The wine education industry has been booming, it seems, with courses offering some sort of certification drawing particular interest from both amateurs and those seeking a career path. Then there is what might be called the wine edutainment sector which provides generally short term programs or classes that combine learning with a bit of socializing and a night out.
Enroll in one of the better sort of these and you’ll likely be presented with basic information about where and how wine grapes are grown, how fermentations are accomplished and how wine is matured. You’ll get an overview of the more common grape varieties and how climate, weather and terrain contribute to the character of finished wine. Along with this, you’ll likely get pointers on how to go about tasting wine in a systematic way, and be offered ideas about what constitute successful food and wine pairings.
As you go along, you’ll be asked to memorize data, absorb a good deal of received opinion, engage in some sensory development and be encouraged by the thought that the more you learn and experience the more you will advance in competence.
All good, certainly. Reason, experience and authority are each proven pathways for arriving at knowledge. But here, I’d like to put in a word for a fourth important means, one that while it isn’t as often credited, is nonetheless in daily and effective use in all our lives: imagination.
It would be nice to be able to discourse a bit on the history of this means of knowing and navigating the world — but we’ve not room for that. Let’s just say that imagination hasn’t always been in good repute, being associated as it is with undisciplined flights of fancy not always in accord with prevailing ideas and respectable pursuits. And of course it’s true that unlike reason, experience or authority, which all seem firmly attached to some anchor point, imagination is by contrast a free spirit — the ramblin’ man of the human intellect and so always a potential threat.
But this, of course, is exactly its strong point, since imagination serves up, unbidden, ideas and possibilities we might otherwise never entertain. But for our powers of imagination, certain thought operations may not be possible at all.
So how is imagination helpful in knowing and practicing wine? We might point to wine’s neolithic origins when the miracle of spontaneous fermentation endowed it with occult properties, and linked its intoxicating powers to notions of participation in the divine, both pagan and, later, Christian. To this we might add a longstanding association in medical theory of red wine with blood, and consequently with robust health and vigor — notions that informed French wellness theory well into the early 20th century.
Then there is wine’s long connection with visions of the good life, leisure, pleasure (fountains of wine being a feature of the Medieval utopia known as the Land of Cocaigne) and sexuality. One could go on. The point being that wine has been richly endowed with human imagination since forever and that as we create, serve, consume and talk of it, we can never step outside the influence of its durable cultural aura; what one might call its affective magnetism.
Beyond this, certain tasks important to our practice of wine appear to depend in part or wholly on operations of the imagination. Certainly the contemporary wine publication tasting note would be impossible without it, requiring as it does a great exercise of imagination to ransack the world of scents, flavors, and textures in search of terms that will give the reader a sense of the experience. And how about the kind of wine talk that might describe a wine as akin to a walk on the beach or a stroll through an Alpine meadow?
Imagination seems essential to our contemporary fascination with food and wine pairing, too. While experience clearly comes into play, much of the time, we can only attempt to visualize (or is it sensorize?) how a given wine will behave with a given dish.
Then there is the case where, tasting wine with a vendor or winemaker deep in the bowels of the FK wine cellar, we are left to surmise how a bottle of wine that’s been open for a day might have tasted when freshly uncorked. There doesn’t seem to me to be a means of accomplishing any of these other than by resort to the imagination.
Yes, imagination is funny, as the song lyric goes. And in wine practice, essential, too.