That I’m fascinated by metaphors and analogies will come as no surprise. Since each is a rhetorical device you could have the idea that their primary use is to persuade others — but the most interesting thing about these figures of speech is not how useful they are in bringing others around to our point of view but how they help us understanding our own thoughts. I know that a good metaphor helps me clarify what I think about something, often reflecting back to me more than I put in to it. Tell me you haven’t had this experience.
I was thinking about this today while running some errands in the car and listening to a radio program about New Music (I capitalize this because it apparently has some sort of very specific meaning in the classical music field – something I’m not privy to). Wine has many affinities with music, more than with any other art form, I think, and while listening to this program I started thinking once again about what sort of music wine is most like, when it occurred to me that at least in one important way, wine is not like music at all.
Music flows on and on; it’s a continuous, serial experience. In this way it’s like reading or like looking at a painting, sculpture, or architecture. Wine drinking, on the other hand, like tasting of any kind, is discontinuous. You can continuously stare at a picture, but you can’t make a taste last longer than it wants to – in part because the swallow reflex takes the tasted thing out of the field of experience in such short order. In this sense, tasting is more like watching a bicycle race on a closed course. You take a position and the field comes spinning by giving you a few seconds of thrill – and then is gone. After some period of time, it reappears and you have another episodic thrill before it disappears again.
I found this line of thinking useful – but not really satisfying until I began to think that wine has more in common with discrete sounds than music, in that, like a sound, a taste has no ongoing narrative structure, its just a single event. It was at this point that I decided that a wine is actually most like . . . wait for it . . . a gong.
Strike a gong and you get a brief percussive attack, followed by a quick swell in volume that is briefly sustained then gradually diminishes and trails off. I don’t know much about gongs (okay, I don’t know anything about gongs), but my guess is that gongs that provide complex, layered harmonics that continue to interest as they gradually recede into inaudibility must be prized. We would say the same thing about wines that provided this sort of effect, wouldn’t we?
Watch this short video with someone who does know something about gongs and let me know if the similarities make sense to you: http://goo.gl/51dSP
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I decided to post our growing wine library at something called Kippt. It’s a new web service for social bookmarking. It works a bit like Twitter in that I post links to articles or videos I want to keep hold of and people who follow me receive the links as a feed on their Kippt page. I like it is because (1) it’s free; (2) it has a very clean and intuitive interface; (3) you can choose to follow the link to the source site on the web or click on the little R which presents the page in a beautiful reading format, minus all webpage clutter; (4) it actually archives the content so that even if the page goes away, you still have a copy of it; (5) we can all also can follow you so that as you collect things you think we should know about we have access to them, too.
I hope you’ll give it a try and provide some feedback on whether I made a good choice and whether the material posted there is helpful. It’s still being curated, so not everything has, for example, a proper title. To start, go to Kippt, set up an account and follow me. You can search for me by my Twitter account @stephen_meuse.
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A reminder that the tasting database form lives at tableintime.com/db-form. Hope to see your tasting notes appearing there. If you have any problems with it, please email me.