In a recent New York Times op-ed, pianist and musicologist Jonathan Biss offers a now-familiar lament: “Our digital existence conspires to fracture our attention, barraging us with more information in less time than the human mind was designed to absorb […] a cacophony of dings [and] alerts.” He proposes “that music is uniquely well positioned to provide an antidote to this avalanche of stimulus,” having in mind the sort of listening experience—epitomized for him by a movement of Beethoven—in which “we give our full attention to one thing, and marvel at its beauty and strangeness and specificity.”
Uniquely well positioned? Surely any World of Fine Wine reader will be familiar with an analogous experience of beauty, strangeness, and specificity from a glass. Which makes one wonder why, at a time when wine appears to be slipping from public favor and its alleged physiological benefits are addressed with increasing skepticism, more is not being made of it as a potential antidote—not to mention a pleasurable one—to something that nearly everybody agrees is ailing us. One may balk at calling wine growing/winemaking an artform, but just as music organizes sounds in time, and along spectra of pitch, volume, and timbre, in tasting we experience the aromas, flavors, and textures of wine as localized in time and space. Similar structural preconditions arguably apply to any experience amenable to aesthetic evaluation and, thus, to any marveling at beauty.
Baptism by immersion
“[I]n today’s frenetic world,” writes Biss of listening experiences that could as easily be tasting experiences, “such moments are increasingly hard to come by. We should consider how rare and treasurable this kind of immersion is.” He seeks to assure us that “if we nurture our capacity to concentrate absolutely on music, it will have ripple effects in other areas of our lives.” To immerse oneself in a wine can also be a means of mental sanitation and a training in the disciplines of sensory sensitivity and focused, sustained attention.
Constant, clamoring distraction of the sort that Biss laments are inextricable parts of what has come to be known as “the attention economy.” But as befits the superficiality of contemporary clickbait, neither the treatment of attention as a commodity nor the association of attention with fleeting cognizance have deep roots. Johnson’s 1755 dictionary offers the definition “The act of […] heeding [or] bending the mind upon any thing.” There soon emerged another sense, that of care—which nicely captures the shared Latin root with “tenderness” (tendere, to direct). In his undated late-18th-century treatise “An Easy Way to Prolong Life by a little Attention to What We Eat and Drink” (which, incidentally, endorses wine), a self-styled “Medical Gentleman” (likely the Reverend John Trustler, who may or may not have concluded his MD studies) managed to capture both senses of “attention” a few sentences apart. Having “advertised” of himself that “He has not given his authorities”—supplied citations—“because he would not break in upon the reader’s attention,” the author launches into his text by observing that “[t]he human body is a piece of mechanism that requires care and attention.” If we speak of attending to a wine, it’s clearly one of these long-standing senses that we have in mind: diligent observation or, in the case of a winemaker, care taken in upbringing—both of which imply significant time and mental exercise.
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Abstract, yet inescapably material
“You may prefer literature or painting as artforms,” contends Biss, “but they do not have music’s magnificent, peculiar abstraction. Novels use words; even an abstract expressionist painter relies on colors and shapes that exist in nature and our lives. But instrumental music is not ‘about’ anything. It stirs the emotions despite—or maybe because of—its inability to reference our lived experience in any literal way.”
Music’s abstraction may be peculiar. But the vinous medium is no less abstract. Fine wine refers to—indeed, testifies to—its vintage and place of origin, as well as to the human endeavors that made it possible. But it, too, is not “about” anything. Our sense of immersion in wine, bound up as it is with physical intake and with intimate bodily impingements, may even be uniquely well suited to an experience of healthy disengagement from the “outside” world.
And yet, wine is ineluctably rooted in that world. It eludes capture by the forces most responsible for today’s digital degradation of experience: “Large language models that,” as Charlie Warzel has written of late in The Atlantic, “[having] devoured the total creative output of humankind endlessly remix those inputs […] flooding the zone with so much synthetic crap that engaging with reality and humanity becomes just one of many content experiences to choose from.” Music is as vulnerable to cyber synthesization as is any other artform. But no large language model can devour wine; nor is a digital simulacrum conceivable. Given how dominant interpretively is our sense of sight, even culinary dishes—via photos and recipes—can be conjured in a cyber medium, albeit not artificially “created” in tasteable form. With wine, a photograph of it sitting in the glass or a list of ingredients barely, if at all, hint at taste.
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Financial Times columnist Tim Harford recently observed, “What’s fun and memorable about the real world helps us push back against the endless samey stimulation of the digital.” There are certainly lots of “samey” wines, but even they are products of human endeavor that exist solely as fluids in the material world. Meanwhile, fine wines represent not just fun and memorable but sometimes profound and absorbing souvenirs of the real world but, at the same time, a means of, like them, eluding cyber capture.
