Unified Perception Without Goals in Place of Trained and Aimed Sense
Everything that is part of the processes occurring in experience contributes to making the taste of wine. Thus in the actual situation the taste of wine is no different from tasting with wine. Epistenology was born when I felt I had understood this passage. Everything that flows can be equally important for perceiving with touch (apton), that kind of feeling obliquely that is tasting with wine.
To release tasting from the prison of sense as well as from correct rationality, we must also free it from the doldrums of correct pairing. When I presented the Italian edition of the book in wine bars and restaurants, the organizers often asked me what wines I was using as examples so that the chefs could match them with the right food. This was followed by my usual amiable clarification, combined with a degree of disappointment that epistenology was not fully understood by my hosts. Using this approach, a right pairing, based on the alleged correctness of taste, is pure folly. Of course, this does not mean that we mustn’t consider making a choice of what to drink that we imagine can be fulfilling, but for this precise reason we can make this “perfect” and “complete” bond ourselves by creating combinations that are not preestablished and preordained.
I once set the following exercise: participants had to swap clothes—shoes, shirts, colors, accessories, everything possible—pairing them in the most curious and unexpected ways and thereby creating previously unimagined, or what they saw as possibly kitsch, combinations. Then they drank wine with food in a strange and carnivalesque atmosphere. Pairing emerged from this experience under a different light. By enacting a transformation, the participants understood that pairing is a creative possibility and not a duty to be fulfilled according to rules that have been assimilated. What we call “pairing” is not a paired relationship, like a couple, because, at the very least, it is a threesome. Food and drink do not correspond to each other but to us, and we are not neutral or “transparent analysts” of what would go best with what but active participants in this correspondence. If something makes me feel good, then that is the perfect match.
An approach called “food pairing” promises gustatory happiness by combining foods and wines chosen with method and analysis. This objectivity would allow us (of course, with accompanying copyrights, courses, and credit cards) to learn how to combine ingredients and flavors not by chance but by following the necessities of “science.” As a result, there would be one food and one wine and their encounter according to what science, with its tools for analyzing elements and segments, tells us about flavors and their more or less enjoyable combinations. This is the judgment of taste based entirely on a scientific approach. The premise of this objectifying and analytical model is a biophysical naturalism that quickly demonstrates what a worn-out idea it is. Indeed, we cannot deconstruct the food, wine, or other drinks we experience and then reconstruct them into flavors and discrete, simple, atomic elements. Abstraction is the only way to do this, after the experience is over or by observing it from the outside, assigning values to what we eat and drink rather than flavors. A predefined and regulated pairing is the triumph of a thematic approach that dissects, divides, and then recomposes, like Lego. Even a child knows, however, that she can build whatever her imagination and the possibilities for combining provide without needing to submit to either restrictions or preestablished rules. But the scientists who pair drinks with foods view themselves as functionaries who must serve the hegemony of established knowledge—which is not all that established anyway—rather than encouraging new possibilities and combinations.
Another phantom has recently been haunting the rooms of this abstract, thematized, and objective tasteology—which is the mother of all the competent, methodical, and judicious degustoramas—and this is the ghost of the neuro. In science, there is a neuro of everything, which makes sense some of the time (we will not go into the details, but obviously wines and serious diseases are two separate things). But what is the meaning for us of neurogastronomy or neuroenology (which, if I wanted to be a bit more of a Dadaist, I could write as n(€)enology)? In a nutshell, they explain, they show us that nowadays, thanks to functional (neuro)imaging, we can at last know—with a “naturally” analytical knowledge based on sight, on solid and certain scientific perceptions—what happens in our head when we taste and smell. Do you know that what is happening in your brain when you feel these tastes and aromas is this way or that? Good. In reply, all we can say is, “Wow, so what?” (I know, this is a caricature, I’m making fun of something that can be actually be quite important in some cases, but bear with me, don’t look at the pointing finger, look at the moon.) What does this knowledge say about the experience I am having—not about the processes taking place in my little head but about what I actually feel and taste in the experience with wine, in that specific situation in which the wine also participates? Tasting with wine is a qualitative experience that is always different and is an overall, ecological experience. We do not smell aromas and flavors because what we are doing is actually eating and drinking. We are immersed in atmospheres, within situations that carry us away and to whose creation we contribute.
To feel tasting with wine has nothing to do with the neuro. Our perception is always and only ecological: situational, relational, and always mixed up with all the rest—this “rest” being that part of the whole, whose lines, whose knots, touch us, make us move, or, in other words, feel, perceive, think, and certainly taste. Epistenology helps us to gain awareness of this process. Even if we dissect the ingredients in a wine and place the elements and object into pigeonholes, they are not the cause of the experience and of what we feel; they rather follow it analytically in order to make articulation and discourse, classifications and culture, possible. As emphasized above, however, the comprehension of a wine and the tacit or explicit expression of its discovery do not relate to any previous knowledge or study of it. Similarly, any knowledge of the neural processes that purport to discover how we experience wine is superfluous. This is why I propose a connivence (connivance) with wine rather than a knowledge of it. A nearness that knows, without need of analysis. It would be meaningless to think that a man does not know his wife because he is uninformed about her DNA. Likewise, a tacit and nonthematic connivance with wine can be fully expressive, lacking nothing.
The term haptic indicates a sentient approach and behavior that expose themselves to the improvised creativity of the experience, without preprepared and precooked menus devised by the analytical brain. It is a way of feeling by thinking and thinking by feeling that does not refer to a specific sense. There is only one unitary sentience, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty stated—a sentience that also extends beyond itself because intertwined with the “rest.” With wine, before taste comes all the rest. It is like a meshwork that continually produces smells and flavors, aromas and visions, in a tapestry of ongoing and interstitial differentiations along its path. These differences provide a position and function for something that otherwise would always be displaced: projects, motives, varying situations, and unforeseen elements. Isolating the sense of taste from the rest in order to abstract the classifications and banal interactions of smells and flavors is an in-depth and complex operation to the same degree that it is illusory and unfulfilled.
Approaching wine haptically means accepting that taste is not a sense but a feeling/thinking that requires commitment; it’s a task. It is paying attention, first and foremost, to the flow of the river, regardless of anything else. Of course, the river has solid banks where we sit to rest and contemplate—but without the flow of the water in which we have to swim, there would be no banks. (I gestured to this in the first part of the book, referring to Being the River by Giuseppe Penone.) This awareness of the flow and the link between acting and enduring (what John Dewey calls “doing and undergoing”) is an act of devotion toward its truth that is, as is ours, the truth of experiences with food and wine. In this sense, gastronomy and wine always concern bonds, compassion and love, and consequently food pairing is unnecessary. As with many other rational and systematic models, we believe we contrast the randomness of choices with studied and analyzed necessity. However, this has nothing to do with replacing predetermined choice with fortuity; it concerns, rather, the possibility of an action that, on the one hand, is not left to chance and, on the other, is not guided by analytic algorithms that make all the decisions for us. The need for bonds and knots makes it possible to decide the combinations for each specific situation, allowing us to encounter and discover a particular wine or not on a singular and particular basis. Taste is a task because it always is confronted with something with which it has to relate: unforeseen events, obstacles, unusual experiences, all kinds of reasons. In a world not of objects but of processes, wine does not exist but is continuously made. The same is true for taste: it is neither an isolated natural sense nor a cultural acquisition, learned and transmitted. One makes taste, moving like a bundle of lines that change over space and time.
One cannot be taught and trained to understand taste as a task. Instead, it can only be the result of an education based on feeling and unified perception. Instruction teaches us how the senses work (sweet, savory, tannic, acid, violet, asphalt, berries), whereas education takes care of and hones both how we feel and the processes of feeling. The instruction of the senses, which in the conventional model of wine culture is often considered the only possible form of teaching, may initially seem to be both necessary and gratifying, but ultimately it turns out to be somewhat sterile and rather boring. Here, wine becomes a map to be read and followed according to established coordinates, and those who are sensitive and attentive will quickly get bored. We lose interest because it is impossible to move forward to a different floor, to a further level. In effect, we buy and drink bottles of wine and not flavors, tastes, or aromas. Within the model of instruction and transmitted culture, wine as a complete entity stands on the sidelines, precisely because it cannot be encountered. Being educated to feel, on the other hand, means learning to be exposed to the encounter. To educate may mean two different things: on the one hand, it means to instill knowledge into someone; this is what I call instruction. On the other, it means to lead out (ex ducere), to extract, bringing the inside out, into the world, making it move and walk according to potentials and specificities that are respected and to which we pay attention. Therefore to educate does not mean to impose something on somebody but to expose and to be exposed. It does not mean learning this or that content, nor is it concerned with recognizing objects and their specific features. On the contrary, it means tuning ourselves into the flow, the process, or, in other words, learning how to learn. Elsewhere I called this approach wisdom, the wisdom of taste and the taste of wisdom. Taste is a task because taste is a foretaste: it is an attempt, an ongoing test. To educate ourselves with wine means educating ourselves for happiness, as Sandro Sangiorgi aptly pointed out, but also for indifference, pain, and boredom. Becoming educated also requires an education in metànoia (from the Greek metanoèo: to change one’s mind), changes in one’s way of living, including the way we feel and think with wine.
Tasting is an education and a commitment: it is a process whereby agreements, negotiations, and conflicts occur through harmonizing, adjusting, and creating correspondences—questions, answers, executions, saliences, implementations—with the environment in which we live and to whose creation we contribute. This is why, in contrast to what is usually believed but that at this point along the journey should now be clear, taste is never individual and private. Taste is then an ethical task because it concerns daily life and the care we take with our own little lives. It is also, however, implicitly political because our little lives ultimately correspond with the vast life of us all. As an ongoing correspondence and process, taste is never only mine because it is always a commitment to answer something or someone. To cor-respond means responding, and responsibility is the ability to respond—to the wine I drink, to the situation I am living in, to the community I live with, to the stories and the history that have shaped me so far. (The conflict of interest among the different wine models—the conventional versus the natural, technological versus traditional, and all the various associated versions—is effectively a conflict between the different correspondences of taste, between different versions of tasks and responsibilities.)
If we exist as knots of moving lines entangled with other lines in an infinite process—through to the time of the Apes, of Adam, of the Big Bang, of cosmic consciousness, or Deus, sive Natura—then, ontologically, individuals do not exist but are rather only temporary positions along a path. These positions represent the individualities and identities that, in space and time, we think and feel we possess. The same goes for wines, as for anything else. In other words, the characteristics of human beings, of people and wines, are not fixed and everlasting features. They signal, more or less rigidly, the merging of biographical, familial, cultural, social, historical, geographical, temporal, and meteorological lines, which can vary.
Taste is not a sense but a task, because we make it as we go along (Ludwig Wittgenstein): like the rules we construct for moving, thinking instead of simply applying them. Even when we recognize a wine as “that wine” and highlight the value of discovery for a taste that we already know—this often happens, as we are too lazy and domesticated to change habits easily (scholars say that taste is neophobic)—we are never really confirming but deciding, each time anew, the next steps to take. I always eat the same things, I’ve been drinking and enjoying the same wines for years, and now you’re telling me that I’m deciding things anew every time? Yes, that it is precisely the case.
Here is another objection, that of the (presumed and so-called) realist: “You say that identity doesn’t exist, and neither does individuality, wine, and taste, because nothing is fixed and all the postmodern yadda yadda. Nonetheless, we can recognize a wine as a wine that we have already drunk, let’s say a Brunello. So, how are things really?” First, things are not in one way or another; instead things tend toward. (I am not rising to the bait here. As soon as epistenology adopts a classic argumentative logic, it has betrayed its purpose.) The State of Things is not just the title of a Wim Wenders movie, nor is it posttruth; it is rather a disposition to being true. When, tasting, I recognize a Brunello as such, and possibly as the same one I drank yesterday, I am actually corresponding to the task, to the commitment of feeling the strong and intertwined bonds with the lines that come from the past and memory. (By the way, let us keep in mind that only a few people, in relation to the global population, would be able to do this, making it an interesting question that reminds us of the experts and competent, authoritative people.) Here the knot is something that is stable. Imagine seeing me every day. With every tomorrow, I am different from today—I might have lost some more hair; my skin is a bit more oxidized—and last night I even read a book by Slavoj Žižek—but these variations are hardly noticeable at all. You recognize me as the same person. The lines that I trace and weave correspond with yours and what we call the “past”; memory is, in this case, the continuous flow along paths walked together. Now imagine seeing me in twenty years’ time, if I am still here. I might now be overweight, or maybe some ailment has gradually changed my shape, manners, colors, temperament, and thoughts. You might struggle to recognize me as the same person at least to begin with, because, in this case, the variations would be evident and the stability of my identity concealed. (This is why recent photos are required on IDs.) The lines that tied us have gradually come undone, memory is vaguer, and both time and effort are required to recall it. We need to reweave a fabric that went missing over the years because other fabrics have been woven. This is precisely what happens with the Brunello: you ask a ninety-year-old local if he recognizes the wine called “Brunello” as the one he used to drink when he was eighteen. He will not say that the wine is the same, but, nonetheless, it has similarities, and if this is not the case for the old man, then it will at least be for the community where that wine was born and evolved.
The identity of one wine cor-responds to the perceived intensity of the knot woven by all the lines that produce its perceptual reality. This intensity establishes the similarities, identities, or variations that we severally notice as something familiar: a family resemblance (Wittgenstein again), a facial trait (a sensory “profile”), a way of walking (the “gustatory dynamic”); a personality (a style, the “terroir”). Or simply a surname? In effect, we should also consider the complex question of the names that make things: the performative power of a name (from Hugo von Hofmannsthal to John L. Austin—just to show off a bit of culture, again). However, there must be something since otherwise it would not still be called a Brunello.
The identities we position as ours and others are a continuous correspondence between stability and variation, like harking back to memories tending toward the next step to be taken, to what is called the future. Therefore recognition is also a creative act, but precisely for this reason it is not free or left alone as an individual decision. It is rather a corresponding act, a responsible one. Epistenology encourages the creativity of responsibility—the space of intertwined bonds—where freedom is implicit. Ties bind me, more or less tightly, to the decisions I take, where the freedom of changing my mind is always a possibility but with more or less evident and significant consequences. When a new wine denomination is created or when another is modified or removed, this kind of process is at work on a larger scale.
Educating ourselves to feeling as a task and a responsibility also means experiencing time in a different gear. In the instruction of taste, the one that trains authoritative and competent experts, the clock measures time. After all, the professional circumscribes his work by marking the hours and the days. The competent person has no time to spare, while the amateur’s is free and inhabited. The acquired and learned taste of wine can be remunerated: value/currency, time/money. We must pay for the expert. Conversely, gaining experience is a gift; it is free. Tasting with wine is neither measured nor paid for; it is a delight. We do what we love doing and, now and again, time can be stolen or created. This leads to creativity and commitment. Just as in art, even when you make wine or food with care, attention, and love, it is often impossible to separate “free” time from work time, and, anyway, it is not really important.
Consequently, time spent tasting with wine is not occupied but inhabited time. We run on the taut or bent ropes of the world’s surface, feeling its substances and thereby expanding time. Some of the most interesting exercises I set for educating ourselves to have this feeling deal with playing with time. These exercises of slowing down sampling times, going in slow motion, or using an expanded rhythm in the frequency of tasting the same wine, allow us to pay attention to how the void after that sip speaks to us in such a way that we lose awareness of the ticking clock. Feeling the tasting with wine is then a way of dwelling with a time that is not the abstract time of moving clock arms but the concrete time of making things. Making them with the heat, with the cold, with the light and the dark, with the wind, the sun, or the rain, on the grass or by the sea, or on a table inside a house, and even in a wine shop. (This has to do with the verticality of the vine that Gaston Bachelard highlighted in his work about the alchemists’ vine, with all its magical powers. The vine links the chthonic forces of the earth with the sky, and this striation consists of the lines that we trace and cross.)
This different temporal dimension of the task opens up the narrative quality of tasting with wine: without a theme or a method, without judgment or competence, epistenology does not deal with profiles to be described but inhabits stories to tell.