneously makes in a lived experience. Feeling/thinking this way calls for a shift of perception, I know; but now I have discovered that such a perception is possible.
Epistenology attends the knots perceived when various elements combine, among which is wine, and on their coming into being—or, in other words, perceived and therefore created. This is not the “post-truth” ideology—anything but! It is instead a radically relational approach, which, in itself, opens up situations that are never fixed and completed. The consideration that wine is an encounter to be had thus expresses the most ruthless grip on reality with regard to what effectively occurs and happens during our travels along the paths and roads of the Earth that we call “the world”—travels that make the world what it is at one and the same time. We are elements in motion that perceive. We perceive by moving ourselves, and while we perceive we live and flow, changing by transforming ourselves through that which we encounter. Wine: I have repeatedly stated that there is no essence of wine but only the existence of wines, concrete happenings and events. So to which wines am I referring when I describe my encounters? Just to the wines that facilitate the encounter, which are the only ones that interest me today and with which I wish to engage. Which are these? The wines in which life manifests itself and develops most strongly and with the greatest degree of unforeseeable freedom. In principle, every wine can be vital, although not with the same force, because life is continuously made and it is relational; there are wines that have been designed and contained by the myth of being an object. They were born to be slaves, and for this reason it is more difficult for them to be open to encounters. One can perceive life or death while encountering the wine with attention and care. When perception is open and tuned, wine answers accordingly if it is living and on its own. Life is movement, process, and transformation. It is not a given but a task. Life is what is woven every day, life is the relationship, and it is within the relationship that things are given life. So it is for the wine.
Mario Soldati, great Italian writer and wine lover, wrote, “Wine is the poetry of the earth.” Poetry as poiesis derived from the Greek “to make,” producing something of value. Primarily, wine is the value of the earth. From the earth comes wine by means of the vine and its fruits. A vertical process, from the vine roots to the grape berries on the plant, because life is generated underground where the minerals, rocks, and water reside. Under the ground lies the mineral world, while above ground life is manifest—a life made of surfaces and substances, of air and light. Between the below and above lies the earth, that thin layer that is the skin of the world. A skin that is porous, connecting inside and outside, receiving from below and pushing outward. Wine is produced by the vitality of the earth because the wine rests its roots on it, sinking them down, and the plant is the mother of the fruits to which it transfers the substances elaborated by its metabolism. When the vitality of the earth is depleted or compromised because those who make wine work in accordance with the idea that the material is merely an extension, an object to be dominated, then the plant will need further assistance in order to receive that which it needs to transmit to the fruit. This results in the assistance created by objective knowledge, the produce of syntheses created thanks to microscopes and laboratories. Even if this does not necessarily destroy the potentials of life —because life tends to hang on, and often adapts and resurrects itself, and new relationships produce life—nonetheless, it is transfigured and undoubtedly impoverished.
Wine is animate. Wine is vibrant and vital as it is open to be encountered by us as part of an experience. Life is not the start of movement; it is, rather, movement that produces life. This is true for different entities, not just wine. The whole world can be animate, not because objects possess a soul inside them; once again, this false representation comes from the objectivist model, and objects are exactly what cannot be animated, because they are detached from the currents of life. Instead, the whole world can be alive once we are open to feel and think of it not as a sum of detached objects but rather as a continuous flux of intersected and fluid elements that are encountered as the experience. To perceive the world as alive does not mean accepting the idea that, somewhere or other, it has a soul. The soul is not owned but is produced and created as the partial result of the unceasing generation and transformation of everything. To perceive this animation means feeling things in accordance with their materials, their substances, and not as stable objects but rather as continuously created force fields. Through the medium of air, substances are reached on their surfaces by other substances, organisms, light, heat, and water. There is always a metabolic exchange, in varying degrees. Movement breaks the distinction between outside and inside since it is the very process of the generation of life. This is why producing wine according to a dualist and Cartesian idea of the living subject and passive object, over which a mind exerts its will, does not help in the creation of a vital relationship. Such a project aims to produce something that is stillborn, to be consumed, and which only with great difficulty can avoid its fate.
It is therefore doubly mistaken to consider wine as an object, a static and helpless res extensa: on the one hand, because no element is such in itself and absolutely, but above all because, if it is allowed to express itself as an active relationship, wine has evolutionary and transformative processes. From the roots of the plant through to the end of its cycle of life. These processes are so rapid and perceptible that they are truly similar to our own, including in terms of time that can be measured by the clock: birth, growth, evolution, decadence, and death. The human processes are usually just a little bit longer. The magic of wine therefore comes from the interweaving of the greatly underestimated sky and earth, from climates, from meteorology and atmospheres, from bacteria and soils and leaves—from plants with deep roots, from grapes and their fermentation. Its ability to transform itself is like my own transient and fluid sense of identity: it changes and evolves, it’s different while remaining “the same,” it radiates a style and a character that shape and produce the encounter with those who drink it.
On the other hand, the objectivist paradigm leads us to consider wine in a different way. Not as a continuous production of creative relationships—from the roots of the wine to the drinker—and not as a text/fabric but as a work/object, well-undifferentiated, static ontology, malleable and molded at will. Thus in this model the vital potential of wine is impoverished and repressed by further interventions. These are defined as “corrections” and “improvements”—with respect to what I will discuss further on—that castrate its organic and partially spontaneous development in preference for an external imposition by the relevant demiurge—I will improve you in relation to an idea, and you will become this because that is the way things are. This idea is one of oenological correctness: making wine as a work/object and not as a text/fabric, as the outcome of a grammatical exercise, a writing that respects standards and is appreciated because of the final actions. In this way, tasting becomes a series of corrections, activities of control with which each result is measured by its adherence to the taste produced by such a grammar. Émile Peynaud, the master of modern, positivist oenology, told us that taste must be instructed to its rules. In contrast, we know that syntax and grammars are the outcome of cultural and social processes. Holding to them is a choice.
Epistenology is a field of open opportunities, a field that has been freed from the illusion of the need for a single possible “science.” It contains no science, nor the possibility of falsifications, no conjectures or refutations, when dealing with the encounter with wine. What it does have is a multiplicity of practices, styles, and expressions that are legitimate whenever there is a drinker who is both disposed to and capable of appreciating it. For this reason, it is ridiculous to consider wine with narcissistic presumption based on a model of objective knowledge. Unfortunately, this is what happens when the “product” consists of a generic and general object to be measured and therefore the encounter is difficult and abstract. Above all, within this model, there is no interest in encountering anyone. In contrast, in the vitality triggered by the subsoil and transmitted through the earth and the sky to the plant and its fruits, wine clearly reveals itself to be a living element, a vital organism that expresses character and personality that cannot be reduced to any form of abstraction. There is no essence of wine because wines exist only through concrete experiences where lines, traces, nodes, and relationships with someone who will subsequently drink them emerge, as, for example, on this May evening. Epistenology predisposes us for the encounter with wine as a dynamic element that facilitates the relationship as an active correspondence. Of course, it is still possible to be indifferent even to those wines that call out to us, setting out signposts and ropes to draw us in, as occurs in any kind of encounter—arid and futureless lines, suspended lives. As here proposed, however, it will be possible to perceive the world as a continuously woven tapestry while we march over the earth. It is like an infinite papyrus that unrolls before us as we walk, like Italian cartoonist Osvaldo Cavandoli’s line, as long as both lines and the papyrus are seen as products of our movement—allowing the emergence of our wonder at what happens as a constant generation, and for us to accept this feeling with vulnerable grace. It happens with art, it happens with eros, and it happens when we feel things without explaining them. It’s called magic, and it also happens with wine.
In French, the ageing of wine is called élevage. The word élevage is used for the education of children, as in their formation before they venture out into the world on their own. This period involves many actors: parents, friends, relations, teachers, animals, landscapes, the sun, the rain, the wind, roads, atmospheres, sounds, odors, fables, and words. Wine, of course, is not produced out of nothing. Wine is not a mere product because it is not just a fixed oeuvre —it is produced and is a text. Wine is the fruit of an active interweaving of the sky, the earth, feet, hands, and actions, a process that began a long way back and, furthermore, has always been developing. The role of humans in the creation of wine is only the very last phase, from the vine to the bottle, because everything that takes place before is lost in the interactions that are no longer dependent on us—progeny, elements, ancestors. This role is peculiar. Those who make wine follow the maieutic method, and, in this sense, some have suggested that those following this method should be defined as custodians rather than producers. It’s a nice definition but needs to be used with care as it risks falling into the objectivating funnel, representing wine and humans as two distinct and separate elements, the protected object and the protecting subject. However, maintaining the animated and relational perspective by means of which wine is not an object to be measured but an encounter to be experienced means considering wine and the rest, those who make it and those who drink it, as an inextricable fabric of lines, encounters, and nodes. Every wine drunk is a new knot tied.
The trees of the great artist Giuseppe Penone express this idea to perfection: elements/artifacts, the tangled mass of humans and plants, evolve and transform themselves as fields of dynamic relationships. There is a correspondence between them and us in the postal and rather outdated sense of the word. It is a correspondence as a path, a written communication, letters through which we try to know about each other and ourselves; every line, every page, and every missive needs lines, pages, and letters, the previous and the future, integrated events, in order for there to be a narrative. The relationship comes alive in the response of the other and in their further questions. This also happens with wines as the knots produced in the crossroads of the encounter between the maieutic, the liquid element, and the drinker: there is not “the wine” on the one hand and those who make and drink it on the other. The maieutics and the drinkers “make” the wines to the same degree that the wines, the intersections of many different elements and organisms, in turn give us life. Wines exist or, in other words, this bottle exists as the trace produced by these maieutic approaches that in turn encounters me, the drinker, in this determinate context —an aware, participated, partial, and perfect relationship.
Epistenology is therefore the knot of ontology and epistemology. Not so much a knowledge of wine; an epistemology of wine would be sufficient in this case (and the new name would just be a clever stunt). Rather, epistenology is a knowledge with wine created in the dense grain of time, within the inhabited world. The n of beings—Greek ōnta—combines in our perception as an act of choice and trust (pistis). Episteme, then, is ōnta and ōnta is episteme: there is no relativism lurking in the background, only processes and relationships, texts as fabrics, tangles of lines, dense temporality, and the unavoidability of atmospheres. In other words, there is a radical and uncompromising grip on reality. This wine is the encounters that have created it, and the bottle is not an example of an abstract category. For the same reason, I find the fetishism of vintages, the collection of labels, the adoration of producers to be incomprehensible. If this seems to make sense in our tranquil daily lives, nonetheless, there is another possible story, an aggregate or an alternative: the vitality of wine is produced in the significant relationships that are established, going beyond schematic reductionisms and permitting new opportunities for those who know how to capture them by calling themselves into question. Furthermore, this rebirth takes place annually and is called “the harvest.” The question of “good” or “bad” harvests is therefore an error typical of aesthetics as the promotion of fixed criteria of the good and the beautiful—signifying its inevitable demise. It is a reassuring distraction, multiplication tables learned by rote. A good vintage with respect to certain criteria, of course. But what about going beyond these transmitted criteria?
When did I first encounter wine? When did I become aware of its powers to establish relationships that pulverize the rigid and foreseeable mechanisms of ability, of aromatic recognitions, of written typologies codified by unimaginative grammars—desperate grammars that do not search for true phrases, but abstract objectivities for the mythological protection of their existence from the ceaseless flow of the river? This took place not that long ago, and there were no revelations on the road to Damascus but rather a ferocious and progressive evolution. Somehow, at a certain point, wine as substance, no longer wine as object, began to speak to me because I re-created the ears, eyes, nose, mouth, and, above all, the touch that could listen to and accept it. Some relationships are particularly impressed on my memory. The Paradiso di Manfredi drunk in spring 2012 in Pistoia, the Coulée de Serrant drunk in Turin on that summer evening in 2013, the white Château Musar in Milan when I became aware of what I wanted to remove. Then, so many glasses before dinner, unexpectedly on the rocking chair on my porch, through to the source of this essay’s writing on November 29, 2014. On that date, thanks to Pierre Overnoy’s Arbois Pupillin and Joly’s Les Vieux Clos, everything became full of gods. The gods were created because I encountered them and, therefore, impiety came to rule the house. I became aware of them, the fantastic gods of the living world, taking into account the plexus where creation coincides with discovery and all this lies in the combination of yourself and all the others, those with whom we have shared our journeys. On that day, the entanglements of lines created a perfect knot. Since the earliest of times, many have captured the fantastic power of wine, the liquid of community and sharing, and the trigger for images that become memories. Of course, once we have fully understood the socializing intimacy of wine, then, every now and again, we are able to drink it on our own. The experience of wine on our own is like Baudelaire’s experience of crowds: only those who are able to enjoy being alone can enjoy being in crowds. Only those who know how to share the encounter with wine can also get joy from a one-to-one relationship.
Being disposed to encounter wine means loving the experience of the relationship, its possibilities as well as its risks. Nothing can any longer become (this is not being, let’s let ourselves go) as it was before. Because wine is those possibilities and those risks, “the wine” is dissolved in wines, in these wines that I drink as if there were no tomorrow, because tomorrow is already now, instant by instant and movement by movement. It is the illogical note of temporal ecstasies. There is no fixed ontology that can stand up to it: whether this is considered in the sense of the “objective” constituent parts of wine or in the equally hypostatic sense of the rigid geographies in the played out song of the terroir. In reality, there is nothing less static than places. They are, in contrast, hives that are continuously redefined, both explicitly and implicitly, including within the regulated spaces of current legislation.
Wine is its occurring and ongoing taste as a relationship and as resistance. This wine is what we are when we encounter it—a trigger, an alchemy that needs no knowledge of the facts to work. Within the model of objective knowledge, what we cannot explain by its causes is not true, or, at the very least, it lies somewhere in-between. In the relationship, in contrast, we are not concerned with the causes because that which works is true. It is not pragmatism but process. To be able to describe what we observe, it is necessary to participate, and this does not mean elevations or epoché. The same goes for when we drink a wine by encountering it: we become that wine. Touching its skin with ours, we capture substances and mix with them. The substance of wine is, in turn, a fabric: its effects are not solely dependent on the alcohol, although every wine possesses psychotropic qualities that can provide joy and enjoyment, when assimilated in a manner suited to the encounter. The effects of alcohol intertwine and are part of the overall ecology. Wine is all its constituent parts—the bottle, those who drink it, its surroundings and internal elements—that, in their entanglement, are produced every time anew. Anyone who has encountered a vital, dynamic, and lively wine is well aware that the quality of inebriation is never identical. It depends on the type of encounter. Encounters and stories, narratives in which characters emerge and ceaselessly shape and remodel themselves. At times this wine comes to us unexpectedly, without any deliberate intent, and, if anything, these unforeseen events are often the most interesting. The encounter can be secular, joyous, or spiritual, pragmatically distracted, but in all cases there are endless possibilities—pliable and relaxed like the life we lead every day.