Wine and Astonishment
This piece is excerpted from "Drinking with the Valkyries: Writings on Wine". Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Académie du Vin Library. This piece originally appeared in The World of Fine Wine.
Wine is quietly unique: ‘A pure biological expression of environment interpreted by rational and creative thought,’ in the words of Australian winemaker Brian Croser. Human actors and the natural world play equal roles in its coming into being. This creation is experienced sensually, intellectually and emotionally; at times, it even seems to have a spiritual force, too.
Can wine take us closer to being itself, to the principle of existence? Perhaps. One mechanism by which it might do this is astonishment.
Astonishment
‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ The formulation is that of Gottfried Leibniz in 1718, but many philosophers before and since have posed it.
Religion, obviously, has an answer to the question: the ‘something’ is the intended work of a divine creator. Scientists search for answers to this question as they probe the origin and scope of the universe, the tiniest of unseen particles and all the matter between, together with the forces that govern all interactions.
Philosophy has no answer to the question – but the asking of the question has always been significant and fruitful. One 20th-century philosopher, Martin Heidegger, made this question the centre of his philosophical enquiry. He did so via a book called Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), published in 1927, and via a series of subsequent essays and lectures.
Heidegger maintained that, in the torrent of existence, being itself (‘Sein’, a word that he capitalized) has been forgotten. What is the difference between existence and being? Existence is the extant; it is what exists. You bump into it, trip over it, look at it, touch it, smell it and eat it. You could call it ‘stuff’.
Being, by contrast, is the ‘isness’ inside everything that exists. The fact that this seems such a strange concept indicates how complete our forgetting of being is. We’re so obsessed with ‘stuff ’, with appearances and externalities, that we forget ‘isness’. Or, to go back to the original phraseology, we’re so distracted with existence that we forget being.
Heidegger’s project was to ‘uncover’ being, to ‘think’ being and to ‘say’ being, though he recognized that this was difficult – given the inauthenticity, distraction, ambiguity and hunger for novelty in which most of our lives pass.
Being for Heidegger was not the metaphysical matter or question of ideals that had been associated by previous philosophers with notions of ‘essence’; still less did it equate to God. It is, rather, something earthly and worldly, embedded (though at the same time hidden) in the density of things. All of existence, in other words, is secretly saturated in being. Being streams – like photons and other elementary particles – through that which is, through existence. The challenge is to break through the crust or carapace of existence to find being again.
Heidegger’s own technique for doing this is a set of new words, often forged clumsily out of clusters of existing words. He uses these to shock and dislocate the reader into the re-thinking that might reveal forgotten or lost being within the familiar, mechanical thrum of existence.
Language is key. ‘Language is the house of Being,’ Heidegger wrote in his ‘Letter on Humanism’. ‘In its home man dwells.’ For you and I, it is through words and language that things come into being. Customary philosophical thinking, he maintains, is unable to take us back to being. That can only be achieved, says Heidegger, by what he calls ‘poeticizing thought’ or ‘thinking poetry’.
There are kinships between Heidegger’s work and Buddhist (and Hindu) tradition. Heidegger’s ‘existence’, the aggregated and inauthentic externalities that hide being from us, might bear some kinship to samsara, the ceaseless flow or drift of transitory desires, emotions and experiences that every Buddhist is urged to repudiate, and the directionless ‘wandering’ cycle of death and rebirth from which Hindus struggle to liberate themselves.
Heidegger’s ‘Being’ and its locus, by contrast, spoken of as a ‘clearing’, or Lichtung, shares much with the positive Buddhist notion of emptiness, better seen as a space capable of being filled by light. The koans of the Zen Buddhist tradition perform a similar jolting task to Heidegger’s ‘poeticizing thought’. The posture of ‘care’ is not dissimilar to the attentiveness and compassion of Buddhist practice.
Being, Heidegger stresses, is also temporal: it can only exist in time. It is therefore fully accomplished only as it ends, in death, or rather in ceasing-to-be. It is care and attention to being itself that makes human existence meaningful.
Because being is projected in time and completed by death, it must necessarily involve anxiety. This positive, end-focused anxiety stands in opposition to the negative, formless fear that the daily run of inauthentic existence provokes. Out of that positive, directed anxiety comes care, concern, apprehension and attention.
To be authentically in the world, says Heidegger, is to care for, or be answerable to, being itself. Astonishment is essential: it is astonishment that reveals the presence of being inside existence.
The process of questioning, the questioning of everything that surrounds us, is a translation of astonishment into action; care or carefulness is how that action might be maintained. There is no particular answer to this questioning. Both it, and care itself, are a kind of practice.
Wine
Now let’s return to wine. Those who love wine enough to read books about it can often trace their enthusiasm back to a single moment of astonishment. In some cases, this would be strong enough to be called an epiphany, variously defined as ‘any moment of great or sudden revelation’ or a ‘sudden manifestation of the essence or meaning of something’. These moments are regularly written about or discussed in wine circles; some like to cite the particular bottle that led to the revelation or epiphany.
Assigning the impact of such moments to a particular wine in a particular vintage is what wine minds (often obsessed with the granular) tend to do – but it misses the point. The wine involved on such occasions may not be great. It certainly wasn’t in my case – an encounter with a bottle of anonymous Beaujolais in the mid-’70s. Good wine is good enough.
What happens, I’d suggest, is that for a moment we see or sense the being of wine inside the existence of wine. This has a physical dimension, of course: we suddenly relish the wine we are tasting in a more comprehensive manner than we have ever been able to do before. We suddenly ‘get it’, often with overwhelming force. We suddenly grasp, through a single glass, the radical principle of beauty common to all good and great wine, and gasp for a moment at the extent of its appeal. We understand how wine creation might mesh with other cultural activities. At the same time, we come to realize just how intimate its relationship with the natural world is. It has a maker, but who is that maker? The wine grower, or the place from which the wine came? The question is resonant. We become one with all of those who have understood this beauty and this uniqueness in the past, and we become one of those by whom it will be transmitted in the future. All this is often wordless and instantaneous, a kind of explosion of insight.
Might the mechanisms at work in that moment of epiphany not stand behind all of our interactions with wine? We should try not to forget, in other words, the first astonishment we felt as we looked, tasted, and tumbled into the being of wine. Being is always there, inside existence; it just requires the torch of astonishment to shine a light on it.
Alcohol
The first of these mechanisms is alcohol. Yes, the epiphany that I am alluding to and that you experienced is an alcohol-lifted one, though not alcohol- induced. (Many alcoholic drinks are incapable of triggering astonishment.)
Alcohol, strangely enough, has become problematic, even for those who love wine. Some commentators and wine creators would prefer wine to be alcohol-free if only it could retain its sensual personality intact in that form – and if not alcohol-free, then 12.5% abv and no more. Others might discount the initial experience entirely on the basis that alcohol has a role in it, and suggest that the glimpse of being contained in that moment is consequently inauthentic or ‘drug-induced’.
Yet it is alcohol that lends wine an emotional dimension or force, which enables us not just to perceive wine’s beauty, but to feel it, to be moved by it. Alcohol humanizes wine. Nothing is more human than seeking the means in nature to access emotion in this ritualized or formalized way. If ever and whenever we are able to perceive being inside existence, there will be an emotional aspect to that perception – because we are human. No epiphany is ever purely intellectual or purely rational. There may be other drivers of emotion in moments of epiphany – like religious rapture, or long-sought spiritual insight, or the physical forms of human longing. There’s no reason, though, why alcohol should be considered secondary to these merely because its trigger is chemical. It seems likely, indeed, that chemical triggers of all sorts play a larger part in the life of the mind than most of us realize.
Whenever yeast begins to work on sweet fruit, alcohol comes into being. Alcohol belongs in wine; alcohol helps define wine; without alcohol, wine does not exist. Alcohol is central to the appeal of wine. A little wine brings spiritual music to secular or material life. Alcohol plays a role in that. What would wine be without the solace it imparts? Alcohol plays a role in that, too. Alcohol itself is never easier to assimilate or more nourishing than in wine. A large part of our astonishment at wine’s being is connected with its diversity or difference. Everything in wine sings difference, undulating alcohol levels included.
Naturalness
Nature dwells in wine. I remember my own sense of wonder, during the winter of 1974 and spring of 1975, as I realized that in drinking wines from different countries, continents and hemispheres I was ingesting a liquid whose physical form and sensorial outline had been brought into existence by a plant or plants anchored in those places. Agreed, the liquid had been through a transformation; grape juice had become wine thanks to the agency of yeast (and winemakers). The substance itself, though, had come into existence through physical pathways in root and leaf, and through a suite of interactions with soil, rain and sunlight, in vineyards in Tuscany, in Portugal, in Burgundy. The birth both of that substance and of its personality had taken place inside grapes hanging in clusters on vines... there, there and there. Cold, drizzle, mud, stones, a misty dawn, bright noon, storms at dusk: the liquid I was rolling on my tongue had synthesized all of those, snug inside its grapeskin. They in turn were a part of its being. There was a direct line of transmission from the distant vine’s vascular tissue to my waiting tongue. With nothing added and nothing subtracted, or so I believed.
This made wine special, a contrast to beer or to spirits made in a brewery or distillery by assembling ingredients, adding water and yeast, and following a kind of recipe. A glass of grapefruit juice may follow a similar line of transmission to a glass of wine, but it is silent concerning its place of origin, and the absence of alcohol robs it of an emotional dimension, of the same capacity for solace, and thus of cultural significance.
This still astonishes me today. I’m still shocked by the naturalness and wholeness and strangeness of wine. I think this is a common experience among new wine drinkers. It is one reason among many why I would urge anyone who has a hand in making wines to seek to respect the integrity of the raw materials, the harvested grapes, in so far as this is commensurate with purity and stability. Drinkers want to hear nature’s heartbeat in wine. They want to sip distant places, to taste geographical difference rendered with astonishing articulacy; this shock or jolt of place is part of the being of wine.
Our species has come into being on earth. It will cease to be on earth. Wine enables us to drink a little of the diversity of our planet’s life forms, topographies and geological phenomena. Through wine, the earth becomes more precious to us. If wine, all wine, even inexpensive wine, is served and regarded with a kind of respect that eludes beer and other alcoholic drinks, that’s a reason. We erode or discard that respect at our peril. It’s care; it’s attention; it brings meaning.
Jefford writes regular columns for Decanter magazine and for The World of Fine Wine.
