Wine has many faces. If it didn’t, how could we write a fresh essay about it every week, not to mention the occasional draw from the archives we twitch a feather duster over, set upright and republish from time to time? Considering the richness of the subject, it’s hard to imagine one would ever run out of meaningful things to say about it.
As with many other matters we humans turn our attention to, opinions about proper methods of investigation rapidly emerge … and just as rapidly diverge. In the winey world, for example, we bump up in very short order against the much-bumped-up-against controversy as to whether a scientific or more humanistic approach is likely to produce the most helpful results. Does wine require an x-ray or a portrait, would be one way of posing the problem. Let’s noodle it, shall we? Feel free to chew on a pencil, if it helps.
The participants in this particular contest are of two sorts, then. In one corner, the chemists and technicians who operate on a micro level, and see wine as little more than a collection of molecular assets needing to be pushed around and put into a more agreeable order than they could manage on their own; in the other corner, folks we might style wine humanists, trained up on context, experience and sensibility, taking a holistic view and keen to bring all rhetorical means at their disposal — metaphor; analogy; allusion — to bear on the problem.
The picture is no doubt overdrawn in our usual TWWC way, but arguably not wholly unrepresentative of the situation. I’m not just hedging my bets when I say that both groups and their respective approaches have something to contribute to questions such as: What is wine anyway? How does one differ from another? What do we mean when we say (as we seem to love to do) that one wine is better than another? Stated baldly: how is wine best explained?
As a person with very little science background, I’m surprised to be more than a little enthralled by the reading I’ve done on the number and variety of naturally-occurring chemical compounds responsible for what we taste and smell in wine. My original exposure to this came via one of the earliest wine information online sites I know, Tom Canavan’s Wine-Pages, where Australian wine guru Tom Stevenson published his extensive Taster’s Handbook of Wine Aromas and Flavors, including what he calls his mind-jogging list. There’s a lot to be learned from it.
Readers with a categorically negative view of sulfites may be surprised to learn there how, for example, many familiar and much-prized wine aromas are the result of naturally occurring sulfur compounds called thiols; or that a class of compounds known as terpenes are responsible for scents of roses (geraniol), lavender (linalool) and citrus fruits (citronellol), among many others. The list is a veritable x-ray of the components and structures responsible for the sensory experiences wine offers in all its kaleidoscopic variety. Yet, none of these compounds is in any way unique to wine, but widely distributed among the general plant world. This explains both their familiarity (even novice tasters readily recognize them) and the pleasure we derive in discovering them in the glass.
And it’s just here, I think, that STEM and lib arts types can find common ground. It’s precisely because wine is, in its flavors, aromas, textures and hues, reflective of a world of common experience that it can function as a rich mine of references, associations and allusions — both sensory and conceptual — that has marked its long, illustrious history and is chiefly responsible for the many faces it presents to us.
Radiology or portraiture? Together they give a fuller picture than either could on its own. What hath been thus joined together, let not man put asunder.