Touch is exposed, secret, nocturnal, and confused. I am writing this in Lucca, the oneiric city, seated at a wooden table in a venue owned by a friend while I drink one of Gravner’s moving Ribolla. I talk with Cristiano, eat the food he has made for me; I get up and continually walk about because I get fed up with sitting down for too long in any circumstances, and on occasion even in a restaurant. In the meantime, I touch the pavement with my feet, the amphorae with my hands, and I think about the mysterious square of the Roman amphitheater while a naked force that accelerates my creative paths warms me, smiling and planning. I also reflect on the fact that, when we are children, we learn to sit still and not move for hours, days on end, at a desk, and, de facto, we are eviscerating the perception of the flow, building a world of solid objects instead. Usually it is assumed that tasting and appreciating wine should be done while sitting still, with the wine sitting with us behind the desk. Everyone at school, learning how to behave. Thus it becomes difficult, with the passing of time, to remember the truth of the process, the movement that provides us with knowledge. Epistenology flourishes also thanks to the feet. We are trained to sit still in order to do serious thinking, and this is why, in conscious contrast, when I was writing this text I was standing up and moving about—the thoughts it produced required liberated mobility.
This wine produces, here and now with us, in the lucid intoxication of the present moment, a convivial quality that transmits an emotive strength to me. I have absolutely no interest at all in describing its aromas: What is in the wine? It’s the wrong question or, at the very least, it’s a ridiculous question, because why look for something in the wine instead of actively participating in that which we are creating with it? Touching it, I find no reason for denying my somaesthetic self, in order to typify and shape a static and helpless sensorial profile. Why should I? Universal, clear, and distinct precision makes way for the justice of the tactile singularity of the specific encounter.
The position of touch on Western philosophy’s scale of the senses, from Aristotle to Herder, from Kant to Derrida, is a complex question. Touch is undoubtedly the most controversial of the senses—how do we use touch and for what end? Are we controlling or controlled? We are lines, and touch guides us, but it’s an ambiguous compass. Its ambiguity is due to the fact that, paradoxically, it too can be both optic and haptic. The coevolution of the hand and the brain has liberated the prehensile nature of the upper limbs within a mainly visual paradigm: erect stature, vision from above, and the hand that explores, grasps, and understands, creating a solid chain. In German, der Begriff, the concept, refers to the act of grasping on the part of a prehensile hand. I touch the surfaces, the outlines, the skin of the things of the world while vision coordinates and commands from above. There is another story to be told, however—the nocturnal story of the lower body—and it is its emergence that we want to deal with here. In the haptic paradigm, touch exposes itself to the vulnerability of a relationship that does not grasp but rather walks together with the things of the world, touching them. Haptic touch considers our feet, legs, and bellies in the same way as our eyes. And we should recall that wine used to be made by feet pressing the grapes.
When we ingest the material of wine, in its assimilation, we touch the surfaces and substances at the same moment. Haptic taste, in contrast to optic, has no power to control. It is entirely exposed inward without any manipulation or grasping. Wine invades me and becomes as one with me. I no longer dominate it if I maintain an openness and honesty with regard to the encounter that is taking place. A Bel Air Epidote that I once drank during an evening of casual sharing in my favorite place in Livorno had a wicked effect on the interactions at the table. I was on the threshold of the echo that comes from inside, listening to oneself but activating the link with the other, the unknown, if only for a short time. Voices and faces arrive as if filtered, mediated by an atmospheric tactility that was both environmental and internal. At times the relationship can be intense, gratifying, and fleeting, and it was the wine that made this possible. Internal touch expresses our very nature with secret and confused clarity, the entanglements of locomotive lines that explore without being able to control. It is from here that the surprising nature of the haptic derives. It is not predictable, and for this reason it constitutes an unacceptable risk for those who fear its powers of imagination.
This touch does not make us weak but only vulnerable, and therefore creative. In the space of a few hours, together with a Domaine des Miroirs Entre Deux Bleus, we passed from the fullest and most joyful happiness to emotional confusion: the wine of clouds on which we were suspended at a certain point tumbled me down to the unyielding earth of barbed pain. With the complicity of that great wine—of course, great was the encounter with it—my sufferance was thrown into the duskiness of the room like an icy blanket covering the most intimate contact. I was stone, I became stone over which images and cuts and a combination of confused substances ran, all singing in chorus: this is how it must be.
Imagination does not gush from the optic and objective perception of reality but from its continuous, haptic redefinition, consequent to the ability to be exposed. Imaginative touch, tactile imagination, as Bernard Berenson says with regard to the effects provoked by the figures of Italian painters, produces fantasies as a grip on the reality of the world, continuously encountered in (its) movement. During this process, there is no time or space for chimeras or the masturbatory hallucinations stemming from optic sclerosis. Along this line, only precise measurements or phantoms are created as specular but mutually supportive opposites, and where, by means of the same approach, the world is either objective reality or ideal imagination. But touch is creative insomuch as it is neither the one nor the other. Imagination is real, the real is the images I produce along every step of the path that I take, and, if anything, the path is the images. The presumed distinction between images and the imagination herein collapses and is dissolved, in contact with the things of the world, because everything is the outcome of the creative processes of movement, as I realized on the day that I began to combine with the wine I encountered.
We encounter wine because it is an interwoven relationship. The relationship is intimacy or, in other words, internal touch. Intimacy is hospitality, the impossibility of total control. But hospitality is vulnerability, and vulnerability is amazement; and amazement, ultimately, is creation.
To imagine does not mean building mental idealizations. Images are not mental visions like generic ideas. Vision itself can be used in a haptic way by knowing how to see the world with a continuously refreshed look of amazement. Creating images encourages our capacity to respond—to decide with respect to the entanglement, to the new knots that are continuously interwoven, demanding, in turn, a new move in order to dissolve and renew itself further on. A few years ago I found myself in a restaurant in Palermo together with a colleague and, having chosen a wine I had never drunk before, suddenly changed direction—that bottle wasn’t right, not because, as the waiter asked me, whether there was any particular problem; it wasn’t “corked,” nor did it have any specific defects. In effect, a “defect” would be something that it lacked, and not an “incorrect” element, some lopsided grammar, an insult or a spit in the face of civilized society, as is always considered in relation to wine. That bottle was immobile and mute; it did not allow itself to be encountered and did not permit us to continue. It was not a question of “combinations” with food—combining means coupling, uniting two things, and there can never be enough ridicule of the “science” of combinations. Rather, it was because of the rhythm of the flow that one could sense at the time. The knot created was all wrong and effectively had obstructed all paths. There was the choice of proceeding and ignoring this immobility, at the cost of not walking with the wine, or of changing companion, opting for a better feeling. The others could not understand this sudden change, but my decision permitted us passage to a space where I too could feel happy with the wine and the interesting openings it allowed. How can we communicate by means of arguments directed by experience such as I have described? One can only hint at such examples. There is effectively a short circuit, and in order to understand it you need to have had the experience even to connect it to something else, in accordance with the analogical imagination of lucid vision. Meanwhile, this narration in some way suggests the taste.
To imagine is to know how to transit, to avoid dead objects, to stay one step ahead —just as when I see a smile but realize it’s actually hatred or, vice versa, a gesture of impatience but know that it is love. Walking, reacting, playing—all express our capacity to imagine. Childish play, on the other hand, as many authors have observed, can be seen as the first manifestation of aesthetic feeling and therefore, according to Joseph Beuys, as the first expression of art. Drinking wine haptically, therefore, is like playing, as adults, with the loose gaze of children. Relaxation as in strong vulnerability. To imagine also means continuously translating a “foreign” language into another one, our “own.” Correspondence and imagination fuse together, creating texts as woven fabric, as textiles. Or, again, it’s like replying to a letter about which we know nothing. The live wine that I encounter is something outside. It is the other that I combine with but yet maintains the friction of the world, like a foreign language that I continue to learn as “my” language, like “my” mother tongue, in which, in the amazement that I tap into, I find myself to be always a bit inadequate and extraneous.
I am going off track, however. Today I am in Rome’s Trastevere, and I’m sipping a Bloody Mary in a bar. It is cold and I have just walked the length of Tiberina Island. The alcoholic acidity of the neutral vodka mixes with the sweetness of the tomato juice, filling me with tiny electric shocks and a pasty essence. What for? To be able to perceive haptically Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere or, in other words, to be completely touched and even criss-crossed by its buildings and the duskiness of the sky, as if they were the last things I’m going to see today, or maybe even forever.
How many of the fearful in life have recently become interested in “wine tasting”? This very circumstance should rightly arouse our suspicions but instead has been superficially welcomed as the revenge of the sensitive and a late recognition of the importance of the odorous liquid. The truth is that those who follow established grids and given grammars like to recognize the things and themselves in the world. They do not encounter things; rather, they want just to be mirrored in them. Tasting becomes a pure practice of following in consolatory and even dazzling footsteps—repetitive co-action in contrast to horror vacui. The narcissists of wine continue along the path of recognizing types, varieties, and aromas in order to consolidate themselves on the level of a frivolous, community authoritativeness. In effect, this often unconscious approach corresponds to cognitive bulimia. While the illusion of knowledge consists of the accumulation of data and information, so the narcosis of the wine expert corresponds to the compulsive tasting of the greatest number of possible examples, possibly comparing them on the same day, with a swirling glass that is obsessively emptied and refilled, and even ranking them. But just as knowledge does not develop through the accumulation of information, in the same way it is not the number of examples that makes the taster wise and knowledgeable. In fact, wine is not a token for type. The experience of wine is its singular existence in the flow. The wine has no being for me beyond what I encounter. And let’s state this very clearly: with wine, as elsewhere, experience is as important as intelligence. If intelligence without experience is naïve, experience without intelligence is dangerous.
I have known bulimics of philosophy from whom nothing can be gained. Equally, I know compulsive tasters who have created no images, no leaps for either themselves or the wine. No conviviality, no sociality, no passion, and no love. Wine has never revealed anything to them other than what they already knew: names, labels, production places, and, of course, its classified and very polite characteristic fragrance. However, the qualities of wine change and evolve because they are created when they are touched, and in this contact something new always takes place. All the rest is pure regulation, a solid, rigid object that can be understood only through information. Informing oneself about wine does not mean knowing it. It’s a lack of imagination that has very little to do with what wine can gift us.
Jean-Pierre Robinot’s wines have always given me extreme images, bodies freed into the air like birds or hot-air balloons, passages from the sky to the earth. I have always lost control with his Cuvée Camille as in very few other cases in my life. I imagine a house by the sea, built with light but indestructible reeds, a strong wind, and a quick sea. I find a design within the weft of its substance, a slightly crooked walk, a cutting gaze like your last no, to use Knut Hamsun’s words. The quality of the inebriation was different from that which Joly gave me or even that from a Gravner. Of course, it depends, because the interweaving in which we find ourselves is always different and never preordained. Every wine drunk has a precise and characteristic tone and a timbre in the moment in which I, and she, and you who drink with us find ourselves. Ichigo ichie (one time, one meeting), it is said with respect to the Japanese tea ceremony. When we achieve an encounter with wine, what is at play is always the relationship between abandonment and intention, relaxation and grasping. The enjoyment we feel can move from the naked passivity of psychotropic heat of alcoholic power to the intellectual clothing that refers to the knowledge that is deliberately activated in the process. I have already known this wine, and I am part of the meshwork that created it. But precisely for this reason, this memory is valid as a further woven entanglement that is created on future occasions. In fact, as it is, haptic touch cannot be governed or controlled by even the firmest of wills. We head forward, possibly even armed and ready, but toward the unknown.
Internal touch is creative because it moves tentatively. With every step, a new decision is made, and it marks a piece of the road. For this reason the encounter, including the encounter with wine, is an aesthetic experience in its most complete sense. The unforeseeable nature of touch, experienced with the fullest enthusiasm in open and amazed tasting, effectively contributes to the elaboration of an art of life that is achieved time after time without anything ever being a given.
The relationship with wine is a creative relationship insomuch as it is research and invention at the same time. And there is nothing Promethean about this, as creativity is always collective and we create precisely because we are tiny, finite elements among others. Invenio, in Latin, means “I encounter”; I find, but I discover, invent, imagine. What do I find and what do I invent? A substance that is always in the making, while it also affects and changes me during my drinking—the me that I am always differing because I am always moving along. Touch is creative because it invents, but it invents precisely insofar as it is ingenious. Thanks to ingenuity, we have clarification on an aspect that may have appeared as paradoxical: creative touch is that which simultaneously permits us to perceive what is called authentic. Haptic taste perceives the authentic not in contrast to its creative capacities but as their interface. When we proceed tentatively inveniendo (finding) paths, we contemporaneously recognize places, activate memories, and return to paths already taken, even if a bundle of lines does not have an unambiguous direction between the past, the present, and the future. This is what imagination is: a dilated and composed memory. An ongoing process of finding and of creating. Authenticity has not to do with an isolated object—this bottle of wine—but with the process that brings a bottle of wine to be perceived as this one. Authenticity is the aware perception of the flow and of the current, not of the fixed object itself.
Haptic taste is always ingenious. Exposed to the unknown in each step forward, it has memory and cognition because it recognizes. This recognition, however, is always dynamic and active. It is the transitivity of touch: caressing or feeling the presence without wanting to be right or necessarily understanding by grasping, we imagine and thus connect the past with the present and, by so doing, create what is to come. Touch is transitive because it connects masses of lines that are apparently distant and that the optic method would see as unrelated. Contact lends energy and flows between elements as if by magic. Distance cools and decelerates, it renders the flow as crystallized, solidified, and ordered, and it puts elements in a series, classifying them. Like a sequence of wines divided by type in a normal evening of knowing about wine. If we look to us human beings from an ecological, holistic perspective, we can say that we possibly needed classification and partition as well. However, we are actually so inured to this paradigm of perception that a strategic liberation in the haptic sense is well overdue.
We are transformed with wine: having fun, being thrilled, and enjoying ourselves. The creativity of touch is wise because it is the capacity to transit, to be distracted while continuing firmly along the path taken. And when we taste, drawn into the tactile flow that makes us participate in the feeling, we trust in our ability to discern the authentic from the fake. It is the wisdom of taste, the haptic capacity of knowing how to perceive—which is also the capacity to create. To be haptic, therefore, we must become shamans, explorers, diagnosticians and medics, sensitive inhabitants of the world. Nongrasping, tactile perception allows us a slowed-down and combined take on reality, not only with artifacts and not only with wine but in every relationship.
Indifferent to and immune from the distal model of optic objectivism, when we want to verify the authenticity of something or someone we care about, we touch them or get up close. The same happens, for example, when we look at artworks in a museum. The emotive quality is more intense than that of surrogates at a distance, of reproductions, however good they might be, because closeness has to do with aura. Despite always being exposed to the risk of being kept in check, tactile proximity is the more powerful and true relationship. Thus we understand wine because we touch it with our mouths and then inside ourselves down to the lower extremities, and above all it is the texture of wine that is precisely what analytical instruments cannot achieve; they cannot replace a relationship of direct contact. This is what authenticity is: it does not lie in the object; it is not the object-wine to be authentic. There are wines (I have called them living wines) that facilitate the experience of encounter; there are wines that favor the haptic engagement. But, in principle, anything can produce this approach. It is like meditation: in principle, one can meditate everywhere and with everything, even among a crowd, as Baudelaire pointed out; but, especially for spirits that are not so elevated, there are environments that facilitate the process, providing threads and connections for an easier start. So it is for wine. Authenticity is, rather, the experience of the encounter taken to a positive conclusion or, in other words, the encounter in which all the participants let themselves go. Magical thought is a haptic ability to feel and respond. In alchemy, it is what allowed one to talk freely of “forces.” Haptic perception is so strong at times that it permits the authenticity of contact even at a great distance, like when I think about you and you feel me to be close. “Then you laugh and the Atlantic recedes,” said Jacques Derrida in The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, describing the effect of an intercontinental telephone call. It is from this power that a participatory art of life develops. The philosophical myth of absence and continuous deferral, to which, with Derrida, I too was susceptible, conceals an ambiguity that is essentially concerned with a pulsation of death, with a fantasy of disappearance that destroys the imagination. In its attempt to objectify, optic perception slows down or rescinds relationships. To imagine, however, is not to keep at a distance but rather to make the absent present through the haptic.
Imagination is creative because it transforms perception and the world, since we are the world that we perceive and produce. Participating in the change of light in a room or the wind on a beach, walking on the earth and on rocks, abandoning ourselves to sleep on the mattress of a bed, changing seats on a train because we can’t stand the voice or the gaze of our neighbors are all imaginative and creative journeys that transform the world and thereby transform us. The same happens when we drink wine in a creative way. Enjoying, having fun, being warmed, thinking, being indifferent, socializing, talking, moving together with it—all these dynamics are the weave of a carpet that we constantly construct and in which there is no precise or preordained design. For this reason, the “creatives” who believe they can create from ideas cultivated in the kitchen gardens of their own interior condos are misguided or, at the very best, innocuous. Comfortably seated or lying down, heads in hands and deprived of any effective external friction, they separate the earth from the sky, the head from the belly, and produce nothing at all. They can easily drink soulless wines and eat any indifferent food, and they will never realize what they are missing.
Touch with wine is produced throughout the entire apparatus along which it slips: in the mouth, the pharynx, the esophagus, and the stomach. If we know how to encounter wine haptically, we explore it tentatively and discern its eventual authenticity. We need to drink it in its entirety. The relationship that participates with the substance is a taste that enjoys the hydration of all our tissues, taking care of the passage through the channels to the lowest parts, the inferior regions. And what remains after this passage is an echo, an inheritance that leaves the value of the created knot thereby produced. Flavor and smell combine, and the taste is all one.
Smelling, by bringing the volatile matter directly into the nostrils or indirectly through palatal oxygenation, is a process that can be open, in the haptic way, or closed, in the optic. Of course, exploring the aromas of a wine also means perceiving the land where it was grown in its taste, which is defined in the specific language of the experts as terroir—the sense of place. In the paradigm wine/substance, however, it is not the recognition of quality and characteristic aromas that we are addressing. In the end, they are not that important. What does happen is more about the magic of the forces at a distance. Touch allows us to participate in the community of the comakers of that knot that is wine. It allows us to perceive the sky and the earth, the soil and the vines, the feet and the hands who have accompanied its birth. In other words, it means animating the inanimate optic once denuded of its being an object. This must be the place.
This should not be a surprise. The comprehension out of the corner of our eyes that produces haptic perception is a primitive and emotional intelligence that aims to return to us the dynamic sense of life that we create and not the sclerotic stability of objects. Wine is alive because it is animated in the encounter we have, not because it is a defenseless object plus the attribution of an internal soul—optic perception, present in the theories of the standard philosophical form of rigid animism, in manuals and from pulpits—that we, as inevitable subjects, will contemplate. The relationship always comes before the object and the subject—the magical thought that wine engenders lies entirely in the relationship that is established. Fundamentally, it is this relationship because life is not a given but a task, just as when we perceive a perfect manifestation of hate in a smile or, vice versa, the most profound testimony of love in a gesture of rejection. We encounter traces, affordances, invitations, paths for going in one sense or another. It is the creation of the world that is constantly reborn. It is its authenticity as a bond with the earth that combines me with the sky. It is the wine that we know because it unexpectedly surprises us and in which we find our origins inscribed. Origins, however, are what happens there, before our very eyes. The original is created as an imaginative process that is constantly produced—“image” comes from the Greek mimeomai, I imitate. This is what the next glass I will drink tells me, that which I enjoy as if I should encounter you, touching me.
If we reason according to standard philosophical terms, I might explain it thus: to believe in the authenticity of a wine—to be willing to believe in the authentic, to be willing to encounter it in order to verify its appearance and fabric in the terms of its truthfulness with respect to the moment in a “given” place where it grew and developed—is sufficient in order for such cognitive properties to penetrate the perceptive experience that we have through the tactile nature of the encounter. Authenticity is an extra sensitive property that develops from its materials, not due to causes or reasons but to relationships. The material is this ongoing passage between itself and the soul that continuously overflows from it.
We can feel if a wine is authentic by recognizing it, in some way, as corresponding to the terroir, the expression of a certain space and certain time, because of beliefs that depend on what we have encountered during the journey we have taken up until the moment when we taste it. In the model of the encounter, in effect, recognition is not a static fact but something that, in turn, is continuously made. Here lies the functional difference between truth and error: only by making the experience can we retrospectively consider that which we supposed to be authentic. A terroir is not a sclerosis, a cage made rigid by inflexible, spatial coordinates, but a ceaseless work that continually redefines its boundaries on the basis of how much it is inhabited. Authenticity is therefore a continuous process of authentication: the “sense of place” in wine is always invented—found and created at one and the same time—by those who drink it, perceiving it haptically. Discussions around typicality, traditions, and place have no sense beyond this horizon. Otherwise, they are reduced, as is usually the case, to mere ideological exhibitions or, even worse, to petty, edifying motives, replicated without any contact or rapture. To paraphrase Gilles Châtelet: by means of the creativity of touch, we unfold to wine its space; a space that does justice to its and our bodies as substances and organisms. When the body is oriented toward feeling, the perception of the authentic is infallible because fallibility arises precisely when the power of contact is lost.