Epistenology: Wine as Experience 9780231552202

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EPISTENOLOGY

A RT S A N D T R A D I T I O N S O F T H E TA B LE

ARTS AND TRADITIONS OF THE TABLE: PERSPECTIVES ON CULINARY HISTORY

Albert Sonnenfeld, Series Editor For a complete list of titles, see page 197

EPISTENOLOGY W I N E A S EX P ER I EN C E

NICOLA PERULLO

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2021 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Perullo, Nicola, 1970– author. Title: Epistenology : wine as experience / Nicola Perullo. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2020] | Series: Arts and traditions of the table: perspectives on culinary history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020017906 (print) | LCCN 2020017907 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231197502 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231197519 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231552202 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Wine tasting. Classification: LCC TP548.5.A5 P47 2020 (print) | LCC TP548.5.A5 (ebook) | DDC 641.2/2— dc23 LC record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2020017906 LC ebook record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2020017907

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover image: Dreamstime, 123RF, iStock. Cover design: Noah Arlow

To my brotherly friend Marco Zocchi, partner in countless epistenological crimes for decades

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CONTENTS

Note for the Reader ix Acknowledgments xi

I WINE AND THE CREATIVIT Y OF TOUCH Prologue 3 1 Meeting with Wine 2 Haptic Taste

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33

3 The Creativity of Touch 53 4 The Languages of Wine, All of Them 69 II TASTE AS A TASK 5 Reestablishing Bonds 87 6 Without a Theme 95 7 Without Method 107 8 Without Competency 117 9 Without Judgment

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10 Taste Is Not a Sense but a Task 141 11 Stories Without Instructions 153 12 Terroir Is the World 163 13 Inebriation and Intoxication 177 Notes 185 Bibliographical Note 187 Essential Bibliography Index 193

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NOTE FOR THE READER

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he book you are about to read requires some preliminary clarifications. First, this essay proposes an agreement with the reader, a request for engagement. I ask for a willingness to be open and exposed to different movements of language as an ongoing experience of reading. I have conceived this text as a sort of wayfaring, and I suggest approaching the experience of drinking a glass of wine in the same way: each path followed, each sip ingested, can offer different thoughts and different feelings. Like a glass of wine, moreover, the text can be understood and felt in different ways, depending on the background of the reader. Inviting openness to multiple perspectives is the main reason why names and notes are reduced to a minimum. Second, the essay comprises two parts, representing two different periods of the journey. These periods differ in time: the first was written between 2015 and 2016, the second in 2017 and 2018. In the Italian version, they correspond to two different books, published, respectively, in 2016 and 2018. This temporal gap entails not only the appearance, in the second part, of new issues as well as the deepening of some already presented in the first but also a clear difference in the form and style of writing.

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The first part is more belligerent and dry, the second calmer and smoother. But they both advance the same arguments, and I find the sequence a good way to communicate to the reader how this experience of thinking and feeling with wine came into being. Third, regarding the title: epistenology is my neologism, and it indicates two different semantic domains. One clearly relates to the crasis between epistemology and oenology: the theory of knowledge and the knowledge of wine condensed into one word. The other semantic domain, however, also plays a pivotal role in the book: the complex combination of epistemology with ontology, where the n of ontology has replaced the m of epistemology. In my view, this expresses the idea that knowledge and being are never fully separable; rather, they relate to each other. So the title expresses the following: through wine, we try to show how knowledge and appreciation are always participative and intimate actions that make the reality as we perceive it. As with life, wine is what we constantly make of it. This is not a subjective position but rather a radically relational one: I try to approach wine as an encounter, a continuous correspondence of doing and undergoing. Epistenology proposes precisely an ecology of attention—as caring, listening, and making—with wine.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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his work owes a lot to the students with whom, for many years, I have learned to experience wine through a different approach. I want to thank them all. Although it may seem very personal and intimate, the book is the expression of a collective oeuvre: there are friends who gave me suggestions and insights or shared with me the same sensitivity with respect to the odorous liquid. Of course, I am also very grateful to the winegrowers who, with their wines, have inspired different parts of the book. I am grateful to Paolo Gruppuso, Elena Mancioppi, Maddalena Borsato, and Nicola Rudge Iannelli for their help and contributions in the first phase of translation. I express all my gratitude to Carolyn Korsmeyer, Wendy Lochner, and Ken Liberman for their valuable and generous help in editing the final version of the text, both for its content and for the language.

EPISTENOLOGY

PROLOGUE

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t may seem bizarre, but the older we get, the less we know. We often delude ourselves about the value of and reasons for our knowledge to such a degree that we can design our entire existence under the aegis of ignorance and indolence. This essay originates in an experience that completely overturned my previous assumptions. It has been like crossing a frozen river. Unexpected, intimate, and forceful, it made me realize the value of discovering oneself, perhaps in retrospect, to be exposed and vulnerable during the very years of life’s most intense activities, of one’s most acclaimed “successes”; it gave me the chance to experience a growing awareness of my own weakness even while acting with ordinary and habitual determination. This overturning was the ongoing result of a sense of unease, above all, in relation to philosophical discourse or, more generally perhaps, to intellectual discourse: talking, discussing, claiming to be right, competing, arguing, and triumphing. At the same time, however, it was an unease with regard to the equally automatic and rigid alternatives—such as programmatic hedonism or militantly cynical indifference—in contrast to which I prefer the ongoing exercise of learning to learn. Calling oneself into question, beginning to be exposed, means constantly

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and completely feeling oneself as a part of the participatory processes that we observe and describe. It also means feeling the need to remove oneself, to break everything up and begin again. This twofold and impelling need is what generated this piece of work. But why wine? Because wine has always been my faithful and constant companion, but also because it easily lends itself to the experiments I will be attempting. Wine is not a simple pretext for describing the overturning of perspective that this (no longer young, not yet old) professor of philosophy underwent. I drink wine in order to bind and create links, to highlight for myself the connections among the exhausted elements of the world. It is through wine that I have learned, and continue to learn, how to balance not necessarily wanting to be right, not necessarily defending myself, and not necessarily understanding. This delicate balance is precisely due to the forces that meeting wine provides me with—those of laughter, sociality, irony, and the lonely desert; those of the active passivity of the gaze and the magical profundity of the contact relationship. In other words, I am continuously trying to learn from wine about the hugely powerful weakness of poetry and its processes. Drinking wine is both a poetic and a practical gesture, as is making it. I call this approach to exposition haptic taste, in opposition to a different attitude, which I call instead optic taste. “Haptic” originally meant a special kind of touch; however, for reasons that will be better explained in the second chapter, I have chosen this difficult word because it enables the possibility of a complete and general perception that is not object-oriented but rather processoriented. Haptic perception engages with the fluidity of the materials of life and acknowledges the relational nature of knowledge, going beyond subject-object dualism and moving toward

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the “participant knowledge” model. (I situate my approach and suggestion more closely in the first chapter.) In wine, haptic taste perceives the material of wine even before the optic taste has solidified it as a stable object consisting of aromas, acidities, alcohol, and defined and fixed places of origin. Haptic perception has permitted me, through wine, to immerse myself in the flow of experience, in which I constantly try to create images that both regulate and nurture my imaginative powers. If, before my revolution in perspective, I used to try to “look good,” possibly by flaunting my knowledge of wine, I now try to create images through the grace of my encounter with wine. This, however, is not due to any particular faculty of mine, and even less to any supposed superior gustatory talent I might have. Instead, it is the result of the awareness of the being-a-line; a line that is unceasingly traced and that, at the same time, creates an interwoven and knotted fabric with other lines on the Earth we inhabit.1 As what appears to me now as a necessary passage, I met with wine as a line that joins others, and this shifted my view—not just about wine. Epistenology is not interested in knowledge about wine—being a wine expert, possessing a culture regarding wine—but in knowing with it. What do we become in meeting with wine—images, trajectories, possibilities, and creations? And conversely, what does wine become in meeting with us? I have encountered wine with passion and intensity over the past twenty-five years, around half of my life. The present essay has a lot to do with time—with time undergone and measured but also with time stolen and conquered, like a task that traces one’s destiny. Until a recent point, I believed it incumbent on me to accumulate information and erudition, based on the pressure of time, measurement, and money because of knowledge as something laid out lengthwise. I misunderstood knowledge

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as something acquired through transmitted data and information. After that point, I decided to allow myself to experience the encounters that just happen and surprise us along trajectories within which we are always different: I discovered time as event. This change in perspective runs parallel with my change of perspective with wine. Another grain of time, a different resource of writing: no longer “I’d like to but I can’t”; rather, “This I can do now, so I will write it.” Because we are moving lines, locomotive perceptions, and the fabric of interwoven relations that intersect and correspond with one another. This is why, dear reader, this essay is not a book about gaining knowledge about wines. It is not a manual nor, even less, a “wine course.” Such projects look backward to a position that no longer exists. This essay is an open textile, a carpet continuously in the process of being woven, even when it now appears to be finished. Its form is the disposition (a word that comes from the Latin dis-positio, “without a position”): never firmed nor fixed in one place. It is a tasting of knowledge by creating it through encounters. What you hold in your hands is an attempt at suggesting how to live and inhabit the world with new eyes. It is not, therefore, a book for learning tasting methods, for recognizing vines, varieties, and perfumes. It is rather an essay about learning how to learn, thanks to the knots created by the meeting of the lines of wine and our own. In other words, this essay is about knowing ourselves out of the corners of our eyes and with the sensitivity of our tongues, on the threshold of new tasks that are always awaiting us. To learn how to learn, we need to question ourselves or, in other words, to act and think within processes in the participatory flow of events. A piece of writing that tries to practice participation is a challenge, and the author who takes such a risk must strive for and delve into the kind of questioning described.

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Neutrality is not possible here, description being a process of intimate participation. Therefore what you will read is, above all, a writing through wine meant as a substance—substance as a fluid, living organism, full of potential once one approaches it as an experienced encounter. I will be dwelling on the relationship with wine as a possible entry point for tracing pathways along the existence I am living. I will be writing the encounter of me with wine; I will be writing how everyone can make and develop different threads and knots in accordance with the lines that one traces. Alive and vital wine, that is, wine not designed for market and commodity purposes, triggered by dynamic paths and sensitive visions, by the awareness that we inhabit a world and do not just occupy a space, facilitates and demands such a haptic approach. One needs haptic perception for emerging into and achieving a reality of relations that is the only unquestionable truth of our lives. We are not in relations; rather, we are relations, as Tim Ingold has beautifully stated. Because it constitutes life, relation moves and arouses us. In the third chapter, “The Creativity of Touch,” I explore the creative powers of haptic perception: as it is an engagement toward processual, mobile, fluid ontology, it opens up a field full of potentialities and imaginative forces. Before my transformed perception, my relations with wine were both normal and normed: curiosity, interest, competency, and knowledge at the professional level of a critic. I remember my first encounters with the wines of my homeland when I frequented a tavern belonging to a Greek man with an allconsuming passion that, at the time, I did not understand— Sassicaia and Grattamacco revealed themselves as sparking stars in an unknown and interesting constellation. I remember my first drink of a great bottle of Percarlo during an

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evening of university solitude, an event that revealed the psychotropic effects of the odorous liquid. Such effects were not always identical, I began to realize; on the contrary, they very much depended on the wine I encountered and when I encountered it. I well remember my initial enthusiasm in meeting the master who introduced me to the environment of wine and planted in me the seed of this passion. I also remember, a few years later, the tasting sessions with fifty, eighty, and even one hundred wines to be “evaluated” and judged. I recall now, just as then, how exhausted and discombobulated I felt after such activities; it was both physical and mental prostration, a spontaneous reaction that, in retrospect, I recognize as a sense of inappropriateness. Nonetheless, for a few years I conducted— and, it has to be said, with an increasing success — courses on “learning to taste” with a consistency that, with hindsight, surprises me. Almost every evening, in different and often distant places, I transmitted the rudimentary skills of a language through the grammar that I had been taught and that, as too often happens in the beginning, I had accepted without posing too many questions. It was fine then, but it was not the final direction for me. After a few years, I felt discomfort and a growing perplexity. I was moving away from wine, and I almost fell out of love with it. This unwitting evolution, however, just as when you think you are not thinking about what you effectively continue to think about, gradually led me to encounter something new, or rather to see and feel with new eyes. Therefore I began to walk in the opposite direction. I can now understand, with confused clarity, the steps of the path that led me to (will to) forget almost everything in order to begin a different relationship with wine. A new kind of life. I need to be clear. I do not mean that one should shift from one language to another, as if discovering the real, new truth

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about wine or about life: in fact, this would contradict the radically relational model here proposed. Rather, as I try to show in chapter 4, I propose an encompassing position, which opens up to an egalitarian and disseminated polyglossia: the languages of wine, all of them, may have space and legitimacy as they result from the awareness of processual entanglement. My overturned perspective came out of my path and my encounters, and its value consists in pointing toward other possibilities and other perspectives. Over the past few years I have been trying to describe, in numerous books and essays on food and wine, something that somehow anticipated the pathway that this work now exposes and reinforces. If I look back, I cannot detect an intent to propose a philosophy of food and of wine; what I was seeking, instead, though through a possibly overly correct, cautious, and fearful approach, was a path for thinking through and with food and wine. An approach that would overturn the cards on the table, or better, clear the table itself. I have never considered myself to possess a wholly, pure philosophical mind, nor to be wholly intellectual or cultural. I have never been a pure theorist nor an enthusiast for long and analytical arguments. I have always preferred brevity, suggestion, and anarchic ideas. These are the setting of the present essay, which stems from a long, indirect elaboration but was written quickly and almost impulsively, with secret gestures, stealing and creating time from everyday ordered and ordinary activities. To create time one needs to love; in the name of my love for wine, this essay was born. Impulsively, but as the distillation of an elaboration both aware and unaware that has taken about twenty years. This text is an experiment and does not want to provide explanations with detailed analyses; rather, it suggests a synthetic look and a unitary approach. For this reason, it asks for an intimate complicity with the reader, and it

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needs a respectful compact. There are no notes, overly precise references, or analytical arguments because I aim to stimulate a response free from supporting voices. In fact, as it is an essay and not a treatise, it can afford such a subtraction. Epistenology is an open field, and, as such, it would like thus to be appreciated and enjoyed in different ways, just as it is when drinking a glass of wine. Like in tasting or reading, there are no hierarchies between the different possibilities: from “immediate” and naked enjoyment to intellectual engagement with the assumptions, philosophical architecture, or oenological debates around which I develop my positions. There is no hierarchy nor mastery, because the epistenological approach avoids the pupil-master and studentteacher model that is typical of knowledge considered as transmission. Instead, the knowing with wine model grows and develops as a participatory and active process, a relation: what Epistenology aims to do with its readers—to provoke the shift from critical distance to critical intimacy. I can now see why the field of food and drink held great attraction for me: ephemeral consumption, change, transformation, and metabolism. The unceasing life cycle finds in food and drink one of its clearest examples; as wine is part of this process, its appreciation cannot be reduced to competencies, expertise, critical knowledge, and conceptual blockages. I was already aware that such a way of conceiving food would be difficult and the result uncertain, but I had never plucked up the necessary courage to deepen my thinking and writing in a more radical way, both totally exposed and firm in the move. This work is the attempt to do it. I am well aware of the objections to putting what may seem a mere personal perspective into play, but I prefer an uncertain result to the rigor mortis of the rigorous, analytical, and objectified arguments. This is an essay with wine and with taste, therefore, rather than on wine and about taste. A text

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is itself a process: from the Latin texere, a fabric of interwoven lines that move along with time. Approaching wine as a process requires a progressive exposition, and, in this particular case, it asks for the abandonment of classical and familiar standards of the aesthetics of taste, demanding, in contrast, a constant and intimate adhesion to the fluxes of time, that is, to the events that continuously arise and that create an encounter. This is the first book by the other me, the secret—secretum— descant that, at a moment, decided to come into play. Following Jacques Derrida’s idea that every philosophy, just as every art, is also an egodicy, a way of justifying our lives in the world, I have experienced and made a text whose navigation calls for different types of readers. This work is an experiment, but at the same time it is also a provocation and a confession. It tells a story, with a style that encompasses argumentation and narration; a story about some personal facts and some episodes. It establishes connections with an often-polemical strength, and, on the other hand, proposes and suggests. It leaves to its readers, however, the freedom to reach their own ways and conclusions, stemming from the examples and metaphors that make up the picture. In the end, this writing is not heretical but impious. Epistenology is an essay of impiety with wine, the fruit of our reciprocal love, the descant in relation to what would have been normal or even opportune to continue doing and that, in contrast, has not been done because, in the meantime, something more urgent and desirable has come up, has developed, and has been written.

1 MEETING WITH WINE

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few years ago I had a brief exchange with a food technologist colleague during a thesis defense session. A student was presenting her work, on which I was the advisor in question, discussing taste as an intersubjective and negotiating value. At one point the technologist blurted out, in an attempt to highlight with deliberate sarcasm something that, having never contemplated, he found to be contradictory: “In other words, this is supposed to be the objectivity of subjectivity!” I politely replied, explaining to him in a collaborative and peaceful manner that it was precisely the case. To no avail, of course. Academic patience, a degree of which I retained at the time, has accompanied me for large parts of my life. However, the desire to be just, true, and even a bit cruel subsequently emerged. This is why I am writing these lines and am doing it drinking a Dettori Tenores: a slap in the face, a violent slash that ends up caressing me. A strong, almost ferocious sweetness. With every caress there is a drop of blood—this wine opens up in me a universe of vulnerability without any weaknesses, an unsettling openness in which I feel things simply with all their force but without needing to understand them. To meet with wine, I have needed to take a

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longer path, one that I am presenting to you here and now in this chapter. A path that, at a certain point, goes up and down. You rise up, you gain a vantage point, and then, descending, you lose it again with a conscious enjoyment of that disappearing illusion, of that reborn journey. Others may follow different, immediate, and more artistic paths, but this is mine and I offer it up to the reader. Why have we created objectivity? When did we start needing it? Objectivity comforts and places us at a safe distance, but its invention is not obvious and inescapable within human history. I don’t mean that it’s better or worse, just not inescapable. Ethnography tells us about the actual existence of communities where the world and what inhabits it are not perceived “objectively,” like something in front of us and at a distance. Objectivity is a special category that we have invented as the ambassadors of logic. Even here in the West, as children or when we are dreaming, we have no need for objectivity because we have no need for a safe distance. If anything, during the first years of our existence or while we sleep, we want to encounter the unknown or the new without any safety nets. We Westerners, however, and in particular we modern Westerners, have decided to rigidly separate childhood time from adult time, dreaming from being awake, our imagination from reality. Imagination itself is calibrated on adult perceptions, and there are very few aesthetic theories based on childhood since art too has something to do with the adult world of well-defined reason by providing it openings. In adult and waking time, therefore, we perceive according to an “objective” model. This allows us to distinguish between truth and falsity. We think, build bridges, laser machines, information systems, and many other things with true objectivity. Nonetheless, and effectively truly, bridges can also be built where—in many communities studied by anthropologists—there

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is no rigorous demarcation between dreaming and waking, fantasy and reason, clock-time and time measured by tasks, by doing what our life commits us to do. In spite of this, it is believed that the existence of such artifacts depends entirely on the possibility of knowing objects with analytical exactness without which, it is held, nothing of all this would exist. Above all, however, we cultivate the illusion of control over the things of the world through objectivity, and this is reassuring. And since we have metabolized, as if they were drinking water, the connections between the evidence of our knowledge of the world and objectivity, everything we want to know, including ourselves, is elaborated and perceived as an object. To perceive objects means, above all, to perceive the world as a collection of independent things: ourselves on the one side and a house, the ground under our feet, the sky above us, on the other. Language favors, or rather is the illusion necessary for, this separation: a world populated by objects that can relate the one to the other but, by rights and de facto, are discrete entities. On the other side of objectivity, in this dualist model, stand subjectivity and its phantoms. Subjectivity is characterized as uncertain, untrustworthy, and insecure. Subjectivity stands at the margins or is even removed from true knowledge and is accepted only if it can be tamed by means of grids, tables, or categories that are made to correspond to the “objects.” Without grids, tables, or categories—without “systems”—subjectivity might be allowed to circulate within limited territories, in well-defined spaces where there is no question of bridges, lasers, information systems, or biomedical equipment. Within this model, subjectivity is free only in dreams, in the imagination of poets, in children’s drawings, or in the questions of taste where, it is said, it is pointless to dispute. Disputing means arguing, and in order to argue you need conceptual schemata and a stable and fixed language

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that permits arriving at neutral, shared, communicable, and definitive truths. To define/definitive/definition: the ambit of objective knowledge requires being able to distinguish and to be precise. Today this model is even proposed for the adult world of wine culture and expertise that is usually objectified, beginning with acquired instructions shrouded in grammatical descriptions of presumed universal validity, in order to appreciate in a distinct and distal way. We are following a different path, placing ourselves on a different level. This does not mean pleading the case for something untrue, of course. It means beginning to perceive what is true beyond the cloak of the objective object. This does not mean that here we will be arguing against objectivity but, rather, that we will be avoiding it with joyous impiety. If arguing aims at being right according to the measurements of objective knowledge, which means that only what is measurable can be true, a different approach permits us to draw a different picture. The very questions we pose ourselves can be challenged, as Wittgenstein suggests when he asks us to dissolve rather than resolve a problem. In this way we might discover that there is something substantially more real than objective knowledge. Objectivity, on the other hand, is not a simple or evident fact—as some philosophers have shown us, even what is a given is a myth in its own right. If we observe things with the unarmed gaze of childhood, we will find a world inhabited by beings that are very different from one another. A stone, a dog, the wind, water, hair, teeth, and a smile, copper or grapes, railway lines, airplanes, and ships, newborn babies, milk, leaves, a tornado, cars and bridges, billboards and rain, the sea and the sky. It was only at a certain moment, and according to a specific evolution, that human thought began to consider defining, grouping, and abstracting these multiplicities, putting into classes and knowing in the same

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way, with the same instruments and the same language, the undefined list of the things of the world in which those just named represent a minimal part. Above all, however, our mind has performed an inversion of logic—in modern philosophy, these limitations, from the relationships to their ending, have been called “transcendental” or, that is, that before these concrete entities there has to be something that makes them possible. Let  us consider, for example, the notion of space: an empty “container,” the condition of everything that effectively takes place there, of the places, of the sky or the earth, of the roads and paths that would appear to be secondary to or dependent on space per se. This also occurs with wine. Before the encounter with this individual wine, I need its “wineness” as an object, and this generates the question that prepares the field for objectivity as such: “What is wine?” But are we sure that this passage is absolutely essential? Epistenology promotes a different model that is both practical and theoretical. One of the consequences of what I am proposing is, for example, that I prefer to drink a bottle of wine in its entirety if the encounter is gratifying, rather than tasting ten or twenty different wines in order to analyze, compare, and evaluate them as objects. I am very aware of the need for criticism, comparisons, and judgments. And I am equally aware of how necessary all this is if we interpret wine as an object, subject to the market, for example. Nonetheless, this project, epistenology, aims to propose another, complementary, if not alternative, possibility for the wines encountered. From a certain standpoint, it can also be seen as a criticism of criticism, for taking charge of life rather than delegating it. Adherence to the myth of given knowledge and objectivity relates not only to the process of passing from infancy to adulthood but also to the very movement that produces that uniform

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idea of “history.” Nonetheless, as noted by many historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and even philosophers, the path that has led to the objective paradigm of modern science, based on analytical and experimental methods, has been anything but straightforward. Mathematics, physics, and chemistry have evolved by interweaving with contextual questions and problems relating to the more complex social and cultural processes: they cannot be understood by placing them within brackets and ignoring their origins and journeys, which are anything but neutral and abstract. The strategy of measuring many of the entities that make up the world using the same instruments—abstraction, the reduction to numbers and quantities—has not been inevitable but the outcome of a journey, a contingent necessity without a cause. Subsequently, there has been the elaboration of that which we define as “reality” on a stable and fixed basis. Modern knowledge about wine has undergone this same journey by being set into the same model. Let us try to set it free. Of course, in modern, Western culture it has been immediately evident that at least some of the elements that constitute the world contain and express different qualities that cannot be reduced— even within an objectivist perspective—to analytical exactness. The birth of modern aesthetics in the eighteenth century corresponded to the human, all too human, need for reserving to it a specific space. Locke, Descartes, and Galileo defined phenomena such as colors, smells, and tastes as secondary qualities because they did not possess sufficient solidity and stability to be included within the scope of clear and distinct, neutral and perfect science. These great scientists and philosophers and, as a consequence, also great mythographers produced their fantastical narrations, calling up, on the part of other thinkers, the need to build a specific and integrative space for the considerable part of our lives that includes emotions,

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sentiments, and passions; imagination, narration, and poetry. In other words, all these forms of encounter in which the knot produced by the interweaving of different elements inhabiting the world cannot be understood through rational analysis and according to the dualist subjective/objective model, but by means of a relational perspective. Would we ever define an experienced interhuman relationship as objective? A relationship can be real or not real, banal or profound, complicated or superficial, but it definitely cannot be objective. Let us consider the possibilities opened up by some of the elements in the random list just mentioned: when we take a dog out for a walk, when we play with a child or sniff a flower, we do not perceive the grains of time passed in terms of objectivity but in those of truth, intensity, emotion, pleasure, boredom, or unease. Friendships and love relationships are real or not real not insofar as they are more or less “objective.” The thought of objectivity as the outcome of a presumed, neutral knowledge makes no sense at all. In effect, in a relationship, there is no neutrality: we know something of the world, something other than ourselves with all that this implies. “Subjects” are substances that we encounter and, at the same time, are both the outcome but also the producers of relationships. Clearly, within the relationship, the idea of putting aside, removing, suspending the subject never even arises. It is in this way that we know ourselves insofar as we live by and in this relationship. We participate, not considering it, for this reason, as false or uncertain since the truth depends on something different. Relationships are interweavings, the effects of encounters, processes that give rise to stories. What strikes us and endures in a relationship is its narrative quality, its style, and its singular and irreducible nature or, in  other words, precisely what objective knowledge wants to remove because it is unessential. Knowledge as a relationship,

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an encounter that interweaves lines and processes, however, does not possess essentiality as its motive because all that occurs is both pertinent and important. The model of the relationship thus permits us to pass from a world occupied by subjects and objects to a world inhabited and animated by living substances. If the model of objective knowledge aims to neutralize, removing fluid differences, living characters, and singularity from consideration because what it wants to create is a universe of static generalizations, relationship is created in the world of elements lived here and now and then passing away. As dualism and division, at least in most Western modern philosophy, ask for distance, then objectivity requires a representation, a faith that delegates: if that which I know must have a general value and must not relate solely to the specific nature of my current experience, this universal abstraction must be constructed elsewhere. We entrust ourselves to others and delegate to them when it is a question of exact and analytical knowledge because we do not have the tools for measuring it directly. The Earth appears to be flat, but we know (a knowledge based on trust) that it is actually spherical. In the laboratories of the infinitely small and in the centers studying the infinitely large, where those great prosthetics of the human eye that are microscopes and telescopes hold sway, scientific development requires competencies, great ability, and machines that are unavailable to ordinary, daily life. Of course, I do not intend to question the absolute importance of such models. As the crystallizations of complex processes made by genius minds, these are wholly legitimate mytheme in a life conquered and gradually constructed with effort, at least within our culture and society. The point is that these trajectories are determinate perspectives and not the only way to experience and experiment with life. I want to suggest an alternative path with and through wine because I believe that this now

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produces useful and alternative strategies that fit better with the demands of the world we inhabit. Again, this does not mean overturning arguments or replacing one hierarchy of thought with another. It means trying to see things from a different perspective, in a relationship where there is no need to delegate to others the knowledge that we receive, accepting it as an objective given. In some cases and for many people, delegation is comfortable; it removes some of the burden of life. Even representative democracy is a delegation device that legitimates the power of some. No one, however, gets any delegation in a relationship. We place our trust only in the element encountered and that lives intertwined with us. We do not place our trust in third parties because relationships have a sense and produce knowledge only if experienced and appreciated directly, live. The knowledge produced in effective relationships is called living experience or, even, ways of life. With wine, we can create new symbols and forms of life, as long as we accept it not as an object but as a fluid and living substance. Wine is not a knowledge to be objectified but an encounter to be experienced. It is not about the acquisition of data and information according to an established grammar and syntax but about the creation of images and trajectories. I love wine because it bestows on me the constant amazement of triggering possible relationships, a vastness of images that I unfold and in which I find and produce continuous correspondences. I drink to reconstruct and create a fiber, to illuminate the hidden connections between the disentangled things of the world. I recall that sometimes, as in the house with the low ceiling, pink Champagne gave us the keys to a hard-earned intimacy. Other times, as in the restaurant of the aromas in Milan, an Altura del Giglio swept us beyond the distinction between public and private. That wine provided us with a total exposure of

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our most intimate being, because no one could see us. We were invisible while in full sight. The Altura protected us because it tied a knot, which allowed us to perceive everything while we were in a nonobjective but relational and atmospheric mode. You might object that this evidence tells us nothing about wine “as such,” and it is merely a personal narrative. But this is precisely the point, because wine “as such” does not exist, and to pretend it does means placing it with both feet in the sphere of the dualist paradigm, the subject on one side, the object on the other. This wine does not exist as a banal “element” as such; rather, it is the relationship that is banal. Then there are elements that favor and encourage more beautiful and gratifying relationships. Therefore a live and vital wine and an intelligent and sensitive companion are encountered and trigger a relationship where something like a “great wine” emerges. As far as I know, only those wines, those determinate bottles that I have encountered along the way, exist. A “cheap” wine and an “expensive” one: these categories do not hold any “objective quality” measure, as quality is what one encounters, recognizes, and simultaneously makes in a lived experience. Feeling/thinking this way calls for a shift of perception, I know; but now I have discovered that such a perception is possible. Epistenology attends the knots perceived when various elements combine, among which is wine, and on their coming into being— or, in other words, perceived and therefore created. This is not the “post-truth” ideology—anything but! It is instead a radically relational approach, which, in itself, opens up situations that are never fixed and completed. The consideration that wine is an encounter to be had thus expresses the most ruthless grip on reality with regard to what effectively occurs and happens during our travels along the paths and roads of the Earth that we call “the world”—travels that make the world what it is at

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one and the same time. We are elements in motion that perceive. We perceive by moving ourselves, and while we perceive we live and flow, changing by transforming ourselves through that which we encounter. Wine: I have repeatedly stated that there is no essence of wine but only the existence of wines, concrete happenings and events. So to which wines am I referring when I describe my encounters? Just to the wines that facilitate the encounter, which are the only ones that interest me today and with which I wish to engage. Which are these? The wines in which life manifests itself and develops most strongly and with the greatest degree of unforeseeable freedom. In principle, every wine can be vital, although not with the same force, because life is continuously made and it is relational; there are wines that have been designed and contained by the myth of being an object. They were born to be slaves, and for this reason it is more difficult for them to be open to encounters. One can perceive life or death while encountering the wine with attention and care. When perception is open and tuned, wine answers accordingly if it is living and on its own. Life is movement, process, and transformation. It is not a given but a task. Life is what is woven every day, life is the relationship, and it is within the relationship that things are given life. So it is for the wine. Mario Soldati, great Italian writer and wine lover, wrote, “Wine is the poetry of the earth.” Poetry as poiesis derived from the Greek “to make,” producing something of value. Primarily, wine is the value of the earth. From the earth comes wine by means of the vine and its fruits. A vertical process, from the vine roots to the grape berries on the plant, because life is generated underground where the minerals, rocks, and water reside. Under the ground lies the mineral world, while above ground life is manifest—a life made of surfaces and substances, of air and light. Between the below and above lies the earth, that thin layer that

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is the skin of the world. A skin that is porous, connecting inside and outside, receiving from below and pushing outward. Wine is produced by the vitality of the earth because the wine rests its roots on it, sinking them down, and the plant is the mother of the fruits to which it transfers the substances elaborated by its metabolism. When the vitality of the earth is depleted or compromised because those who make wine work in accordance with the idea that the material is merely an extension, an object to be dominated, then the plant will need further assistance in order to receive that which it needs to transmit to the fruit. This results in the assistance created by objective knowledge, the produce of syntheses created thanks to microscopes and laboratories. Even if this does not necessarily destroy the potentials of life —because life tends to hang on, and often adapts and resurrects itself, and new relationships produce life—nonetheless, it is transfigured and undoubtedly impoverished. Wine is animate. Wine is vibrant and vital as it is open to be encountered by us as part of an experience. Life is not the start of movement; it is, rather, movement that produces life. This is true for different entities, not just wine. The whole world can be  animate, not because objects possess a soul inside them; once again, this false representation comes from the objectivist model, and objects are exactly what cannot be animated, because they are detached from the currents of life. Instead, the whole world can be alive once we are open to feel and think of it not as a sum of detached objects but rather as a continuous flux of intersected and fluid elements that are encountered as the experience. To perceive the world as alive does not mean accepting the idea that, somewhere or other, it has a soul. The soul is not owned but is produced and created as the partial result of the unceasing generation and transformation of everything. To perceive this animation means feeling things in accordance

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with their materials, their substances, and not as stable objects but rather as continuously created force fields. Through the medium of air, substances are reached on their surfaces by other substances, organisms, light, heat, and water. There is always a metabolic exchange, in varying degrees. Movement breaks the distinction between outside and inside since it is the very process of the generation of life. This is why producing wine according to a dualist and Cartesian idea of the living subject and passive object, over which a mind exerts its will, does not help in the creation of a vital relationship. Such a project aims to produce something that is stillborn, to be consumed, and which only with great difficulty can avoid its fate. It is therefore doubly mistaken to consider wine as an object, a static and helpless res extensa: on the one hand, because no element is such in itself and absolutely, but above all because, if it is allowed to express itself as an active relationship, wine has evolutionary and transformative processes. From the roots of the plant through to the end of its cycle of life. These processes are so rapid and perceptible that they are truly similar to our own, including in terms of time that can be measured by the clock: birth, growth, evolution, decadence, and death. The human processes are usually just a little bit longer. The magic of wine therefore comes from the interweaving of the greatly underestimated sky and earth, from climates, from meteorology and atmospheres, from bacteria and soils and leaves— from plants with deep roots, from grapes and their fermentation. Its ability to transform itself is like my own transient and fluid sense of identity: it changes and evolves, it’s different while remaining “the same,” it radiates a style and a character that shape and produce the encounter with those who drink it. On the other hand, the objectivist paradigm leads us to consider wine in a different way. Not as a continuous production of

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creative relationships—from the roots of the wine to the drinker— and not as a text/fabric but as a work/object, wellundifferentiated, static ontology, malleable and molded at will. Thus in this model the vital potential of wine is impoverished and repressed by further interventions. These are defined as “corrections” and “improvements”—with respect to what I will discuss further on—that castrate its organic and partially spontaneous development in preference for an external imposition by the relevant demiurge—I will improve you in relation to an idea, and you will become this because that is the way things are. This idea is one of oenological correctness: making wine as a work/ object and not as a text/fabric, as the outcome of a grammatical exercise, a writing that respects standards and is appreciated because of the final actions. In this way, tasting becomes a series of corrections, activities of control with which each result is measured by its adherence to the taste produced by such a grammar. Émile Peynaud, the master of modern, positivist oenology, told us that taste must be instructed to its rules. In contrast, we know that syntax and grammars are the outcome of cultural and social processes. Holding to them is a choice. Epistenology is a field of open opportunities, a field that has been freed from the illusion of the need for a single possible “science.” It contains no science, nor the possibility of falsifications, no conjectures or refutations, when dealing with the encounter with wine. What it does have is a multiplicity of practices, styles, and expressions that are legitimate whenever there is a drinker who is both disposed to and capable of appreciating it. For this reason, it is ridiculous to consider wine with narcissistic presumption based on a model of objective knowledge. Unfortunately, this is what happens when the “product” consists of a generic and general object to be measured and therefore the encounter is difficult and abstract. Above all, within this model, there is no

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interest in encountering anyone. In contrast, in the vitality triggered by the subsoil and transmitted through the earth and the sky to the plant and its fruits, wine clearly reveals itself to be a living element, a vital organism that expresses character and personality that cannot be reduced to any form of abstraction. There is no essence of wine because wines exist only through concrete experiences where lines, traces, nodes, and relationships with someone who will subsequently drink them emerge, as, for example, on this May evening. Epistenology predisposes us for the encounter with wine as a dynamic element that facilitates the relationship as an active correspondence. Of course, it is still possible to be indifferent even to those wines that call out to us, setting out signposts and ropes to draw us in, as occurs in any kind of encounter—arid and futureless lines, suspended lives. As here proposed, however, it will be possible to perceive the world as a continuously woven tapestry while we march over the earth. It is like an infinite papyrus that unrolls before us as we walk, like Italian cartoonist Osvaldo Cavandoli’s line, as long as both lines and the papyrus are seen as products of our movement—allowing the emergence of our wonder at what happens as a constant generation, and for us to accept this feeling with vulnerable grace. It happens with art, it happens with eros, and it happens when we feel things without explaining them. It’s called magic, and it also happens with wine. In French, the ageing of wine is called élevage. The word élevage is used for the education of children, as in their formation before they venture out into the world on their own. This period involves many actors: parents, friends, relations, teachers, animals, landscapes, the sun, the rain, the wind, roads, atmospheres, sounds, odors, fables, and words. Wine, of course, is not produced out of nothing. Wine is not a mere product because it is not just a fixed oeuvre —it is produced and is a text. Wine is

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the fruit of an active interweaving of the sky, the earth, feet, hands, and actions, a process that began a long way back and, furthermore, has always been developing. The role of humans in the creation of wine is only the very last phase, from the vine to the bottle, because everything that takes place before is lost in the interactions that are no longer dependent on us—progeny, elements, ancestors. This role is peculiar. Those who make wine follow the maieutic method, and, in this sense, some have suggested that those following this method should be defined as custodians rather than producers. It’s a nice definition but needs to be used with care as it risks falling into the objectivating funnel, representing wine and humans as two distinct and separate elements, the protected object and the protecting subject. However, maintaining the animated and relational perspective by means of which wine is not an object to be measured but an encounter to be experienced means considering wine and the rest, those who make it and those who drink it, as an inextricable fabric of lines, encounters, and nodes. Every wine drunk is a new knot tied. The trees of the great artist Giuseppe Penone express this idea to perfection: elements/artifacts, the tangled mass of humans and plants, evolve and transform themselves as fields of dynamic relationships. There is a correspondence between them and us in the postal and rather outdated sense of the word. It is a correspondence as a path, a written communication, letters through which we try to know about each other and ourselves; every line, every page, and every missive needs lines, pages, and letters, the previous and the future, integrated events, in order for there to be a narrative. The relationship comes alive in the response of the other and in their further questions. This also happens with wines as the knots produced in the crossroads of the encounter between the maieutic, the liquid element, and the drinker: there is not “the wine” on the one hand and those who make and drink

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it on the other. The maieutics and the drinkers “make” the wines to the same degree that the wines, the intersections of many different elements and organisms, in turn give us life. Wines exist or, in other words, this bottle exists as the trace produced by these maieutic approaches that in turn encounters me, the drinker, in this determinate context —an aware, participated, partial, and perfect relationship. Epistenology is therefore the knot of ontology and epistemology. Not so much a knowledge of wine; an epistemology of wine would be sufficient in this case (and the new name would just be  a clever stunt). Rather, epistenology is a knowledge with wine created in the dense grain of time, within the inhabited world. The n of beings— Greek Ďnta—combines in our perception as an act of choice and trust (pistis). Episteme, then, is Ďnta and Ďnta is episteme: there is no relativism lurking in the background, only processes and relationships, texts as fabrics, tangles of lines, dense temporality, and the unavoidability of atmospheres. In other words, there is a radical and uncompromising grip on reality. This wine is the encounters that have created it, and the bottle is not an example of an abstract category. For the same reason, I find the fetishism of vintages, the collection of labels, the adoration of producers to be incomprehensible. If this seems to make sense in our tranquil daily lives, nonetheless, there is another possible story, an aggregate or an alternative: the vitality of wine is produced in the significant relationships that are established, going beyond schematic reductionisms and permitting new opportunities for those who know how to capture them by calling themselves into question. Furthermore, this rebirth takes place annually and is called “the harvest.” The question of “good” or “bad” harvests is therefore an error typical of aesthetics as the promotion of fixed criteria of the good and the beautiful— signifying its inevitable demise. It is a

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reassuring distraction, multiplication tables learned by rote. A good vintage with respect to certain criteria, of course. But what about going beyond these transmitted criteria? When did I first encounter wine? When did I become aware of its powers to establish relationships that pulverize the rigid and foreseeable mechanisms of ability, of aromatic recognitions, of written typologies codified by unimaginative grammars— desperate grammars that do not search for true phrases, but abstract objectivities for the mythological protection of their existence from the ceaseless flow of the river? This took place not that long ago, and there were no revelations on the road to Damascus but rather a ferocious and progressive evolution. Somehow, at a certain point, wine as substance, no longer wine as object, began to speak to me because I re-created the ears, eyes, nose, mouth, and, above all, the touch that could listen to and accept it. Some relationships are particularly impressed on my memory. The Paradiso di Manfredi drunk in spring 2012 in Pistoia, the Coulée de Serrant drunk in Turin on that summer evening in 2013, the white Château Musar in Milan when I became aware of what I wanted to remove. Then, so many glasses before dinner, unexpectedly on the rocking chair on my porch, through to the source of this essay’s writing on November 29, 2014. On that date, thanks to Pierre Overnoy’s Arbois Pupillin and Joly’s Les Vieux Clos, everything became full of gods. The gods were created because I encountered them and, therefore, impiety came to rule the house. I became aware of them, the fantastic gods of the living world, taking into account the plexus where creation coincides with discovery and all this lies in the combination of yourself and all the others, those with whom we have shared our journeys. On that day, the entanglements of lines created a perfect knot. Since the earliest of times, many have captured the fantastic power of wine, the liquid of community and sharing,

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and the trigger for images that become memories. Of course, once we have fully understood the socializing intimacy of wine, then, every now and again, we are able to drink it on our own. The experience of wine on our own is like Baudelaire’s experience of crowds: only those who are able to enjoy being alone can enjoy being in crowds. Only those who know how to share the encounter with wine can also get joy from a one-to-one relationship. Being disposed to encounter wine means loving the experience of the relationship, its possibilities as well as its risks. Nothing can any longer become (this is not being, let’s let ourselves go) as it was before. Because wine is those possibilities and those risks, “the wine” is dissolved in wines, in these wines that I drink as if there were no tomorrow, because tomorrow is already now, instant by instant and movement by movement. It is the illogical note of temporal ecstasies. There is no fixed ontology that can stand up to it: whether this is considered in the sense of the “objective” constituent parts of wine or in the equally hypostatic sense of the rigid geographies in the played out song of the terroir. In reality, there is nothing less static than places. They are, in contrast, hives that are continuously redefined, both explicitly and implicitly, including within the regulated spaces of current legislation. Wine is its occurring and ongoing taste as a relationship and as resistance. This wine is what we are when we encounter it—a trigger, an alchemy that needs no knowledge of the facts to work. Within the model of objective knowledge, what we cannot explain by its causes is not true, or, at the very least, it lies somewhere in-between. In the relationship, in contrast, we are not concerned with the causes because that which works is true. It is not pragmatism but process. To be able to describe what we observe, it is necessary to participate, and this does not mean elevations or epoché. The same goes for when we drink a wine by

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encountering it: we become that wine. Touching its skin with ours, we capture substances and mix with them. The substance of wine is, in turn, a fabric: its effects are not solely dependent on the alcohol, although every wine possesses psychotropic qualities that can provide joy and enjoyment, when assimilated in a manner suited to the encounter. The effects of alcohol intertwine and are part of the overall ecology. Wine is all its constituent parts— the bottle, those who drink it, its surroundings and internal elements—that, in their entanglement, are produced every time anew. Anyone who has encountered a vital, dynamic, and lively wine is well aware that the quality of inebriation is never identical. It depends on the type of encounter. Encounters and stories, narratives in which characters emerge and ceaselessly shape and remodel themselves. At times this wine comes to us unexpectedly, without any deliberate intent, and, if anything, these unforeseen events are often the most interesting. The encounter can be secular, joyous, or spiritual, pragmatically distracted, but in all cases there are endless possibilities—pliable and relaxed like the life we lead every day.

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O

nce we overcome the fear and discomfort of losing objectivity, finally we can consider the nature of diet. In the epistenological mindset, wine is effectively a dietetic relationship. But what is diet? Is it possible to make a life in which drinking wine accords with the overall equilibrium of our well-being? Let’s run through the paths crossed so far. If knowledge is relationships, knowledge is movement because relationships are encounters. Encounters are life. If life is relationships, it is a task—in following traces, we draw lines and interweavings that constitute force fields. This knot finds its truest reality in diet. How can we deny this? Everything is a metabolic process. Our diet shapes us, and for this reason it has often been considered to be the art of living. “Diet” in ancient Greek is diaita—a way of life, with the same root as zao, “I live.” Diet is how we exist, the regulations by means of which we come to terms with time, which, as mobile elements, we also produce: sleep and wakefulness, being still and in movement, the light and the dark, sex and abstinence, physical exercise and food. Our dietary regimes are an integral part of our lives. Expressions such as quod sapit nutrit (what pleases nourishes) or “a little

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of what you fancy does you good” convey the truth of the relational model whereby the body is, improperly but at one and the same time, both the “object” and the “subject” of care. In effect, it does not live within strict subject/object distinctions. The ecological relationship is not experienced dualistically. There is no longer a subject over here and an object over there with respect to the reality of our own lived bodies. There is an encounter, a knot that produces what we call “me,” “us,” “wine,” and all the rest. To cure oneself means to take care, to exercise a passionate watch over the continuous requests that we meet in the world in the form of elements different from us to which we respond and correspond. These are bits of lines that we were, are, and will be, coming together along new paths with those edible substances that we literally ingest. The body never knows (itself) in an objectified state, as both medicine and phenomenology indicate. Rather, the body knows (itself) only from the inside. Instead of being objectified, it can be observed by moving along trajectories that draw temporary and dynamic landscapes, the latticework that we inhabit, cohabiting with the other and completing those tasks that, in different ways, we call life. The body continuously produces the soul that weaves it, the movement that it needs in order to encounter and therefore do “things” and produce images. In this way we develop sensitivities thanks to which we accept substances inside us—an “inside” that, however, is in a continuous process and relationship with “outside.” Everything is food, in a way: in an inextricably interwoven physical and metaphysical sense—air, water, light, plants, animals, and minerals—we consume everything in the form of encounters and relationships. But these are perceivable qualities, the decisive ones that we deal with day by day: not the objective components hidden from our sensitive life but the

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vital substances with which we continuously interact. We drink wine, not polyphenols or amino acids. Hippocrates from Kos proposed pairing the four elements—water, air, earth, and fire— with their respective attributes— cold/damp, warm/damp, cold/ dry, and warm/dry. These correspond to the four basic humors: phlegm, blood, black bile, and yellow bile. The correct functioning of the human organism was thought to depend on their overall equilibrium. Foods comprised their perceivable qualities together with the body that encountered them. The Hippocratic/ Galenic diet set out rules that were never general because they were consistently in relation to the specific situation of a specific body—its age, health, sex, physical activity, type of work. The relationship between the body and food was therefore direct and created a fabric, complex and never conclusive. It was not possible to place this knowledge outside, postulating generalized truths that applied to everyone because what was appropriate always corresponded to the situation within the individual body. Thus the truth of wine also consists in its effectively experienced qualities, those that are felt and assimilated: astringency, dryness, heat, spiciness, strength, sweetness, sharpness, coldness, freshness, lightness, heaviness, pungency, greasiness, and all the others. We drink wine experiencing its existence with its chain of effects. The qualities of wine have gradually become distant from the qualities of diet because the latter has, in turn, been reduced to the calculation of its objective constituents, which food science has identified as the essences of foods. Thus the essence of wine refers to its discrete components or, in other words, that which is in wine independently from what wine does in the encounter. The scientific model, specifically the modern Western model, introduced the infinitely small, the imperceptible to the human eye, into its visual paradigm as the only possible form of

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human knowledge. A carrot is in truth its constituent parts— water, carbohydrates, fibers, and proteins—that we can identify only from analyses that require machines and instruments. In this way, objective knowledge postulates a clear distinction between the scientific image and the image manifest in the world of experience, knowable by means of technologies that require “neutral” (and insipid) observation, independent from participation and therefore the social aspect of tasting in the case of food and wine. For this reason, diets have begun to be compiled in accordance with quantitative criteria—a certain number of proteins, vitamins, carbohydrates, and so forth. Dietetic science has thus become detached from the singularity of lives, externalizing and delegating knowledge of the body to its external specialisms— only a doctor will know what I need, what is good or bad for me, because they have trained and can see things to which I have no access. We accept as normal the fact that they are distant to our bodies, dismissing our experience as of no account. Just as with diet, this aspect of modern science has removed the need to be alert, as is required in a direct relationship, a relationship that cannot be objectified because it is produced only through participated and lived perceptions. While objective knowledge externalizes and separates, the participated, intimate relationship internalizes and unites because it is knowledge from within the flow of experience. This does not mean contrasting good with bad but rather understanding that it is not possible to lump everything together. The variety of processes in the lived body requires a plurality of instruments to understand it. This is what a diet needs, precisely in the sense of our gaze and our tastes being open and on display to the world. What refers to wine stands also for other tastes because taste, as ever, is experienced singularly and therefore cannot be reduced to an undifferentiated unity.

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When expert and pedantic tasters tell us that this wine “tastes” of black currants, almonds, or dried figs, passing their words off as a referential and, even worse, neutral assertion, what are they effectively talking about? They do not mean capturing a sensitive quality of wine, the ecological perception of that situation. Whether they know it or not (and they often don’t know it because their perception passively reproduces what has already been described in books that teach the correct syntax), they are calling into question the recognition of the stimulus as the primary constituent part, the guaranteed source of objectivity and truth. The perception of black currants, of almonds, and of dried figs is presumed to be due to the effective presence of measurable chemical components that can be verified by the analytical tools for which the apparatus of the human mouth is model and mold. The point, however, is— over and above any criticism of this concept that reduces the body to the status of a machine— that the question of whether black currants are effectively there is one of pure and fixed ontology; it cannot be the case for epistenology: ontology is interwoven with epistemology so that there is no space for an objective paradigm. We need to recover the internal dimensions of knowledge, beginning with a renewed sensitivity, with an experience of the body as situated locomotion. The “short supply chain” is much discussed, above all, in reference to the food but, in contrast, should relate primarily to the connections between us and the world: that knot of interwoven lines where doing and perceiving, producing and benefiting from, creating and consuming are always inextricably linked. Let’s take back possession of life, and let’s do it with wine. If I go back in time, I find myself at twenty when, having just graduated full of hopes and illusions, I was invited by chance to a dinner with two famous American philosophers, a fairly significant occasion held in a modest, though clean and

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well-lit, venue. Of course, it was a terrible meal with even worse wine, but at the time I paid no attention to such things as I was entirely caught up in the intellectual value of theoretical discussion of nutrition. Just as I had been taught, the head and the belly never came together. Nonetheless, on that occasion something was revealed to me, in a primitive way, that I had already perceived as a brutal approach contrary to the reasons for which, as I had thought up until then, philosophy had a sense. Both the expert in language and the prince of the mind very clearly demonstrated the violence of the argumentative model on the basis of which the exercise of thinking is lived entirely as a game of intellectual ability. Here, the intellect is considered as the accumulation of points awarded from some external source and never interwoven and contextualized with the processes in which they are involved. There are only agile and competitive thoughts that never connect to the earth and the sky, thanks to which we exist. And just like adolescents competing at who can throw things the farthest, in that funereal conversation in which I debased myself—because I took my French masters seriously when they held that there could never be enough of discussions—the two eminent scholars, who also ate and drank a good deal, revealed to me their complete ignorance because they had never known anything from “the inside.” The two savants had and still have no idea of the creative movement of elements as lines produced and productive with time—and, of course, they knew nothing of the power of our diet and of wine. I have known many thinkers and many tasters of this ilk: walled up within their static and objective perceptions, they wander around as survivors and are buffeted here and there, exceptionally weak in their disembodied intellectual strength, always ready to attack someone or something and to defend their booty

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of knowledge. They desire things to be systematic, even when they are sufficiently intelligent to glimpse, from the corner of their eyes, the ceaseless movement before something becomes a product. Therefore, rather than accepting the impossibility of control and opening themselves up to the value of the flow, they design systems that are so complex—schemata, concepts, classifications, and categories—and they slip on an autism caused by their pursuit of virtuosity as an end in itself. When Wittgenstein states that no philosopher has ever been wrong unless he has set out a theory, I believe that he meant to highlight this very problem. The myth of the truth of the theory as such, on the other hand, comes with the retinal approach: the theory, as the idea, refers to seeing. In the case of wine, systematic theorists present us with aromatic wheels, like peacocks, within which we should insert and adapt our nostrils for the purpose of recognizing perfumes and, so they believe, the essence of wines —the perfumes of Nebbiolo, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, and so forth. What is well-known from previously written guides and guaranteed by the knowledgeable father in a white coat is repeated from within the comfortable setting of common knowledge. A wine’s perfume should never be taken to guarantee anything at all. Forcing it to exist within the narrow, analytical/ referential confines of its constituent substrata, which, in turn and in reality, have been culturally constructed, is pointless and in all cases weakens both it and us. As one notable philosopher said, the ire of Jove is no more mythological than the electron for explaining lightning. Let’s focus on the deep sense of the ideology of tasting. To taste: a verb that isolates a single sense from the complete act of drinking. The overall scene in which the action is generated and develops is divided and split, placing a single moment at the fore. The glass is raised to the mouth, which lies in the head, and everything takes place in this restricted

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space. The context, the process, and the whole tangle— of the wine, and of me drinking, and of time—disappear. The analytical/referential language of tasting is a product of the modern era, beginning with the progressive abandonment of our ancient diets, of the theory of the elements and alchemy. The current system for appreciating wine has been definitively codified only over the past seventy years, thanks to the momentum of the California school of oenology. During the 1950s the Viticulture and Enology Department of the University of California, Davis, was founded to support the large production of the expanding wine industry. Presenting itself as the only “scientific” methodology, the Davis system was not interested in wine as an organic substance and element expressing the value and poetry of the earth, living matter to be encountered. Instead, wine was conceived as an object, a consumer asset to be produced in the greatest quantities and with the greatest profitability in accordance with homogeneous and trustworthy standards. An undifferentiated asset: “the” wine, cataloged solely on the basis of the vineyard variety, like a crowd of extras with predefined roles thought up by a coldhearted and mediocre director. In this context, journalists such as Frank Schoonmaker before and oenologists such as Maynard Amerine later began to propose a method of evaluating wine, developing quantitative and universal measurements: a numerical scale accompanied by a referential lexicon, all adorned by objectivity and guarantees of accuracy. The next generation, notably Anne Noble and Robert Parker, completed this work. Objectivity requires distance and distance assumes disengagement and superiority. Sensorial tasting considers taste as a distal tool. The taste of tasting is the optical taste of the objective paradigm built around the presumed neutrality of nonparticipation at a distance.

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Perceiving the world in an “optical” way means thinking in the same way as those two philosophers at my dinner twenty years ago. It means remaining psychically immobile, solidifying processes, destroying any imaginative passion and, therefore, any amazement at what happens. Perceiving wine optically means using taste and smell as mere machines, analytical instruments that thereby permit objective knowledge; the ghost of a pure oenology that wants to avoid any participative relationship, choice, and risk. This is anything but a “re-evaluation” of the importance of taste! Within this model, wine is sniffed before being drunk in order to describe the aromas and perfumes. It is a gesture considered to be fundamental to the conventional grammar used but which reveals the desire for purity and control at a distance. Tasting also means, within the so-called serious practices that, however, appear to be ridiculous abstractions to the lucid observer, taking in small amounts of liquid, which are then happily spat out. Spitting is a decisive gesture within this grammar because it rejects incorporation and suspends the process: coitus interruptus or, paradoxically, intentional vomiting. This epistemology of aesthetics, anachronistically still seen as the machinery for elaborating criteria for the purposes of offering up supposedly “neutral” judgments, is underwritten by an entire, ideological model: I can judge you without having to drink you because what really counts as objective is what occurs between the mouth and the head. Everything that has any value must take place higher up, in the upper parts of the body. The nose and the palate become machines, isolated from the whole body, senses trained to respond to an installed program, universal measurers. They become abstract and contextless without the surroundings and the entanglements into which they link. They become the universal eye that arranges everything under the gaze of taste. The eye of the mind is comparable to the eye of

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taste. Commonality is also to be found in the rhetoric of postures. Tasting is carried out sitting down and standing still, concentrating in an aseptic and neutral environment that mimics the silence of the library or the scientific laboratory. Erroneously, it is believed that all that is required for tasting is the head and the hands. The mouth is the only orifice that stands between them, and the pose of the intellectual resting his head in his hands cannot be differentiated from the taster who sniffs while swirling a wine glass. In contrast to when wine is actually drunk, no noises, smells, or other contaminations are permitted when tasting. To be objectivated, the taste must be “pure.” This purity corresponds to a raising up of the body. I taste wine through my body but, thanks to my capacities—the optic and objectivist model is an entire education in being capable—I transcend it and capture it in its purity. The optic taste sees wine as an object to be measured. It doesn’t touch it and it doesn’t generate an encounter. Perceiving the world optically means wanting to grasp it, subsuming it within categories and concepts. Even within the optical distance, despite any deliberate intentions, there is no neutrality or disinterest because the desire to control and reassure is overwhelming. For this reason, the two eminent American philosophers, absorbed by their classifications, were entirely unable to feel and think within the flow of their own processes. The raising up of their heavy bodies was not directed toward becoming like birds freed into the skies but toward the  little green rooms of academic intellectual arguments. Changing our approach to wine means changing our field of interests, abandoning the games of expert capabilities, and calling ourselves into question. Here I suggest integrating the term haptic into epistenology. Much employed nowadays in technology, here haptic is used in a different sense, stemming from its philosophical roots (from

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Alois Riegl to Jean-Luc Nancy) to its most radical consequences as an attitude to perceive differently. Haptic perception does not understand by grasping. Haptic taste is running over the surfaces and along the paths we walk down, a continuous friction that produces the route along which we weave other lines, creating new entanglements and calling them “environments.” We are not inside an environment; we inhabit it by passing through. On the crest of the surface over which we are crossing, we feel its substance. Equally, the wine that we encounter when drinking is a skin in which substances combine when caressing from the inside. Wine generates nonreligious transubstantiations. In ancient Greek, hapto means “touch.” There is nothing strange about the fact that the verb is also used in relation to eating and drinking (Apto bromes, Apto potetos), and the derived Latin adjective aptus also refers to this tactile capacity. Haptic perception therefore does not separate properties that are perceivable from those that are not, just as it does not distinguish between material food and the food of the soul. This is because these separations presuppose the objectivist and dualistic externalization of knowledge that a monistic approach to opening up to the world calls into question, as it also opens the ceaseless process of paths of lines. Haptic perception trusts in and entrusts itself to the possibility of feeling the earth with our feet and the sky with our breath, and in the meantime, life is produced as the only way of feeding both our bellies and our imagination. By drinking wine with openness, caressing it and allowing it to caress us, substances open up and combine, deploying a process of knowledge from inside that is not reduced to the hypostasis of isolated and fixed elements. Haptic taste is easy to put into practice. It does not require capabilities and expertise but rather the desire to learn how to learn. The material of the wine is perceived, or that of which it

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is made (and makes itself): its roots, the subsoil, the sky, the earth, the air, the sun, the plants, and their fruits. And this creates a new field of interest where the text consists of what we feel, the fabric within which we correspond to the sense of the questions that, in that moment, we receive and ask ourselves. When we studied and wrote while drinking Serragghia, the seashells, the salty breeze, and the beach hut participated in our gathering, and it was all that we desired and imagined. In a far-off evening in Livorno, on the other hand, I encountered a Cepparello, which I had already tasted many times but that hinted at one of the first occasions for calling myself into question, a denuding, contributing to my discarding the arsenal I had built up until then. Haptic taste perceives the material of wine even before the optic approach has solidified it as a stable object, the object wine consisting of aromas, acidities, alcohol, and defined geographies. The material: “matter” comes from the Latin mater, the generative mother whom I have known through touching and whom I touched by blending surfaces and substances, myself a blended substance in turn. I call this form of perceiving wine haptically epistenology. Haptic taste anticipates the “given,” denudes the product, and touches the producing while it is in progress. It is immersed in the flow, perceiving the processes that unceasingly create objects, this wine as a finished bottle that I will now drink, taking it back to the sky and the earth. Lively and vital wines are usually the most suitable traveling partners for this adventure. If it is not entirely impossible to imagine an encounter even with a conventional wine/product, nonetheless it is more difficult because it has not been bred for this purpose. And it is not a question of “being good” in the usual sense—goodness is a primitive predicate that has no justification in terms of causes but simply requires a charitable accommodation on a social and environmental basis.

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There are very many possible articulations of goodness. Let us consider the modern wine par excellence, Champagne. Sparkling Champagne was created as a project/design for standardized and serial production, based on research on the part of the great maison to achieve a predictability of taste obtained through the control and imposition of standards throughout all the phases of the winemaking process. Therefore this stereotypically scientific variety of wine intentionally does not aim for the magic of unpredictability in the encounter, although this does not mean that it cannot happen. Unpredictability is not predictable. Nonetheless, those who currently desire a Champagne that is generally more open to the vital flow, to the haptic manifestation of the processes that have made it possible, will direct themselves, possibly more securely, toward those less stable and less precise wines, less a recipe and more a combination of the sky, the atmosphere, and the earth. Being used to an optic, distal, and safe form of comfort where all living substances become objects, and illiterate with regard to contact with the Earth’s crust, we are fearful and disorientated at the fact that we are combined with its materials. We reduce wine to its measurable legibility, setting ourselves up as mirrors and automatons: I describe and judge, and I may eventually appreciate and take pleasure from the outside. In this optical model, tasting is an enjoyable reading—sitting at a table, set in a certain position, we don’t allow our bodies to move because this is intellectual activity and does not conceive of movement. The haptic, however, runs over the surface from inside and opens up to the verticality of the matter, as Gaston Bachelard says: from minerals to the roots, from water to the sun, from the leaves to the fruits through to the liquid in the glass. Nothing is inessential because there is no essence. What occurs is a tangle of lines that become a fabric—that is, ourselves together with the

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wine we have drunk. So, just as we should practice reading while walking more frequently, in the same way we should learn to taste while moving. If tasting is a pleasure, the complete haptic taste of drinking is enjoyment. We enjoy by touching the potentially palpable fluid, the power transfused not into isolatable flavors and aromas but into the entire process—us here around the table, the atmosphere, the sounds, the light, all the languages of wine, the incorporation, the heat and digestion. In this bottle of wine lies all the metabolism of the world. A process of continuous flowing, the crystallization of interweaving and total permeability, produces the outside and the inside. Participating in the flow does not prevent solidification that establishes itself as the optic stability of movement. This stability is necessary from a certain point of view—islands of presence, moments of stasis. It is the same as the flow of consciousness that is fixed in images and then returns to be perceivable as a text, outside/inside, inside/outside, in a ceaseless movement producing life and knowledge. If I sand down a wooden chair, this action takes me back to the concrete life of the material that the chair as object ignores. I look at the chair and use it as an object on which to sit. By sanding it down, however, I denude it of its being as an object so that it can be perceived again as a substance. When I see a chair, capturing those possibilities that James  J. Gibson, with great intuition, calls affordances and which therefore I use, I elide the entire process thanks to which the chair has been achieved: I forget—or filter by leaving it behind—the tree and all the concrete actions that have made the achievement of the chair possible. But the chair is nothing without the tree. Equally, caressing and being caressed by wine, combining our substances, allows me to perceive it before its solidification as an object, before its analysis as a mere asset of production. I can recall its materials; I drink and

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feel the rock, the earth, the sky, the air, and the water, the sun and the clouds, the leaves of the plant and the mature grapes. I feel the fermentation of the grapes, the alcoholic heat, and the work of the winemaker, the style and the character that have developed in the relationships that came before and that I encounter, extending the entanglement of lines and thereby, by definition, living. This wine is never just this one. It is I who encounter it with you and with the flow of the surroundings where all the things of the world are flowing. When we say “I liked this wine more today than last time,” what we are saying is not that “the wine”—that one—has changed but that the entanglement, and therefore the encounter, has changed, and also that we have changed with the wine. In this small twisting of the sense, in the difference of nuance, lies all the enigma of creation, along with our consequent amazement. The grammarian taster, the cataloging philosopher, the collector of objects, will consider that epistenology is an abstraction. But the very opposite is true: haptic taste is no-holds-barred pragmatism. We mock the hallucinatory vision and reassuring gestures that place wines behind a desk, like a schoolchild, or on a doctor’s bed, like a patient, in order to measure and grade them. Professional tasters who describe and classify many, many wines, even up to a hundred in a day, according to types and rankings cannot perceive haptically—otherwise, how could they possibly judge in such a short time? Arrays and lists are the consistent expression of objective knowledge. Everything in its rightful place, in the precooked slot of the great taxonomy of the world’s objects. Wanting to know everything and the mania for classification find their epistemic resonance in the distance of optic control. Tasting many wines of the same type, comparing them, searching for and finding similarities, establishing fixed points. But being fixed is precisely the problem: as the wines are

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isolated, exposure and experienced approach fail. If the wine is an object to be measured, knowledge of it from inside as a substance with which I combine is precluded. Encountering wine means, on the other hand, considering it as the making of life, together with us who are drinking it. It is an alchemic relationship, the gratifying encounter becoming exposition, passion, and desire; it is time, but time as a task, because nothing here is measurable. Today it is probably easier to taste a cup of coffee with a haptic approach than it is a wine because the appreciation of the latter has been crushed by the analytical and objectivist grammar of the correct wine tasters’ scholastic enjoyment. On the other hand, the dichotomy between optic and haptic is just a strategic gesture, and all the senses conform to both ways. Even reading a book can be optic or haptic. You, who are reading this book in an optic way, will identify my sources, will discover my cryptoquotations, my explicit and implicit references. You will judge me because of abstract rational arguments, according to my level of ability. For many years, I too have been part of this profession, just as I have also been good at recognizing wines. But I’ve lost interest now. The haptic reading that I hope to encourage, on the other hand, looks for an intimate availability rather than an analytical dissection and aims to be an experience of opening up to the flow of images and processes that I—me, that I am writing—have encountered and have become. I would like the truth of this text with wine to be evaluated in the same way. The optic reader and the sensorial taster will consider this haptic reading and haptic taste as superficial or abhorrent, because touch caresses the surfaces and is impious. It is only by overlaying surfaces that we can enjoy the interweaving of substances, because surfaces are always porous.

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Opening up to epistenology, to tactile taste, does not necessarily require a traditional apprenticeship. To practice this language, to produce this kind of writing, it is not necessary to use a grammar or even books. Mine is just one of many possible paths. I have passed through the barriers of epistemological correctness for philosophy as a model for cataloging the world, though it had fascinated me at length. This fascination prevented me from leaping feet first into the river to swim in the production of images. We jump using our feet, but philosophy does not, as it considers them inferior and unworthy. Our heads and our hands produce objects and concepts. Our bellies and feet are of no use; if anything, they are only servants. In fact, they serve us as the necessary sustainment for moving and hosting the food we have eaten. Without movement or nutrition, however, there is no life and no thought. Moreover, without feet, just as without clouds or rain, there can be no wine. It was only rather late on in life that I drank rocks and earth; I perceived the dynamism of the elements and the persuasive and ferocious tension of that wine on that occasion. This awareness that, thanks to wine, I painfully achieve day by day may be crossed by others with greater ease, possibly without the need for long procedures and conceptual legitimizations, especially if they are not philosophers. A movement consists in an inversion of the route, an overturning of the current model by not adapting our imagination to judgments, not closing the flow process in the rigor of the object but liberating judgment within the imagination, rendering it fluid and malleable. It is only in the participated relationship, dual or multiple and convivial, that judgment and appreciation become a significant and creative narrative. Haptic taste calls on a different approach to rules and precision. Touch poses the question of precision, as Jacques Derrida

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and Jean-Luc Nancy, among others, have passionately argued. What does it mean to be precise? The discipline of philosophical aesthetics, when it was developed in the eighteenth century, wanted to provide space for justifying our tiniest perceptions, the unmeasurable qualities, the je ne sais quoi, passions and sentiments. According to Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, following Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, aesthetics is the science of sensitivity, of clear and confused rather than distinct ideas. Only haptic perception completely accepts the challenge that this confusion entails, including the fact that it cannot be reduced to the distinction of discretion. In contrast, optic perception—that is, not just that of logic and rational science but also of objectivist aesthetics—requires clarity and distinction. Aesthetics thus immediately finds itself in a checkmate position by betraying itself and thereby becoming inadmissible—both by reason and by the imagination—when it hands itself over to the unattainable precision to which it aspires, looking away from the participatory flow within processes. Deluding itself that it can obtain some “scientific” legitimacy by aiming at knowledge of, it ends up losing its specific nature of knowledge with—situated, singular, and always implicated in the process that it describes. Simply said, no disinterest is possible. A disinterested aesthetics is an illusion of perspective. This does not mean setting up rational aesthetics in opposition to sentimental aesthetics because the life that is produced by and produces knots in its flow precedes this distinction, just as it does that between inside and outside. It rather means overlooking the familiar aesthetics of the object, of the product, and of the only God, in preference for shamanic, plural, enjoyable, pagan aesthetics. It is not by chance that, with the modern era, hapticality also lost its relationship with sculpture. In fact, sculpture is an art that has gradually lost its tactile characteristics, becoming more distal and objective. Marcel

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Duchamp ordered prière de toucher, and we should accept this invitation with wine too, as it is a necessity. Appreciating this wine does not mean being capable of precisely expressing the reasons, let alone the causes, behind this appreciation, which the optic and objectified taste of analysis, rigidly standing within the referential model of the constituent stimuli and passively received sensations, claims to do. What it does mean, conversely, is being constantly amazed by the qualities we find by participating in this relationship. And we find them because, by reviewing their correspondences to ourselves, we invent them. I felt this amazement one evening as soon as I reencountered the Overnoy 2003 Arbois Pupillin that had seemed, last year, to be fairly tired—was it the same bottle? Is it the wine that is different, or rather am I? I pay no heed to a pure, predetermined ontological question. This new moment has rewarded me with a sweet caress, silky and stony, entirely unexpected and growing gradually. We didn’t talk much about it during the dinner—a hint and a couple of words were more than enough. To appreciate is to explore step by step in different ways: words, images, internal perceptions, with the approaches and actions that accompany them. There are no established rules in this flow. Rules are resting places built along the river, recognizable only after they have helped us to cross. Thus when we drink in a haptic disposition, we make the rules, in Wittgenstein’s words, as we go along. That memorable drinking of a Bartolo Mascarello on a winter’s evening many years ago on the farm was, for me, a gratifying enrichment and contributed to my vital flowering without any explicit words being proffered about the wine. Let us not forget, however, that the pragmatics of haptic drinking are intimately social and not at all hieratic. We don’t necessarily focus on the gestures we make. They can also be made

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within the terms of a “distracted perception,” and in all cases they have no interest in controlling. Haptic taste is feet, belly, body, hands, mouth, and head inextricably entangled in the production of the world, and they move as if dancing. It is precisely every dance step that awards us with a dense image, a grain of amazement for the things of the world. Haptic taste is “somaesthetic,” to use Richard Shusterman’s term, and antiretinal. We encounter the world, exploring our surroundings with all our organic and entirely sentient body. Haptic taste is wise because it moves flexibly between attention and relaxation, calibrating itself on the basis of the correspondences that arise. As François Jullien says, the sage is without ideas: precisely because ideas are optic, while the sage, who is not necessarily an expert, knows how to stay in the flow and drink wine by encountering it. Sages have no strategies nor categories nor pigeonholes; this is how they move within the regulations without rules. The sage is without ideas but always makes the right decisions. Haptic taste is just without being “precise” because justice corresponds to the justice of correspondence— correspondence not as adaequatio rei et intellectus but as a relation between question and response, like a postal exchange—that those who are sage can perceive. This is why I like talking about tasting. From tasting to the sample: from optic taste to haptic taste. We taste tastes. On the one hand, there is its reflectiveness, and on the other, its etymology: tasting as an exploration through participation directed at contact, like the capacity of continuously creating life.

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ouch is exposed, secret, nocturnal, and confused. I am writing this in Lucca, the oneiric city, seated at a wooden table in a venue owned by a friend while I drink one of Gravner’s moving Ribolla. I talk with Cristiano, eat the food he has made for me; I get up and continually walk about because I get fed up with sitting down for too long in any circumstances, and on occasion even in a restaurant. In the meantime, I touch the pavement with my feet, the amphorae with my hands, and I think about the mysterious square of the Roman amphitheater while a naked force that accelerates my creative paths warms me, smiling and planning. I also reflect on the fact that, when we are children, we learn to sit still and not move for hours, days on end, at a desk, and, de facto, we are eviscerating the perception of the flow, building a world of solid objects instead. Usually it is assumed that tasting and appreciating wine should be done while sitting still, with the wine sitting with us behind the desk. Everyone at school, learning how to behave. Thus it becomes difficult, with the passing of time, to remember the truth of the process, the movement that provides us with knowledge. Epistenology flourishes also thanks to the feet. We are trained to sit still in order to do serious thinking, and this is

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why, in conscious contrast, when I was writing this text I was standing up and moving about—the thoughts it produced required liberated mobility. This wine produces, here and now with us, in the lucid intoxication of the present moment, a convivial quality that transmits an emotive strength to me. I have absolutely no interest at all in describing its aromas: What is in the wine? It’s the wrong question or, at the very least, it’s a ridiculous question, because why look for something in the wine instead of actively participating in that which we are creating with it? Touching it, I find no reason for denying my somaesthetic self, in order to typify and shape a static and helpless sensorial profile. Why should I? Universal, clear, and distinct precision makes way for the justice of the tactile singularity of the specific encounter. The position of touch on Western philosophy’s scale of the senses, from Aristotle to Herder, from Kant to Derrida, is a complex question. Touch is undoubtedly the most controversial of the senses—how do we use touch and for what end? Are we controlling or controlled? We are lines, and touch guides us, but it’s an ambiguous compass. Its ambiguity is due to the fact that, paradoxically, it too can be both optic and haptic. The coevolution of the hand and the brain has liberated the prehensile nature of the upper limbs within a mainly visual paradigm: erect stature, vision from above, and the hand that explores, grasps, and understands, creating a solid chain. In German, der Begriff, the concept, refers to the act of grasping on the part of a prehensile hand. I touch the surfaces, the outlines, the skin of the things of the world while vision coordinates and commands from above. There is another story to be told, however—the nocturnal story of the lower body—and it is its emergence that we want to deal with here. In the haptic paradigm, touch exposes itself to the vulnerability of a relationship that does not grasp but rather walks

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together with the things of the world, touching them. Haptic touch considers our feet, legs, and bellies in the same way as our eyes. And we should recall that wine used to be made by feet pressing the grapes. When we ingest the material of wine, in its assimilation, we touch the surfaces and substances at the same moment. Haptic taste, in contrast to optic, has no power to control. It is entirely exposed inward without any manipulation or grasping. Wine invades me and becomes as one with me. I no longer dominate it if I maintain an openness and honesty with regard to the encounter that is taking place. A Bel Air Epidote that I once drank during an evening of casual sharing in my favorite place in Livorno had a wicked effect on the interactions at the table. I was on the threshold of the echo that comes from inside, listening to oneself but activating the link with the other, the unknown, if only for a short time. Voices and faces arrive as if filtered, mediated by an atmospheric tactility that was both environmental and internal. At times the relationship can be intense, gratifying, and fleeting, and it was the wine that made this possible. Internal touch expresses our very nature with secret and confused clarity, the entanglements of locomotive lines that explore without being able to control. It is from here that the surprising nature of the haptic derives. It is not predictable, and for this reason it constitutes an unacceptable risk for those who fear its powers of imagination. This touch does not make us weak but only vulnerable, and therefore creative. In the space of a few hours, together with a Domaine des Miroirs Entre Deux Bleus, we passed from the fullest and most joyful happiness to emotional confusion: the  wine of clouds on which we were suspended at a certain point tumbled me down to the unyielding earth of barbed pain. With the complicity of that great wine— of course, great was the encounter with it—my sufferance was thrown into the

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duskiness of the room like an icy blanket covering the most intimate contact. I was stone, I became stone over which images and cuts and a combination of confused substances ran, all singing in chorus: this is how it must be. Imagination does not gush from the optic and objective perception of reality but from its continuous, haptic redefinition, consequent to the ability to be exposed. Imaginative touch, tactile imagination, as Bernard Berenson says with regard to the effects provoked by the figures of Italian painters, produces fantasies as a grip on the reality of the world, continuously encountered in (its) movement. During this process, there is no time or space for chimeras or the masturbatory hallucinations stemming from optic sclerosis. Along this line, only precise measurements or phantoms are created as specular but mutually supportive opposites, and where, by means of the same approach, the world is either objective reality or ideal imagination. But touch is creative insomuch as it is neither the one nor the other. Imagination is real, the real is the images I produce along every step of the path that I take, and, if anything, the path is the images. The presumed distinction between images and the imagination herein collapses and is dissolved, in contact with the things of the world, because everything is the outcome of the creative processes of movement, as I realized on the day that I began to combine with the wine I encountered. We encounter wine because it is an interwoven relationship. The relationship is intimacy or, in other words, internal touch. Intimacy is hospitality, the impossibility of total control. But hospitality is vulnerability, and vulnerability is amazement; and amazement, ultimately, is creation. To imagine does not mean building mental idealizations. Images are not mental visions like generic ideas. Vision itself can be used in a haptic way by knowing how to see the world with a

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continuously refreshed look of amazement. Creating images encourages our capacity to respond—to decide with respect to the entanglement, to the new knots that are continuously interwoven, demanding, in turn, a new move in order to dissolve and renew itself further on. A few years ago I found myself in a restaurant in Palermo together with a colleague and, having chosen a wine I had never drunk before, suddenly changed direction—that bottle wasn’t right, not because, as the waiter asked me, whether there was any particular problem; it wasn’t “corked,” nor did it have any specific defects. In effect, a “defect” would be something that it lacked, and not an “incorrect” element, some lopsided grammar, an insult or a spit in the face of civilized society, as is always considered in relation to wine. That bottle was immobile and mute; it did not allow itself to be encountered and did not permit us to continue. It was not a question of “combinations” with food— combining means coupling, uniting two things, and there can never be enough ridicule of the “science” of combinations. Rather, it was because of the rhythm of the flow that one could sense at the time. The knot created was all wrong and effectively had obstructed all paths. There was the choice of proceeding and ignoring this immobility, at the cost of not walking with the wine, or of changing companion, opting for a better feeling. The others could not understand this sudden change, but my decision permitted us passage to a space where I too could feel happy with the wine and the interesting openings it allowed. How can we communicate by means of arguments directed by experience such as I have described? One can only hint at such examples. There is effectively a short circuit, and in order to understand it you need to have had the experience even to connect it to something else, in accordance with the analogical imagination of lucid vision. Meanwhile, this narration in some way suggests the taste.

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To imagine is to know how to transit, to avoid dead objects, to stay one step ahead —just as when I see a smile but realize it’s actually hatred or, vice versa, a gesture of impatience but know that it is love. Walking, reacting, playing—all express our capacity to imagine. Childish play, on the other hand, as many authors have observed, can be seen as the first manifestation of aesthetic feeling and therefore, according to Joseph Beuys, as the first expression of art. Drinking wine haptically, therefore, is like playing, as adults, with the loose gaze of children. Relaxation as in strong vulnerability. To imagine also means continuously translating a “foreign” language into another one, our “own.” Correspondence and imagination fuse together, creating texts as woven fabric, as textiles. Or, again, it’s like replying to a letter about which we know nothing. The live wine that I encounter is something outside. It is the other that I combine with but yet maintains the friction of the world, like a foreign language that I continue to learn as “my” language, like “my” mother tongue, in which, in the amazement that I tap into, I find myself to be always a bit inadequate and extraneous. I am going off track, however. Today I am in Rome’s Trastevere, and I’m sipping a Bloody Mary in a bar. It is cold and I have just walked the length of Tiberina Island. The alcoholic acidity of the neutral vodka mixes with the sweetness of the tomato juice, filling me with tiny electric shocks and a pasty essence. What for? To be able to perceive haptically Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere or, in other words, to be completely touched and even criss-crossed by its buildings and the duskiness of the sky, as if they were the last things I’m going to see today, or maybe even forever. How many of the fearful in life have recently become interested in “wine tasting”? This very circumstance should rightly arouse our suspicions but instead has been superficially welcomed

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as the revenge of the sensitive and a late recognition of the importance of the odorous liquid. The truth is that those who follow established grids and given grammars like to recognize the things and themselves in the world. They do not encounter things; rather, they want just to be mirrored in them. Tasting becomes a pure practice of following in consolatory and even dazzling footsteps—repetitive co-action in contrast to horror vacui. The narcissists of wine continue along the path of recognizing types, varieties, and aromas in order to consolidate themselves on the level of a frivolous, community authoritativeness. In effect, this often unconscious approach corresponds to cognitive bulimia. While the illusion of knowledge consists of the accumulation of data and information, so the narcosis of the wine expert corresponds to the compulsive tasting of the greatest number of possible examples, possibly comparing them on the same day, with a swirling glass that is obsessively emptied and refilled, and even ranking them. But just as knowledge does not develop through the accumulation of information, in the same way it is not the number of examples that makes the taster wise and knowledgeable. In fact, wine is not a token for type. The experience of wine is its singular existence in the flow. The wine has no being for me beyond what I encounter. And let’s state this very clearly: with wine, as elsewhere, experience is as important as intelligence. If intelligence without experience is naïve, experience without intelligence is dangerous. I have known bulimics of philosophy from whom nothing can be gained. Equally, I know compulsive tasters who have created no images, no leaps for either themselves or the wine. No conviviality, no sociality, no passion, and no love. Wine has never revealed anything to them other than what they already knew: names, labels, production places, and, of course, its classified and very polite characteristic fragrance. However, the

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qualities of wine change and evolve because they are created when they are touched, and in this contact something new always takes place. All the rest is pure regulation, a solid, rigid object that can be understood only through information. Informing oneself about wine does not mean knowing it. It’s a lack of imagination that has very little to do with what wine can gift us. Jean-Pierre Robinot’s wines have always given me extreme images, bodies freed into the air like birds or hot-air balloons, passages from the sky to the earth. I have always lost control with his Cuvée Camille as in very few other cases in my life. I imagine a house by the sea, built with light but indestructible reeds, a strong wind, and a quick sea. I find a design within the weft of its substance, a slightly crooked walk, a cutting gaze like your last no, to use Knut Hamsun’s words. The quality of the inebriation was different from that which Joly gave me or even that from a Gravner. Of course, it depends, because the interweaving in which we find ourselves is always different and never preordained. Every wine drunk has a precise and characteristic tone and a timbre in the moment in which I, and she, and you who drink with us find ourselves. Ichigo ichie (one time, one meeting), it is said with respect to the Japanese tea ceremony. When we achieve an encounter with wine, what is at play is always the relationship between abandonment and intention, relaxation and grasping. The enjoyment we feel can move from the naked passivity of psychotropic heat of alcoholic power to the intellectual clothing that refers to the knowledge that is deliberately activated in the process. I have already known this wine, and I am part of the meshwork that created it. But precisely for this reason, this memory is valid as a further woven entanglement that is created on future occasions. In fact, as it is, haptic touch cannot be governed or controlled by even the firmest of wills. We

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head forward, possibly even armed and ready, but toward the unknown. Internal touch is creative because it moves tentatively. With every step, a new decision is made, and it marks a piece of the road. For this reason the encounter, including the encounter with wine, is an aesthetic experience in its most complete sense. The unforeseeable nature of touch, experienced with the fullest enthusiasm in open and amazed tasting, effectively contributes to the elaboration of an art of life that is achieved time after time without anything ever being a given. The relationship with wine is a creative relationship insomuch as it is research and invention at the same time. And there is nothing Promethean about this, as creativity is always collective and we create precisely because we are tiny, finite elements among others. Invenio, in Latin, means “I encounter”; I find, but I discover, invent, imagine. What do I find and what do I invent? A substance that is always in the making, while it also affects and changes me during my drinking—the me that I am always differing because I am always moving along. Touch is creative because it invents, but it invents precisely insofar as it is ingenious. Thanks to ingenuity, we have clarification on an aspect that may have appeared as paradoxical: creative touch is that which simultaneously permits us to perceive what is called authentic. Haptic taste perceives the authentic not in contrast to its creative capacities but as their interface. When we proceed tentatively inveniendo (finding) paths, we contemporaneously recognize places, activate memories, and return to paths already taken, even if a bundle of lines does not have an unambiguous direction between the past, the present, and the future. This is what imagination is: a dilated and composed memory. An ongoing process of finding and of creating. Authenticity has not to do with an isolated object—this bottle of wine—but with the process that

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brings a bottle of wine to be perceived as this one. Authenticity is the aware perception of the flow and of the current, not of the fixed object itself. Haptic taste is always ingenious. Exposed to the unknown in each step forward, it has memory and cognition because it recognizes. This recognition, however, is always dynamic and active. It is the transitivity of touch: caressing or feeling the presence without wanting to be right or necessarily understanding by grasping, we imagine and thus connect the past with the present and, by so doing, create what is to come. Touch is transitive because it connects masses of lines that are apparently distant and that the optic method would see as unrelated. Contact lends energy and flows between elements as if by magic. Distance cools and decelerates, it renders the flow as crystallized, solidified, and ordered, and it puts elements in a series, classifying them. Like a sequence of wines divided by type in a normal evening of knowing about wine. If we look to us human beings from an ecological, holistic perspective, we can say that we possibly needed classification and partition as well. However, we are actually so inured to this paradigm of perception that a strategic liberation in the haptic sense is well overdue. We are transformed with wine: having fun, being thrilled, and enjoying ourselves. The creativity of touch is wise because it is the capacity to transit, to be distracted while continuing firmly along the path taken. And when we taste, drawn into the tactile flow that makes us participate in the feeling, we trust in our ability to discern the authentic from the fake. It is the wisdom of taste, the haptic capacity of knowing how to perceive—which is also the capacity to create. To be haptic, therefore, we must become shamans, explorers, diagnosticians and medics, sensitive inhabitants of the world. Nongrasping, tactile perception allows

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us a slowed-down and combined take on reality, not only with artifacts and not only with wine but in every relationship. Indifferent to and immune from the distal model of optic objectivism, when we want to verify the authenticity of something or someone we care about, we touch them or get up close. The same happens, for example, when we look at artworks in a museum. The emotive quality is more intense than that of surrogates at a distance, of reproductions, however good they might be, because closeness has to do with aura. Despite always being exposed to the risk of being kept in check, tactile proximity is the more powerful and true relationship. Thus we understand wine because we touch it with our mouths and then inside ourselves down to the lower extremities, and above all it is the texture of wine that is precisely what analytical instruments cannot achieve; they cannot replace a relationship of direct contact. This is what authenticity is: it does not lie in the object; it is not the object-wine to be authentic. There are wines (I have called them living wines) that facilitate the experience of encounter; there are wines that favor the haptic engagement. But, in principle, anything can produce this approach. It is like meditation: in principle, one can meditate everywhere and with everything, even among a crowd, as Baudelaire pointed out; but, especially for spirits that are not so elevated, there are environments that facilitate the process, providing threads and connections for an easier start. So it is for wine. Authenticity is, rather, the experience of the encounter taken to a positive conclusion or, in other words, the encounter in which all the participants let themselves go. Magical thought is a haptic ability to feel and respond. In alchemy, it is what allowed one to talk freely of “forces.” Haptic perception is so strong at times that it permits the authenticity of contact even at a great distance, like when I think about you

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and you feel me to be close. “Then you laugh and the Atlantic recedes,” said Jacques Derrida in The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, describing the effect of an intercontinental telephone call. It is from this power that a participatory art of life develops. The philosophical myth of absence and continuous deferral, to which, with Derrida, I too was susceptible, conceals an ambiguity that is essentially concerned with a pulsation of death, with a fantasy of disappearance that destroys the imagination. In its attempt to objectify, optic perception slows down or rescinds relationships. To imagine, however, is not to keep at a distance but rather to make the absent present through the haptic. Imagination is creative because it transforms perception and the world, since we are the world that we perceive and produce. Participating in the change of light in a room or the wind on a beach, walking on the earth and on rocks, abandoning ourselves to sleep on the mattress of a bed, changing seats on a train because we can’t stand the voice or the gaze of our neighbors are all imaginative and creative journeys that transform the world and thereby transform us. The same happens when we drink wine in a creative way. Enjoying, having fun, being warmed, thinking, being indifferent, socializing, talking, moving together with it—all these dynamics are the weave of a carpet that we constantly construct and in which there is no precise or preordained design. For this reason, the “creatives” who believe they can create from ideas cultivated in the kitchen gardens of their own interior condos are misguided or, at the very best, innocuous. Comfortably seated or lying down, heads in hands and deprived of any effective external friction, they separate the earth from the sky, the head from the belly, and produce nothing at all. They can easily drink soulless wines and eat any indifferent food, and they will never realize what they are missing.

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Touch with wine is produced throughout the entire apparatus along which it slips: in the mouth, the pharynx, the esophagus, and the stomach. If we know how to encounter wine haptically, we explore it tentatively and discern its eventual authenticity. We need to drink it in its entirety. The relationship that participates with the substance is a taste that enjoys the hydration of all our tissues, taking care of the passage through the channels to the lowest parts, the inferior regions. And what remains after this passage is an echo, an inheritance that leaves the value of the created knot thereby produced. Flavor and smell combine, and the taste is all one. Smelling, by bringing the volatile matter directly into the nostrils or indirectly through palatal oxygenation, is a process that can be open, in the haptic way, or closed, in the optic. Of course, exploring the aromas of a wine also means perceiving the land where it was grown in its taste, which is defined in the specific language of the experts as terroir—the sense of place. In the paradigm wine/substance, however, it is not the recognition of quality and characteristic aromas that we are addressing. In the end, they are not that important. What does happen is more about the magic of the forces at a distance. Touch allows us to participate in the community of the comakers of that knot that is wine. It allows us to perceive the sky and the earth, the soil and the vines, the feet and the hands who have accompanied its birth. In other words, it means animating the inanimate optic once denuded of its being an object. This must be the place. This should not be a surprise. The comprehension out of the corner of our eyes that produces haptic perception is a primitive and emotional intelligence that aims to return to us the dynamic sense of life that we create and not the sclerotic stability of objects. Wine is alive because it is animated in the encounter we have, not because it is a defenseless object plus the

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attribution of an internal soul— optic perception, present in the theories of the standard philosophical form of rigid animism, in manuals and from pulpits—that we, as inevitable subjects, will contemplate. The relationship always comes before the object and the subject—the magical thought that wine engenders lies entirely in the relationship that is established. Fundamentally, it is this relationship because life is not a given but a task, just as when we perceive a perfect manifestation of hate in a smile or, vice versa, the most profound testimony of love in a gesture of rejection. We encounter traces, affordances, invitations, paths for going in one sense or another. It is the creation of the world that is constantly reborn. It is its authenticity as a bond with the earth that combines me with the sky. It is the wine that we know because it unexpectedly surprises us and in which we find our origins inscribed. Origins, however, are what happens there, before our very eyes. The original is created as an imaginative process that is constantly produced—“image” comes from the Greek mimeomai, I imitate. This is what the next glass I will drink tells me, that which I enjoy as if I should encounter you, touching me. If we reason according to standard philosophical terms, I might explain it thus: to believe in the authenticity of a wine—to be willing to believe in the authentic, to be willing to encounter it in order to verify its appearance and fabric in the terms of its truthfulness with respect to the moment in a “given” place where it grew and developed—is sufficient in order for such cognitive properties to penetrate the perceptive experience that we have through the tactile nature of the encounter. Authenticity is an extra sensitive property that develops from its materials, not due to causes or reasons but to relationships. The material is this ongoing passage between itself and the soul that continuously overflows from it.

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We can feel if a wine is authentic by recognizing it, in some way, as corresponding to the terroir, the expression of a certain space and certain time, because of beliefs that depend on what we have encountered during the journey we have taken up until the moment when we taste it. In the model of the encounter, in effect, recognition is not a static fact but something that, in turn, is continuously made. Here lies the functional difference between truth and error: only by making the experience can we retrospectively consider that which we supposed to be authentic. A terroir is not a sclerosis, a cage made rigid by inflexible, spatial coordinates, but a ceaseless work that continually redefines its boundaries on the basis of how much it is inhabited. Authenticity is therefore a continuous process of authentication: the “sense of place” in wine is always invented—found and created at one and the same time—by those who drink it, perceiving it haptically. Discussions around typicality, traditions, and place have no sense beyond this horizon. Otherwise, they are reduced, as is usually the case, to mere ideological exhibitions or, even worse, to petty, edifying motives, replicated without any contact or rapture. To paraphrase Gilles Châtelet: by means of the creativity of touch, we unfold to wine its space; a space that does justice to its and our bodies as substances and organisms. When the body is oriented toward feeling, the perception of the authentic is infallible because fallibility arises precisely when the power of contact is lost.

4 THE LANGUAGES OF WINE, ALL OF THEM

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ow can we communicate with wine? When this wine is authentic and alive, that is, when a wine resonates with the interwoven threads of a particular situation, a community comes into being. Community is communication, making-in-common. Symposium, in fact, means “drinking together” in Greek. The ancient word reveals the relational nature of the perfumed liquid. Encountering wine means sharing the connective fabric that grows and develops in the midst of the current of the experience. Encountering wine is opening oneself up to the magic of the creative awareness to which we are exposed, contributing to its making. How can we explain the magic of this creation? The realization of images, by means of which we enrich this journey with new meaning and chart new paths, occurs in different ways. Language is one means but is not the only path possible. Traces of this saying can happen with movements, gestures, and postures as well as with sounds and designs. Communicating is not just representing internal mental content to the outside world. Adaequatio rei et intellectus—the intellect (of the knower) must be adequate to the thing (known), or the intellect has the power to impose a form to matter—does not apply. Communications

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about wine are performative, and they correspond with the wine encountered. Epistenology precedes any hypostatic division between the constative and the performative. Words, gestures, figures, or expressions of every kind do not depict situations but participate in, realize, and express them; they are scenes of sense in which we observe the complex ecology in which we are living together with all the perceptions with which we make the world by drinking a liquid substance immersed in it. The difference between the saying and the said is that which explicitly distinguishes haptic from optic perception, process from object, wine/ substance from wine/product. The meaning of the images that I produce in the encounter with wine lies in the use that I make of them; and, as previously mentioned, this is not pragmatism but action suspended on the tightrope of the continuous flow. Flow and process or, in other words, those lines that are us, interweaving connections along the crust of the Earth in order to create, in the end, the infinite text that we narrate. This wine will create its own language that will cross grammars and texts in the most diverse ways. Every wine creates with us the expression that returns to us the significant scene of the encounter. I learn the language while I create it, meeting the wine I drink. Herein rightly lies the question of the “communication of wine.” Entirely secular but also exposed by intimacy, communication with wine is destined for those who have the grace of openness. In contrast, we normally just amuse ourselves, gratified by the gestures of wanting to control, the illusion of crystallizing this transformative path into referential phrases. As it is now easy to observe, however, all language is metaphorical. “Haptic perception” and “optic perception” are undoubtedly metaphors. Even “this wine merits 95 points” and “notes of tobacco, citrus and wet stones” are metaphors because a wine on its own is

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subject neither to grading nor to identification of heteroclite elements. The illusion that language can be purely referential stems from its ambiguity; in fact, language imprisons us within the idea that a name can rigidly stand for something. This enchantment produces an unwitting reversal between hallucination and reality somehow similar to the inversion that makes us consider money as something that actually exists. We are the victims of the logic of inversion in the model of objective knowledge and optic perception—we misidentify the crystallized effect as the reason or the cause. Consider “notes of pineapple, jasmine, and white pepper” and “it reawakens the sense of pride in my need for love” or “young, blonde, curly-haired woman running toward the waves of the sea in winter”: these are only three among the many ways that epistenology creates worlds with wine. The differences do not refer to anything other than different stories, different perspectives. I can easily demonstrate this many times over during tastings with my students: the commonality of shared descriptions when I characterize wine in terms of human metaphors—as if it were a human being—is at the very least equal to if not more potent than any phrasing in terms of the dicta of grammar and aromatic wheel. Communicating about wine through metaphor remarkably accomplishes a much higher degree of agreement that is at least equal to if not greater than that of flowers, fruit, and notes of pipe tobacco. This is because all metaphors are elaborated by the rash imaginations that arise from the lives of real people who have different experiences and ways of perceiving. Nothing more, nothing less. Enthusiastic students discover a world of intimate and shared images, a background of personal and communal imaginings that can be communicated with the same level of reliability as the conventional grammar of forest, fruits, and notes of wood.

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Language is not a cage into which we force the experience of drinking in accordance with established schemata but the continuous unfolding of our relationships, the long carpet along which our feet tread on the journey that we are and become. I do not need to adapt the taste of wine to accepted grammar and oenology, as decreed by Émile Peynaud, the well-known oenologist and oblivious companion of bourgeois aesthetics looking for scientific legitimation. The reality is, rather, the opposite: taste with wine is gradually traced out, linking to new stimuli and new paths. Taste does not need to adapt to a production method as insinuated by the defenders of the technological model when they accuse alive and vital wines of being “a fashion.” It’s not a question of ideology. What is at stake, in contrast, is the awareness of the continuous production and making of taste. Taste is the mature result of decisions that occur in the process, exactly like the grapes in the vineyard. When we know and communicate, all those transitory lines that we call language are summoned. The metaphors chosen can, of course, be grammars or texts. I can feel the wine as an object or a fluid and living liquid substance, recognize it canonically or through an eruption of unprecedented possibilities. In all cases, however, such metaphors do not express the equation of the sign with the thing described, as the idealists of objective knowledge and the realists of referential exactness believe. Every linguistic expression is metaphorical because it is a further step of life considered as a practice, a new decision. Every metaphor is an expression of the fabric of relationships on which those signs that we share emerge. It’s true, epistenology was born out of the loss of interest in the distinct solidity of the object, in oenology as a presumed science, and in tasting as an acquired education. In place of static entities appear all the languages with wine to liberate our breath and caress our bodies and surroundings. To perceive

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wine haptically means to produce a language that tries to say not just the words you read but also the ink with which they are written, the hand that wrote them, the body of which that hand is part, the surroundings of that body. A language that tries to hear not only the words that it listens to but also the vocal cords and the muscles that emit those words, the face that proffers them, the body of which that face is part, and its surroundings, the earth and the sky, thanks to which it was made possible. For our language to correspond with the world, it is therefore necessary to forget the abstraction of “pure” consciousness, of “pure” will, of the purity of identity, and of the fixity of things in all their expressions, as James Hillman suggests. It is necessary to place oneself on the slanting plane of images, of faces and expressions. More processes and fewer objects. Fewer nouns and more verbs, adverbs, and adjectives. Events, according to Buddhism; sometimes I think that epistenology stemmed from imagining the life of a bottle of wine in a Zen temple. If everything is characterized, everything must be represented and communicated as characterized, and the characteristics, insomuch as they are never static but knots that evolve, are never pure. Giuseppe Penone titled a work made with stones taken from a mountain and a river Being the River, not just The River. The verbal form rather than the noun highlights the process, the flow of its becoming. Materials are never pure because they constantly change and transform themselves, and purity, in its illusion of stasis, always impoverishes. In this regard, the philosopher and artist Georges Didi-Huberman once explained: natura naturans and sculptura sculpens. Not “the wine” but “being the wine,” a dynamic noun and not an object to be measured. Epistenology is being/becoming the wine. I become the wine that I drink— the wine becomes that which is together with me.

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The generic question of language thus dissolves in the tapestry where specific encounters and their specific nuances grow, change, and evolve. There is no necessity for a particular lexicon in order to share in their sense. The limitations of verbal language do not signal the limitations of expression but stimulate the flowering of different modes. We are not talking about wine but with wine, and it is sometimes a speechless conversation—just living the qualities of inebriation. All the qualities are at play in the becoming-wine. This means not so much thinking about the words that you speak when you taste but rather, while you drink, cultivating your language like a seed that becomes a tree, fructifying meanings, built and shared during the relationships produced. I am in a sake restaurant in Tokyo, and the encounter with the rice liquid immediately brings a more general and abstract comparison to mind. Sake is more alcoholic than wine, but its inebriating qualities are much more contained. The strength of the sake seems to me to reside in a controlled rituality. The quality of its effects on imaginative creativity is more nuanced, almost in the background. Where wine is imaginative strength on contact, sake is the symbolic domestication of closeness, an ecumenical inebriation that gifts me with empathetic feeling and understanding. I had with mixology the same kind of experience. I experienced an inebriation of closeness rather than a closeness through contact in the Star Bar at the Ginza— an inebriation by a chiasmus. The immense ability in the art of mixing produced the effects of empathy at an infinite distance. Feeling the whole world in a single point, sensus communis, humanity inextricably linked to the management of the loss of control. Ecumenical inebriation that provides equanimity and understanding without needing to comprehend verbal words.

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Over the past few decades, more or less since the 1970s, the professional language of wine has become increasingly rigid, controlled, and objective. It has gloried in this, considering it a triumph. This scientism has also taken over the expertise of wine connoisseurs like a modern acquisition. Take a nice tasting course and, without any great expense and in a relatively short time, you’ll have all the tools required to show off your new, unquestionable abilities. The supporters of a universal, standard language consisting of presumed referential descriptors proclaim its ethical value, referring to the democratic nature of this approach. The democracy of taste, the democracy of science, and the consequent democracy of language mean the reproducible nature of the results, the reproducible nature of the experience—colors, extracts, acidity, aromas, and perfumes in a single fixed code that can be understood from Barolo to Tokyo, from Pantelleria to Oslo. A single lexicon, the mathesis universalis of wine, a universal leveler like money, the same for everyone. In reality asphyxiating and impracticable, this model provides a questionable idea about the democracy of food and its values. It effectively impersonalizes the relationship with wine, suspending the intimate experience, draining the specific characteristics of it and those who drink it. It impedes the escape from a state of lowliness that comes about when each of us creates, with words, thoughts, images, and gestures, our own paths in making the world. The universal and referential model levels and obfuscates by favoring, through the grammar it uses, a precooked, standard linguistic package that compliments itself on its recognition of the object but never either invents or discovers anything. Epistenological encounters are sessions of liberation, even more so when frequented by those previously trained in the school of “good manners”; those who already know everything about wine. It is

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good to observe the awakening of awareness, the decision to overcome simple conventional schemata now considered as barriers. The externalization of knowledge, in line with the objective paradigm, has its correlate in the standardization of “objective” language that does not gush out from the experience of the lived relationship. This Tempranillo Pampaneo by Esencia Rural that I am drinking ignores objective referential language precisely because it is this wine, not a generic wine, a generic Tempranillo or even a generic Tempranillo Pampaneo by Esencia Rural. The encounter that takes place produces its own language as the outcome of this relationship, this specific temporal interweaving. This kind of description does not mean that a generic characterization of a wine is always worthless. We can even play the game of analogic perfumes, of the weight of tannins and points. It does not mean replacing one fixed ontology with a new fixed ontology but understanding the possible scenarios and languages of wine on the basis of the projects we make with it. In a more rigorous and academic context, we might express this by saying that every project has a language, and the ways of describing and appreciating wine respond to legitimately different purposes— selling wine, making a place and a landscape known to others, combining it with food, and so on. Every description has value as a testimony, as the “snapshot” of a journey taken or the souvenir of a journey only aspired to, imagined, or dreamt. The description of a wine narrates that journey from which the truth of the encounter emerges and does not imply any ontology beyond its own precise context. Nonetheless, returning to breathe the cool wind of the reality created together with our feet and our hands, the sky and the earth, is neither immediate nor simple. When I suggest to my students that they should communicate the value of wines

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without using pre-established forms or lexicons, without learned grammars, without guides, the first reaction is often one of suspicion. When I propose that they liberate the imagination that is generated within the current flow, possibly by making gestures and creating postures, drawing images, coloring leaves or stones or walls, reciting verses, reading texts, or singing, walking, or dancing, they are usually immobilized by fear. But ultimately, because wine is and is made during this infinite process, grown from the plants, from seeds, and from worms, by those who have walked in the vineyards and so forth, when I suggest all this, a dance of joy flourishes. Like when you free yourself from any of your chains by telling yourself, go, do it for yourself. You may not think it is fair, you may not believe it is appropriate or even right. We often love our bindings, which makes it difficult to escape from them. Epistenology predisposes the drinker to the communication of wine with wine. It predisposes us not to fear freedom but to ascend in a hot-air balloon and place life in front of ourselves—in effect, to treat life as a task that no one has ever prepared you for, that no one can prepare you for. It is to escape the “this is how it must be” that has been imposed on you. Once you have dived into the sea, your fears disappear because you start to swim and you realize that, in the end, it wasn’t that scary. My students, after their initial unease, enjoy this release. Freeing the imagination makes us feel good, on our own, with wine, and with others. With wine, many journeys, many untrodden paths are opened up. It’s easy to fall back into the mantra of I must: “What must I feel? What must I think? What words must I use?” But up in the hot-air balloon, drawings, free associations, memories of the past, songs and words, and other methods, for those who possess them, interweave and begin a new kind of contact with the world.

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From the encounter with drinking a wine, new languages are born, and if you allow yourself to open your mind to the intimate connection to your feet, your legs, and your belly, you’ll discover the creativeness of the symposium. The alternative is for fearful accountants or lawyers of wine using their little manuals learned at their desks, the desks on which the bottles are placed like seated schoolchildren who must defend themselves. These lawyers would like to convince us that legislation is worth more than justice, but the languages of wine must not be legal. Justice is a justness, as Roland Barthes keenly noted. In this justice, something like the truth of the wine becomes and grows. The language that gushes from the haptic adheres to the earth on which we continuously blossom, evolve, and grow old while at the same time tracing our journeys. It is the ladder that we have to climb for talking about the world. The ladder we use for debating about wine and the world, as well as the wine with the world; the ladder we can never discard once we have climbed it. In reality, the ladder is a metaphor for following processes. The languages of wine are multiple and articulated: they are a polyglossia. There are as many of them as there are possibilities of encounter. Variegated languages develop from variegated experiences, only one of which is that of the expert. The wine expert represents a juncture of lines of clearly established provenance and in accordance with a known code. The wine expert claims to know more about tasting a wine because she knows more about wine in general. But the languages that come from encounter and touch are never “in general,” and therefore the expert can never guarantee certainty of knowledge with wine. This requires haptic sensitivity, confused and, in its way, perfect perception, like a comprehensible stutter, the chirping of birds, the dance of bears, the sand of the sea that is mixed

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with the taste of the foods we eat. Epistenology dissolves the aesthetic questions of wine criticism as linguistic competency: before the reality of experience we are all naked and equal in power. Knowledge about is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for knowing with but may enrich it ex post. The experience and appreciation of drinking do not depend on an accumulation of information, on the weight of the quantity of bottles approached. The languages of wine do not require, per se, comparison of various wines but rather a special sensitivity to exposing and opening ourselves up, a movement that passes through the courage of not worrying. Wine-tasting events, with their aseptic environment, white lights, and absence of smells, footsteps, contacts, and noises—these are hallucinatory and abstract gestures aiming to represent the phantom of objectivity but instead being cast into chains. Better to communicate wine with wine, drinking from the bottle or from the gut, because you want it, lying on the beach or eating popcorn. It’s possible to judge this wine without calling any comparisons into play, without measurements, throwing caution to the wind. Haptic languages deride the criticisms of the exclusive wine-tasting profession’s knowledge, of expertise as the depository of universal grammars. Every story has its own dynamics and insists on a specific narration. Language is not only words—it is a carnal and porous carpet along which, in and with which, contact takes place. Metaphorical and physical, a single expression, internal and external, a single line. Epistemology and ontology, always intimately interwoven— epistenology—that is knowledge with wine. Thus the languages of wine are a peripatetic polyglossia, a concrete testimony to the justice that is expressed with wine. There is no hierarchy. Anyone can find a path in the encounter, inventing characteristics that comply with their precise feelings. Drinking

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with haptic sensitivity means interweaving the lines of the world, imagining new ones, creating and discovering all the languages that are needed. Encountering wine therefore requires that sensitivity that manifests and expresses itself in a free linguistic torsion. Being free is being able to use exactly the right words. Not necessarily words about wine: the Rosso “Saverio” from Isola del Giglio that I drank with a close friend acted on our common feelings without needing a linguistic stage, elegantly silent, like Macedonio Fernández, whose mute presence, according to Jorge Luis Borges, highlighted and directed the poetic festivities in Silvina Ocampo’s house. Justness expresses and produces creativity. Leave the hyperbole and the specular mania for precision to those who are afraid of being free. The language that gushes from the haptic is an infinite production of simultaneous meanings. It results in a democratic idea, such as anarchic dissemination, that stands in opposition to the stiff armor of a scholastically acquired lexicon. On contact with the earth on which wine walks, language prefers spontaneity, producing the process, the tactile metaphors. Sensitive to the Earth’s crust, it perceives geo-sensorial authenticity, as Jacky Rigaux claims, through the relationship between the fabric of the wine and the fabric of the soma. Wine is a skin that we caress from inside, the substance that lives. Nonetheless, and here I step aside, the free, anarchic languages of wine do not require tasting. It is rather drinking, in order to explore and create in as many directions as possible. When, today, we come across discussions about the need for a new language of wine, the essential point is ignored: the problem is in the handle, the problem is in degustation, because it is in reality de-gustation—the fragmentation of the entire process, canceling out the surroundings to concentrate only on the mouth and

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the head. Optic taste equals intellectual taste. Reasoning about taste, limiting knowledge to what can be framed through schemata, forgets the preceding processes. In contrast, epistenology proposes feeling with taste throughout the process, that which involves us as lines of encounter within the fabric of the world. To taste means to line up, to compare wines as if they were objects and then find a common measure. Quantitative prejudice—I know as I accumulate, mistaking erudition for culture—and neutral prejudice, number or word as objectifying and a universality that has no taste. The problem of the asphyxiating and self-referential language of wine lies in the handle. It’s not true that you need to taste a lot in order to be able to talk about wine in a sensible way; rather, talking about wine does not mean understanding wine because understanding means moving, taking steps, creating, and thereby corresponding, traveling along paths on which common station points are met. Change your approach, look at the bottle and its contents as the profile of its dynamic genesis, and the language will create itself as it needs to be. Drinking recalls the symposium. Tasting etymologically refers to testing, trying a path, proceeding as a task, the experiment that always involves the wine by drinking it. A taste proceeds cautiously, creating a necessarily imperfect language. In fact, the imperfection that is born out of the haptic approach removes banality, as Algirdas Greimas observed. Opening up to the flexibility of justice and abandoning the constrictions of the Pavlovian lexicon, the one that operates with the devoted and conventional taster. The languages of wine must begin with dreams, as Mario Soldati perfectly understood. If wine fosters our memories and hopes, recognition and desire, then the language must live up to the encounter with wine. Borges wrote: Wine, teach me all my history, that I may see it told as if it were the memory of ashes dead and cold. But memory is

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nothing without the hypothesis of a future. The languages of wine are bridges between memory and future, bridges created and composed by touch. Touching the wine, I mix with it and become part of the chain that unites the hands and the feet of the maieutics who have touched the grapes, have walked in the vineyard and pressed, who have breathed with the earth and the sky. Touching the wine, the wine touches my tongue as the expression of an indivisible unity, creating signs and sharing the space in which it transits. The languages of wine gush out and prolong the situations they describe. My language has evolved and been cultivated over time. If I reread what I wrote about wine only ten years ago, I can find little or nothing of what I now think or say or write. I go back over the moments in which I discovered a wine, together with the way to speak it: the 1989 Comtes Lafon Meursault Les Charmes, drunk by kind concession at the Gambero Rosso Restaurant the evening before my wedding, was possibly the first time that I had been moved with and by a wine. And then, the sessions where I met Case Basse—the memorable 1983 Reserve!— and Pichon Comtesse, and Margaux, and the Monfortino, in the house of some friends or in some particular situations. I cannot leave out Montemarcello’s osteria, where so many events are interwoven, with wine marking out the time, the joys of the moment, the subdued lighting, the cigars, and the cats sitting by the fireplace. At the time I would put my nose in the glass, after opportunely swirling it, believing I had to announce the true, objective perfumes of the wine. Looking back, these were dystonic moments—lines of imagination and freedom imprisoned in the straitjacket of a learned and forced lexicon. The space for desire—because haptic language is erotic—in these cases refers to the violent abstraction of the already said. But the languages of wine have to do with saying now, or, in other

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words, with desire and justice. To communicate well about wine, as Luigi Veronelli and Soldati appreciated, you need to have lived with wine, known how to encounter and be aware of its inexpressible nature. Like love, haptic taste participates but does not possess because understanding wine is, ultimately, being freely available for passion. It is still the case that the narration of wine as an object is normally calibrated around the hierarchy of the senses: vision, smell, and then taste, wearing a toga in a reassuring and protective tone. It is from here that the sclerosis and necrosis of referential language derive. Why should we follow this sequence? Why don’t we do the opposite? The haptic model proceeds from the idea of danger. I sniff before drinking because I fear what might be toxic, out of place, and totally different. The transposition of the primitive nociceptive function of taste onto the modern mechanism of control. In effect, the conventional language of wine, when considered together with reassuring Western and bourgeois aesthetics, works in accordance with a metric that is analogous to the other arts: wine like music, wine like painting, and so forth. This paradigm, both analogous and referential, effectively presents itself with representations delegated to external objects of comparison: the wine tastes of cocoa, the wine has a perfume of pineapples, the wine is very tannic. Once the centrality of conventionally beautiful and correct art has been overcome, once the representational model of objective references has been set aside, the aesthetic experience as a shamanic exploration is the blossoming of the human who does not fear the entanglement of the I/ us with the wine encountered—being wine, becoming wine. In this moment we are potent and tannic, together we have been salty, and, who knows, tomorrow we might taste of pineapples or Carmen Miranda. The languages of wine thrust us forward

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and amuse us but are not superficial; anything but. They are just and accurate, pertinent, patient and prudent. The just languages of wine free us from the chains of the pathological obsession with adaptation. If at times we produce a state of grace in the relationship, nonetheless what we want in the end is the restoration to that horizon of shared and appreciated inexpressibility that enriches the lives that we are— the sanity of languages without pathology, with strength and courage. Strength requires patience. Courage requires prudence. And it is all our future and all our memory.

5 REESTABLISHING BONDS Epistenology from the First to the Second Journey

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have a good relationship with wine: I do not talk about it much, but I drink it quite a lot. I observe it obliquely and write about it every so often. Every now and again, over the past few years, somebody has suggested I change tack and talk about something else in order to widen the breadth of my discourse. In reality, however, I use food and wine to talk about everything. I still feel the need to write using the substance of wine, continuing to trace lines through writing, testifying to a love and intimacy that, luckily, relieve me from the din of the spoken word. Today there are too many people talking about wine, too many people talking in general, and this talking, which immediately means judging, is not only annoying but also problematic. I recall a scene from many years ago: it was the early 1990s and, with a recently blossomed and shared passion, my good friend and I set up a video camera directed at a table where we had arranged a small tasting set. At the time I used to sample using everything: decanter, thermometers, turning large crystal glasses clockwise and counterclockwise. We tasted and described wine with words that today I find amusing, but we had fun, and I felt I had represented the essence of that wine’s reality, which

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was enough for me then. To record ourselves ante litteram, with no need of exposure other than to ourselves, but only to fix the evanescence of the experience of taste: a clumsy gesture that today seems foolish but that then, who knows why, seemed to be vital. I also enjoyed going to the finest wine shop to discover and buy rare bottles almost hidden in the gloom. In the first journey of this work, I wrote that I drink to recreate the disentangled things of the world. I would add that I drink and forget in order to regenerate myself, to start anew. By forgetting, I go forward and feed my imagination, and in so doing I empty myself and try to relate to my surroundings and everything else. Epistenology develops and makes itself: it is not a method but an approach that, through wine, tries to liberate the quality of imagination potentially present but often dormant in us all. Recalling James Hillman, I could say that epistenology aspires to be enthymesis: a stream that flows from thymos, a vital force, thought, soul, heart, and desire at one and the same time. Those who live and practice the imaginative power of enthymesis make all that they encounter come alive. We vivify ourselves with wine, drinking it, the inner and the outer experiences, while the wine itself takes pleasure in our power. Vivifying, wine is, at the same time, itself vivified. Almost twenty-five years have passed since that afternoon of wine tasting filmed in the kitchen. I have encountered thousands of glasses of wine, and my research and attention have persuaded me that it is better to lower one’s objectives and even put them aside entirely. A different, more flexible and anarchic, approach has prevailed, at once improvised and rigorous. Over time, wine drunk with this approach and a global perception, a modus vivendi, has grown to become a meditative observation, without a doctrine but paying due attention and adherence to life as a whole. A few weeks after I sent Epistenology to the Italian

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publisher, I met Alejandro Jodorowsky. The birth of that small text permitted me an encounter that I would never have believed could be so interesting, just as had happened a few years earlier with living, artisanal, and humble wines. Just as Jodorowsky made me appreciate both the pettiness of the ego and what an extraordinary human being like him really is, likewise, those extraordinary wines with which I now enjoy conversing are not narcissistic; they do not always want to be right but live well, even in silence. Wine is an active element in the ecology of a life’s landscape, my life’s landscape, but also that of us all. This life is an ongoing correspondence, where saying by doing and doing by saying interweave in the care taken with new relationships that any encounter both highlights and generates. To resume the journey now with Epistenology means, on the one hand, to specify, clarify, and examine in depth the traces and paths already introduced or touched on; on the other hand, it means to continue along the path already begun, creating new images and new subjects. Wine is a connector, a medium that develops the encounter, becoming an encounter in its own right. It is again, and more radically, an exploration with wine, not about wine. The expression “epistenology” suggests that we cannot separate ontology—onto or being—from epistemology— episteme, knowledge. It suggests that being and knowing correspond—not that they combine and become the same and undifferentiated but that they call and respond to each other. This is a holistic and relational perspective, completely immersed in and produced by experience. Knowledge is always a form of participation, a being with, and the difference effectively lies in its being with. Wine does not exist in the way that a fixed and objectified ontology may suppose; instead, wine is made, from start to finish, in every possible meaning of this making: coming into being, transforming, and evolving. Facts are

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made (in the sense of Latin factum, “fact,” from the verb facere, “doing”). Far from any connection with “fake facts,” they are always the fruit of relationships and constructs: not like a mind that consumes the world but as their engaged and continuous correspondence. The apparent comfort of stability is unseated; the illusory break of any fixed sense is prevented. This is the most interesting meaning of this strange word, epistenology. Without a doubt, the contraction of oînos and episteme, which effectively would be the “knowledge of wine,” is more obvious, but in that case an epistemology of wine would have sufficed, which would also have dealt with its ontology, its essences, and the so-called matters of fact relating to the kind of knowledge we have and can gain. It would have been a discourse about the tastes of wine, on how subjective and objective they are, on the difference between tastes per se and tasting, and on other, similar questions— a more traditional approach to this issue. Instead, we are engaged in precisely an epistenology and not an epistemology of wine. It is not a play on words but a crossfire. Here there are not tastes on the one side and tasting on the other—separate and distinct. There is not the subjective here and the objective there. There is a link, in the sense of an ongoing correspondence between ontology and epistemology. This means that wine is neither an object nor a topic. It is nothing, it doesn’t even exist, without the encounters it experiences—the encounters with the sun and with oxygen, with the earth and the soil, with the men and women who inhabit and dwell on that soil, who touch the vines and cultivate them, who work the grapes and eventually drink that wine. If one is prepared to try this approach, epistenology serves to change the questions we ask. I am trying here to remove wine from a restrictive logos, dressed up as a commodity, so that it can be oxygenated by a different feeling mostly consisting of

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eros and filìa (to the extent possible in a book or, in other words, in a discourse—I am well aware of the performative paradoxes of this project). At this point a list of Greek philosophers who talked about wine from this perspective would be introduced, but this would be a normal approach taken by many others in thousands of essays, so I’ll move on. For me, epistenology has meant an irreversible change of pace. When my past self started to evolve a few years ago, I could have abandoned wine and left it to rot in the swamp into which it had fallen, reduced to meaningless chit-chat, commodities, and professions. Instead, I took it with me so that we could evolve together and it could become something better. I did it for love, and it was a beginning. With the first journey, a magmatic flow emerged from a long elaboration that was both intellectual and emotional and undoubtedly made its mark on my writing, for good or ill. Now the flow is different: it follows a rhythm with which I can comply or to which I can abandon myself with a greater and more lateral capacity, possibly from a more correct but more enduring distance. This second journey that you have just started, settling you uncomfortably at my table where we drink standing up or on our knees—preferably not sitting down so one can stay awake—testifies to and narrates this path. I believe it is still a long one, possibly endless, and certainly does not aspire to ends. Undoubtedly, it is not a private journey. It is not de-prived of anything. It is not owned by just one person but is inevitably communal and collective. This new part of the path has the subheading “Taste as a Task” (for philosophers: this contains also a bit of Kierkegaard). The traditional division of the external senses into five distinct modalities is a distortion— an intellectual operation responding to the need to classify and thematize. In the flow that we are, feeling is unitary; divided senses are already an

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abstraction. Again, for philosophers: Michel Serres and Maurice Merleau-Ponty are very present here. Epistenology is postphenomenological because it radicalizes and extends the idea of the sentient body through the dissolving of the individual that this idea implies. At the same time, epistenology is “linealogical” because it develops the idea that life and the world form a single, inextricable knot, a meshwork of lines that, through experience, correspond with each other harmoniously or otherwise. Thus we are one sentient being intertwined with what is sensed: experience that moves and is moved through the processes in which it participates, such as drinking a bottle of wine. The upshot is that wine cannot be tasted by taste alone—mouth, nose, brain— but is sensed by everything. This externalism relates not solely to the mind but to all feeling and, by extension, characterizes the discovery and enjoyment (or indifference to or rejection) of wine. This is why I suggest using the term task to highlight that taste is not precisely something that exists, because, before being analyzed and established, it is constructed and developed, step by step. A task is a kind of commitment, not necessarily directly ethical or political (choosing what to eat and drink in accordance with particular arguments and reasons) but always ethical and political in terms of life paths and a social presence that makes us more aware of the unfolding of the world at any given time. The haptic approach to wine tasting that I am proposing is one of care for and participation in the processes to whose creation it contributes, setting aside the comfort provided by our optical taste, experienced and lived as from a living room table. We are knots of mobile lines, stretching out to and intertwined with the mass of present experiences. When we manage to feel like this, there is no taste of wine but only with wine, in situations experienced as the effective and creative continuation of lines and traces at the same time both of the past and of that

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which is yet to come. This is not difficult to appreciate if we carefully observe the processes that produce both the sharing of and disagreement with those values termed as aesthetic. It is still comforting, however, to reflect on taste as if it were an established collection of learned rules that need only to be applied—to ask of this particular wine I’m drinking, “What should I taste?” This question is akin to wearing a plastic bodysuit before a carnal encounter. Thus epistenology can also be seen as an invitation to decolonize an imagination made up of the attitudes, poses, vocabularies, and thoughts that will be displaced and removed in the following chapters. Decolonizing also means climbing down from the pedestal of wine culture. (The word “colonize” has the same root as culture and cultivation: in Latin, cultus is that which is cultivated as well as those who invade and those who claim to teach.) It means to slip away from good taste like the invading colonizer to gain the marshlands or the uncultivated highlands of encounters at which we arrive unarmed and where taste and what is good are created in that moment. Like Diogenes, we search for humankind through wine, and like Dionysus, we look for wine with humankind—possibly stretched out in a vineyard, drinking something we brought from home on a midsummer’s night with a sliver of moonlight. Without either theme or method, without the need for knowledge or judgment, gurus or competitions, without wineglasses or maybe with—do what you will with glasses, it is all the same in the end. The only thing that is important in this approach is continuing to explore the roads that, thanks to wine, come to mind in order to create images and stories with and beyond it. We cannot live on wine alone, and to love it, we need to know how to let it go. How to meet wine without meeting the water with which it is also composed? Water is much more important than wine, and it helps even to understand better its nature.

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Not all wine experts (perhaps very few) will accept what will be set out in the pages to come even more forcefully and clearly than in the first part. Wine fanatics definitely will not. However, after the first part of the journey that Epistenology has been, it has become increasingly evident that this work was not addressed only or, above all, to either the experts or even those who are “authorities” on the subject. The direction it took, with obvious exceptions and leaving the author aside (I have not had, nor do I intend to have, any control), was to talk to those who have a less professional interest in our beloved drink and even to those who have never had any interest in it. Those who are teetotalers have even appreciated epistenology as a project. I believe this came about (and I hope continues) because it tries, through wine and with the humility of a neglected ego, to talk about the possibilities for a more beautiful and aware life. What makes us feel good? Imagination, which is the creation of images. Images are the precipitate of memories and fantasies, like the past and the future. Images nurture hope and together allow us to perceive the paths and relationships that have led us here so far. Cultivating the imagination means cultivating what is human—with more imagination there will be less desperation. Through imagining, the world appears as it did on the first day, in a process of continual regeneration. Being capable of imagination, training the imagination through a constant exposure to the world we know, makes us feel good. Epistenology takes wine by the hand like a traveler well met in order to lead it back to its role as a dynamo for the creation of images that are not representations of what is perceived in the static order of “objective facts.” Because as long as we have imagination, we are safe and happy.

6 WITHOU T A THEME Without a Subject and Without Fear: Value in Place of Thematization

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leave the umpteenth wine fair—“lively,” “natural,” “independent,” “naked,” “critical,” “resistant,” and “corsair” wines—with the usual discomfort and a pounding headache. Naturally, it is not because of the sulfites; moreover, many of the wines I love are here, the irregular and unruly ones. Do not fear, it is not because of that, and I haven’t changed my taste since the first part of the book. It’s rather because of the constant chattering as if issuing plenary indulgences, all that dust raised by walking from one stand to another, the “try this” and “try that,” together with all the usual rubbish about vintages and the clichés that accompany it. All this is very annoying, but that is just me, it’s not the wines’ fault. My companions and I met some elderly Sicilians who were a bit lost and confused and had clearly been brought to Milan for the first time now that their “product” was selling. I liked their wine but not because of the miserable amount provided on the stand, a dose so homeopathic that it felt like being in an Antonioni film, playing tennis without a ball. I liked it because I loved them, and this is no surrogate for the pleasure of wine; these are the facets of wine that I notice now. Expressions such as “what counts is only what’s in the glass”—there are still those who say

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this, arrogantly, as if they were revealing an immensely profound truth—mean nothing at all. There is nothing that is only in the glass because what is in it is also always out of it. And this is true not only from a rigorously researched point of view, because tasting, as everybody should know, is both multi- and cross-sensorial. Then, once I leave the wine fair, I’m annoyed with myself for getting annoyed, so I think that epistenology could also be seen as a perpetual invitation to shape and sharpen our sensitivities in motion, without any anchors—as soon as it aims at something, it is already somewhere else. (In effect, some have said they cannot keep up with me. But no one has to keep up; it’s better to be in front or, in this case, off to the side.) Perceiving haptically—the subject of the first part of the book—means running over the surface of the things of the world, feeling them not as helpless objects but as living substances and thereby shaping a movement of sensed thoughts and observing them in the unrepeatable experience of the event. Doing this means continually sampling, a tasting that concerns those who drink as much as what is drunk. It is precisely the act of drinking that lies beyond the “subject” and the “object”; better, it lies inbetween them. Thus the glass is never alone because it is always in-between everything else. Epistenology is nomadic. Nevertheless, it has settled very comfortably in the country Georgia. Epistenology is possibly a bit Georgian, from rural Georgia, where wine has been the life companion of humans for a very long time, a part of ongoing, common, and shared daily experiences. After my first journey there, I called back into question something I hadn’t thought about much. For a long time I believed, as had many academics, that the recent blossoming of interest in gastronomy and taste by philosophers, historians of culture, and the sciences was long

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overdue. However, in what way and why had this topic been neglected “for a long time”? Were previous drinkers less intelligent than we are? I think not. Why was there this supposed hierarchy of the perceivable, this so-called undervaluing of taste, this misconception regarding the importance of food? And, on the other hand, why did a “valorization” of wine and a “booming” economy occur at the start of the 1990s? Georgia came to my aid and cleared up the error I had made: as often happens when we see the world from a single acquired perspective that produces comforting narrations that end up in evolutionary historiography (“we can at last say this because we had realized that this is how things are”), I had inverted the terms at stake. The fact was that I had concentrated entirely on the novelty of a theme’s emergence without at the same time appreciating that the real problem was the theme itself. The “boom” relates to focusing on a theme, then. Can we be sure, however, that the thematic boom corresponds to a plus value? Let us try to create a microhistory of taste by looking backward: at some point, for all the well-known historical and sociological reasons, food and wine became a theme of research, and interest in them was analytical in nature. (As in the previous section, I will not, my studious friend, be including notes and supporting references in this part of the book, just to show you that I know things. Be patient because that is what epistenology is all about—it wants to stay at the margins of culture’s discourse, consistent with what it proposes for wine.) However, the rural Georgians I know and with whom I have shared a lot of wine don’t treat it as a theme or a subject of analysis, and they don’t talk about it much, despite living with it forever and drinking a vast amount of it. Does this mean they do not value it? Not at all, and, in fact, wine is hugely important to them, because they live with it. During the supra, the ritual banquets organized to

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celebrate guests, joyous anniversaries, and even funerals, wine plays a crucial role. It is consumed in great quantities according to the rhythm created by the many toasts coordinated by a tamadà, the master of ceremonies who organizes the speeches and compels others to offer them. What do people say on these occasions? They do not talk about wine as an object of evaluation; it is not a theme, and even less is it dissected in terms of its sensorial qualities. People open themselves up to talk about life in its broadest sense; they express hopes, remember loved ones; they expose themselves to the moment with wine, through wine, the wine that can also be celebrated as a drink that binds and unites, not as an objective, abstract imbibement detached from lived experience. Does wine need to be talked about to have a value? It seems to be a rhetorical question. I have arrived at this point after twenty-five years of drinking; woe is me, and I am perhaps a bit slow. But just look around. We don’t need to refer to Georgia, even if I’m saying this retrospectively, to see what’s in front of us despite the fact that at times we need to take a step back in order to focus. We tend to think that it is only by means of making an argument, defining a subject and a discourse, that an experience, event, or value can acquire importance. However, this is a peculiar perspective that depends on how we as wine aficionados or academics perceive, feel, and think; it is unnatural, and, above all, it also permits us to glimpse an alternative. This was hinted at earlier, but it is now time for a more radical approach, a more powerful de-objectification of wine as the subject of an argument and a discourse, a topic requiring clarification and discursive analysis. Value does not require this thematization; it can remain implicit, atmospheric, related only to its context. Do we need to talk about love to know and appreciate it?

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“I don’t sing about love, it’s a song in itself, the more you call on it, the less there is,” sings PGR on the album Montesole.1 Value has been confused with a theme for way too long, with making something an object of analysis, as if this were the only way to know and recognize something. However, these are two different ways to relate to the world, one distant and reasoned and the other immediate and felt. They are not always conflicting. Nonetheless, as a theme expands, it often obscures the value so that the experience in question becomes less powerful. It has even been the case, in our contemporary era, that the theme has absorbed the experience, transforming it into a financial value and hard cash within an objectivist and analytical model—this wine costs so much because it’s made this way and because it has a specific profile, as if one profile has more intrinsic value than another. I will come back to this. The theme is the argument in question; quite a paradox, I know. Theme comes from tithemi, from which comes thesis, that which is put forward, that which is placed in a given position. Making something a theme therefore means making it an argument for analysis and research, a theory. Modern wine has been increasingly appreciated as an object of aesthetic knowledge. From the eighteenth century onward, wine began to be talked about consistently in terms of its “sensorial characteristics,” which are claimed to be specific to it on the basis of analyses derived from a new scientific model, as demonstrated so well by Steven Shapin. (I like to cite his name mainly because he’s a friend with whom I have drunk a lot of good wine.) From here we get to my beloved, unavoidable aromatic wheel, devised by Ann C. Noble, with all its associated objective tasting systems. This great dissecting machine deconstructs wine into odors: wine tasted with the nose from a distance, optical odor in square brackets, wine detached from the environment and atmosphere in which it is

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generated. Value is lost, obscured by an instrument that cuts and separates the bond between drinker and drink. Value develops through the experience of drinking as a connection with and link to what this experience produces as a memory—the past, what we have become, all our histories—and as a fantasy—what we will become, the aspirations and tasks that await us. Value is a bond, a legacy, and a task. It needs neither discourse nor analysis. There is an exercise that I often propose to my students and to those who participate in epistenological encounters. It is a practice of quasi-meditation with wine, in total silence, for many minutes at a time. We drink but we do not talk, and the setting and situation also facilitate a withdrawal from thinking about wine. I recall that, more than once, someone has come up at the end of the exercise, confessing her annoyance at the beginning of the exercise. How difficult it was to avoid words and thoughts as thematic discourse! The silence game is hard going, but usually annoyance is replaced by a feeling of satisfaction, a sort of joy in a new perspective learned. We have learned by experience that epistenology is not about the theme of wine. It is a sensed thought, a feeling thought through wine where the theme is lost within a broader context. I have invented nothing new: for an ancient Greek or a Georgian, wine usually lives and has worth within a symposium, an experience shared by all participants (from the Greek, sun and pino, “I drink together”), and therefore has no sense as an isolated essence, as a theme for objective analysis. Wine cor-responds to the symposium or, in other words, responds to the calls made by the environment, the atmosphere, the drinkers, posing questions in their own right. This correspondence is not a black and shapeless night but, in contrast, the light whereby all the differences that are gradually produced run and flow. The with of the symposium uproots and breaks the theme because wine becomes one

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with the surroundings into which it is weaved, like in a Georgian supra. The wine dances silently on the table while it makes us talk and sing. Here it lives, grows, and evolves its primary value. Epistenology has no object or argument because to make it a theme means to objectify, classify, separate, and abstract a wine. It is without a theme because it is without a theory, without a position or a fixed and precise collocation. Therefore it is nomadic and anarchic. With wine, everything is connected, or, in other words, wine has value because it is a bond. It is without a theme because it is fearless (without timore—fear). In archaic Italian, a theme is also timore (from the verb temere). We feel wine haptically, without an object and without a theme or, in other words, without the fear of losing it since we love it. It cannot be possessed as one would possess an object; epistenology is not possessive. This is why wine is not a product to be measured but an encounter to be entered, a relationship to be lived as with other living bodies or “quasi subjects.” Agreed, but what kind of relationship will allow the athematic approach proposed here to grow? This was not entirely clear to me until recently; indeed, I have not expressed it well in the first part of the book. It may have been possible to arrive at anyway. Every encounter was a relationship among elements that, in turn, produced other intertwinings. The drinker was already an agglomeration of biographical, cultural, and social references, and the same is true of the wine encountered. Because of this experiential foundation the idea of an isolatable theme—“wine” as argument and object—is conceptually impossible (what analytical philosophers would call a “category mistake”) since always everything is already connected. Nonetheless, accustomed as we are to the thematic argument model, we tend to consider the

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encounter solely in terms of a direct face to face. Even the encounter with wine can thus be seen as a frontal relationship, and, in effect, the current tasting fairs and events exist on the parallel lines of a dual relationship where attention is entirely concentrated on the object encountered. Without a theme, however, we can move laterally and observe, attempting to meet wine sideways rather than face to face. This tactic serves to deflate the ego. Once one displaces and reduces the subject, so too the object recoils and diminishes. I live within a situation without a center or a position, where I feel there is a global scene with all its qualities, of which those lines that make up all the elements that are called “wine” and are called “me” are also a part. Sometimes I use only candlelight during our exercises in order to encounter wine without argument or fear. It creates an atmosphere where objects liquefy, becoming animated substances and permitting us to perceive the processes of these moments of tasting and drinking. (This exercise builds on Gaston Bachelard’s The Flame of a Candle but is also a homage to Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.) The encounter with wine is a knitting together of lines, not of ontologically fixed and isolated elements. It is steeped in a scenario of fluid and open sense so that it is a sideways meeting. Within this atmosphere, the polyphonic reality of tasting without a theme can emerge. Polyphony is another important Georgian tradition that, not coincidentally, is practiced during the supra. It consists of a single chant that nonetheless is not an indistinguishable fusion of voices. Polyphony is not the juxtaposition of different phoné, since they link one to the other not with a logic that is connected (and . . . and . . . and . . .) but one that is contrapuntal (with . . . with . . . with . . .). Thus every individual voice is part of a whole to whose creation it contributes but yet is not lost. To suggest a lateral encounter without

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a theme in relation to wine is enriching rather than annihilating because it gifts to us the possibility of broader paths than those of the dualistic encounter. If one participates attentively, a correspondence between drinking, tastes, things, lights, hands, sounds, colors, thoughts, and, of course, even a few words, if you want, can emerge. If the discursive and thematic approach is entirely centered on the object with our attention focused on shaping the path, the lateral, haptic, and themeless approach, on the other hand, diminishes the object. Our attention is widespread and extended; it has no aims or programs. In contrast, the former approach means to proceed according to objectives based on predefined standards for both making and appreciating wine: How should a good wine be—in the making and the drinking? What must I do for the wine I make to come out as I want it to? These questions signify the idea of a project, an intent that defines positions and objectives a priori. In contrast, a lateral approach is both anomic and dilettantish. We are delighted by nurturing and drinking without any other purpose than having the desire to do so. Attention is a care that moves without knowing where it will go, it adheres to a process of developing and evolving together. It is important to clarify this point again; the lack of intent and of a project in relation to wine does not open the door to indistinct indifference, to “anything goes.” Lying between indifference and intent, we have discovered anarchic but constant and rigorous attention not to wine as an object but to wine felt with all the surroundings that we can encounter by means of our current experiences, stretching the imagination as far as possible. So we say: Beloved wine, I am interested in you and, maybe, quite a lot, but you are not the only thing here. Where? Obviously, in the world, and, since the “world” is the

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continual production of knots that twist together, fixing on you wine alone, as a helpless and static object, is actually to betray you and truly not to appreciate you. The wine expert will ask me: Is it impossible to give a wine value by thematizing, allowing it to become an argument, talking about and analyzing it like an object? Maybe it can be done. Nothing is off the table if we are aware of the flow in which this process participates and by which it is transported and embedded, contributing to the creation of the process in its own right. In this case, value takes on a specific color, a particular salience as the cultured would call it, linked to a specific and functional efficacy (to become, precisely, an expert in wine, to acquire a thematic knowledge that, of course, is entirely legitimate). The point is that everything has been weighted in this direction in these recent centuries of civilization and good manners, of Enlightenment and good taste, and the effects have not exactly been brilliant, so some strategic compensation would be opportune at the very least. Then the impassioned wine lover might press me: What about the intense intimacy, that profound love that at times we can feel with wine? Have no fear. The lateral and athematic approach does not render less intense, does not close down the possibilities of a powerful and loving relationship. It rather moves it into a more florid environment, a richer and more varied, flowering garden, in which, if it happens, it is lived as an amazing and unexpected experience within the flow of the world. To prefer value over theme—I apologize for returning to a previous point that will be painful for some, but epistenology makes no compromises— also means reconsidering wine with respect to its devastating and global proliferation as a brand discourse, placing it rather within the ambit of its rediscovery as a substance and a victual. If we consider wine solely as a

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label, the signature of the “producer,” of the oenologist, and, generally speaking, someone’s property (even the property of a terroir, as I will explain further on), then all its value is sucked into the competitive model of market economies. All is reduced to money, precisely what we need to abstain from or, at the very least, reduce by drinking some types of naturally lively, “resistant” wines that are or should be grown without the constraints of the main market square; wines that do not, or should not obey to the rules of god money. I did not make this clear earlier, even if the question arose indirectly. What was proposed then, however, was in tune with an approach that owes much to the Georgian archetype. A noninvasive and, undoubtedly, a nondominant model of working with the plant and the fruit but also and above all one that is athematic and uncentered, that does not create new theories and truths to replace the old ones. Natural wine—I now want to use this adjective because the banalities around the nonexistence of “natural” wines have become very tedious—should resonate with the perspective set out above, mainly as a more suitable tool in a flexible and lateral approach where value consists of love, care, and attention. So let us rid ourselves of winemakers’ signatures and trophy wines; of names and even prices. Even unintentionally, if an economic value is shown only to a private market, it becomes the theme, the argument, and the object (that brand, that terroir, that vintage). Returning value to the lateral, atmospheric encounter without a theme also invites us to promote a different approach wherein wine is considered primarily as a common asset. I appreciate that this is a complex problem that cannot be resolved here—epistenology does not resolve anything but might dissolve something. Nonetheless, it is opportune to consider abandoning the idea of ownership in order to create poetic and poietic strategies that are consistent. I believe that Luigi Veronelli also

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had this in mind with his famous phrase “the worst wine made by a farmer is always better than the best industrial wine,” an ethical claim on behalf of anonymous, unbottled, ownerless wine. Sometimes I set the following exercise: I serve a wine that is possibly— or rather, preferably—high in cost in a water carafe and never reveal its provenance. This enforced anonymity (people often asking me to reveal the secret for days on end), this work without claims or authors, leads to an experience with wine. It leads us to reflect, which, obviously, can be annoying at times.

7 WITHOU T METHOD Obliqueness and Attention in Place of Method and Intention

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structured and specific language about wine as a thematic discourse has developed in close relationship to sustaining social distinctions. Good wine, as a social marker, is not for all, mainly because not everyone appreciates it—that is, can talk about it. (Pay careful attention here as we will pick up this relationship later: the presumed equivalence between appreciation and being able to talk about wine is not a given because it is clearly possible to appreciate and to express appreciation without using discourse. The so-called tacit knowledge, rather than being silent and implicit, is often very expressive and loud, like in bodily gestures, for example.) Against this view, however, many have been saying for some time now that the “world of wine” needs new approaches and new languages in order to mend the self-referential asphyxia that has been holding back its well-deserved success, particularly among the so-called younger generations. It is a fact that more beer and less wine is being drunk, even if this is often attributed to the absurd assumption that “today, we drink less but better.” Better or worse with respect to what? (This assumption is absurd because it presumes knowledge of every era and place in the entire world, with truly ridiculous consequences. No time should

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be wasted on dismissing such, unfortunately, recurring phrases as “Roman wine was undrinkable” since it is sufficient to ask ourselves, “If it was undrinkable, why did they drink it?” The point is, I fear, that some might even respond that they did so because they were unrefined and had inferior tastes.) Among all these platitudes and clichés, one of the most common is that “the problem lies with communication.” Communication is like stress: when one does not understand why something unpleasant has happened, stress is at fault. Or a lack of communication. Furthermore, it is hard to understand why those who drink and appreciate wine should be concerned with communication. Nonetheless, we can often discover claims that confuse questions that might be useful for people who sell wine with others that relate to the pleasure of those who drink it. In other words, there is a great deal of noise when everyone has something to say. Therefore we have arrived at the “world of wine,” which is held to be ailing due to too much stress or faulty communication. I have to confess, mea culpa: I once used that questionable expression—the world of wine—myself as the title of a collection of articles I edited in English: Wineworld. We now even speak of worlds of wine. A proliferation of worlds. (Philosophers and sociologists, do not get upset. I know Alfred Schütz’s theories on subuniverses, but we are talking about something different here.) Where is this world of wine supposed to be, and, above all, how does it differ from the world as a whole? It seems to me that all the scientific evidence and all the testimonies we possess (I am being a bit ironic here) clearly inform us that, together with everything else, wine is a part of the only world we have and inhabit. If we consider the world as divided into sectors— the world of this and the world of that—there is a credible risk of an objective and thematic approach, as occurs with wine.

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Objects, however, are defined and have boundaries with respect to what lies outside. Consequently, they become subjects outside of which there will be something else—leading to more boundaries and even barriers. Epistenology proposes a different approach, without subjects and therefore without objects—if there is no theme there will be nothing outside the theme. On the inclined plane of feeling and inhabiting the only world we have, a world without objects, only processes, we are undoubtedly aware that “objectivism is a strategy that affects the formation of decision-making techniques relating to methodological, philosophical, and technical questions,” the Italian philosopher Aldo Gargani once wrote. This is exactly the reason that we do not confuse the object with the cause of the experiences we undergo. The object is an effect. Wine, as the liquid content of a bottle made of glass that separates it from the rest of the world, wine as an object, is a strategic effect of wider processes, of endless movement. Haptically, we shift from the world of wine to the wine in the world, that single world that we inhabit with wine where it circulates, passing through and possibly staining the world and us yellow, red, or amber. The stagnation claimed by the wine professionals and experts does not depend, therefore, on a lack of communication with the world of wine—a world that in itself does not even exist. On the contrary, it means bringing wine back into the world with an entirely different approach that involves passions and interests over and above thematic abstractions and sectorial asphyxia. The dissatisfaction with the current situation and the resultant requests for something new are often accompanied by assertions of the need for a method. The method is merely another modern fetish, just like stress and communication. A method is required in the domain of professionalism and wine expertise—methods for

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growth and production but above all methods for “evaluating” wine. In effect, referential and analytical tasting is considered as not only objective but also the outcome of a true method. In epistenology, on the contrary, the absence of a method does not mean something is missing. It is not a question of finding a new method; method is not the solution, rather it is the problem. When our haptic feeling has removed the expert from the tasting panorama of wine, returning the experience of drinking to drinkers around the world, a centerless and directionless meshwork, then the method also disappears. This new way of feeling, this commitment to a different kind of perception, changes both the approach and the very questions that we consider appropriate to wine. The method is replaced by an oblique approach, disciplined but without a priori rules and regulations. (François Jullien suggested the term oblique to describe how Chinese thought helps us understand Greek thought, and I am using it here to understand our relationship with wine. China and wine have a long history: an unexpected and increasingly strong link from all points of view.) Obliqueness indicates the lateral nature of perception once the ego has been removed, a constant and unprogrammed encounter with the world, attention spread throughout the flow of relationships that take place, and the consequent creation of images. Obliqueness differs from method because it deals only with stories, with experiencing that is not of but with something—in this case, wine. Oblique attention is diffused rather than focused on a single aspect of an object; the attention is oblique precisely because the object is not there. It has been lost in the process. For this reason, oblique attention can also seem to be distraction or lack of attention, but only with respect to a methodological, intentional, and objectivist model that, in contrast, can focus on only one thing, enlarging one particular moment as if it explained

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and understood the whole. Obliquely, I am attentive with wine and not to it; in other words, I am not embroiled in the categories of a thematic discourse, of a thought shaped by logos. The term method (from Greek meta hodos, “after the way”) indicates a path, a road that leads somewhere. The beginning foresees the end, the chosen objective. The method is the route followed based on predefined criteria and rules, and all that counts is how to get from start to finish. The method is inevitably thematic and logical. When it comes up against problems—counterexperiences or resistant objects—it tackles them head on, in the most exact face-to-face way possible. Here am I and a glass or a bottle of wine before me. In contrast, the oblique approach is not pre-established, and it continuously disrupts the given order—it is disorganized but nonetheless orients itself and proceeds splendidly. We are here with a wine—have we chosen it? Maybe, but maybe not, and we start drinking it. It does not stand in a frontal relationship but extends all around us, along spread-out lines that develop within the situation. Obliqueness, in contrast to method, is a process and not a guaranteed one; it does not start out knowing where it is going to end up. Thus wine encountered obliquely is a wine along the path, not a model for enjoyment, appreciation, or, even less, evaluation. During epistenological experiences, I often set an exercise in which wine is drunk in pairs from a single shared glass while the two people (preferably strangers) tell each other about their lives, summarizing them in just a few minutes. The attention of the participants is thereby entirely absorbed, and the wine, used to standing under the spotlight, ends up in an oblique position. So I suggest that, in order to appreciate a wine by extending it into lived experience, it can sometimes help to listen to someone else’s life story. Wine is here with us; it acts and accompanies differently in different circumstances and will come upon us unannounced, through a secret door.

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Michel Serres writes “Nothing grows from a method” in his beautiful work entitled Le gaucher boiteux (“the lame left-hander”), which I strongly recommend reading as its random philosophical search for knowledge is apropos to our experiences of wine. A method is an illusion of the preordained, just as we naively think we can control our life by directing it. As we know, the strictest kinds of science, even when they appear to be following established norms, in reality zigzag in random motion. Processes, full of stumbling and unexpected creativity, are often obscured by describing their outcomes as natural. (I am following here Paul Feyerabend and also Aldo Gargani, whose book Il sapere senza fondamenti [Nonfoundational knowledge] represents the formation of knowledge as nonlinear, arising out of the forms of human life.) The ideal of the method is to attach what does not belong to the process, the ontologizing perspective of categories and differences established a priori. It is the model of the static and objective optical perspective of the world where becoming is always related to being. Obliqueness, without a method, stands within a process where things never are nor precisely become (being and becoming are perfectly specular) but rather tend toward. Epistenology is an attempt to make life with wine, without the support of any fixed ontology. Epistenology is an impermanent experiment that tries out this almost impossible, although very promising, path. We are not in a relationship with wine because this would assume that something separate and autonomous exists before this relationship. It is rather that, when we drink, we are the relationship with wine. The absence of a method within a feeling that enriches obliquely can be helpful in both making and drinking wine. Making wine is not an exact science—I think we can all agree on this, except for the few naive fanatics of the oenological process. (A rather well-known scholar once declared that “nowadays,

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taste has improved because wines have improved ”—no comment.) Ways of making wine have changed over the course of time and differ even today. There is no need for a method to make wine, an alcoholic liquid mainly consisting of water, that comes from the sun, the sky, and the soil, from the field, the vines, and grapes. In effect, however, we can distinguish—and even this is a simplification due to the many variations and nuances— between two ways of making it. On the one hand, there are the wines that are designed and produced according to a method; on the other, there are those that are nurtured anarchically and obliquely. Method-based wine is akin to the objective ideal of modern science, an analytical model whose basis lies in the “optimization” of works in order to achieve the best possible outcomes, eliminating any unpredictable obstacles, establishing protocols, and standardizing processes. The objective is clear, or at least it appears to be clear, which results in technologies for “improving” profiles, correcting or adjusting aromas, textures, and perfumes. On the contrary, wine nurtured obliquely and anarchically is alchemic, made without a method but with care. It is not designed in the minds of its producers or sellers; it grows and develops from the sky and the soil together with those who nurture it—a panoply of elements, among which humans are undoubtedly a part, that create threads and connections. In principle, every wine can provide an experience of haptic attention; however, the anarchic ones facilitate the process because their makers were already aware of the educated obliqueness of nurturing. A connection (or a nexus, from the Latin nectere) is a knot, something that bonds and ties. The nexus we have with wine is more or less close: responsibilities to other things and other people, past links, memories and remembrances that interweave with future paths and the freedom of creation. Knots are important because they hold things together, and at the same time they

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must be made correctly because they may need to be undone when we have to unfurl our sails and flee the storms. Made this way, this type of wine is more vulnerable, fragile, and open to attack, but for this very reason it encourages an awareness of the world as a collection of processes and lines, the constant generation of life. These wines are called “living” because they are flexible, because they extend and stretch out; they are not rigid and thematic. Designed and method-based wines, wines seen as products, however, are said to be “more reliable,” although here reliability stands for the predictable safety of the already known, of the always the same, of the lack of amazement and the unexpected. As soon as someone says, “I want to make a wine like this” in terms of aromatic and flavor qualities, we have put wine in a straitjacket; we have restrained it behind the bars of our intentions in a prearranged mold. In the same way, when I expect that a wine I’m about to drink will behave as I already know it should, as an object with certain perfumes and aromas, I transform it from a relationship of ongoing generation into a presumed and appropriate expression about my taste and my idea of the wine. I impose a form on the experience of drinking, forcing it into a mold produced by an objectivist strategy. (This is called a hylomorphic model: the materials of the world are all inside the forms that the mind has devised for them.) But in epistenology there are no such expectations. Oblique attention, guided by neither intentions nor methods, proceeds without any demand for correct and reliable behavior. What would we need to trust? For my own part, I trust amazement, not predictability. I know the objection (an objection is an object thrown directly at you): What about the market? You tell me that the market requires wines that are stable, fixed, and certain; “I cannot afford” to make wines that are always different, etc. But are you sure this is the only way?

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Compared to many wine experts, I have encountered and drunk thousands of wines. I began many years ago, and I am almost old. Nonetheless, unlike many of them, I can say that today I have almost no memory of those wines. I have not had a desire to register or catalog, in case I might want to remember something. I have a few memories, and they survive without themes or methods. If I retrace my life with wine, I recover a less focused approach, a rounded feeling out of the corner of my eye that disempowers the objectivism of sight. If making does not need a method, one is needed even less for perceiving, tasting, and discovering, even though the contrary has been the norm for a very long time. Whereas the many variants of the thematic and objectivist model of sensorial analysis and tasting focus on wine in a direct and frontal way, posing questions on the basis of certain guiding criteria, in the processual, haptic, and athematic approach, questions are never preprepared. They emerge during the experience of drinking, immersed in ongoing life. Tasting obliquely and without a theme, creating value, means feeling with wine, like an ongoing self-making. Haptic taste is without a method because it is also explorative and exposed: wine becomes as one with the sentient body, the correspondence of substances that flow one with the other, without exerting any control. This correspondence between drinker and wine is peculiar because it also always involves a physical relationship, a bodily interpenetration. We proceed tentatively, according to a  dis-position: a lack of position, hence without a theory or a precise collocation. Epistenology, insomuch as knowing with is participative knowledge, according to Jullien can be called a connivence, or connivance, a complicity with wine. If the term knowledge is in fact very much vitiated by the objective and distal model, the

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term connivance is much more helpful. It means feeling and adhering to the flow and the process, with no need of being explicit or disputing the word. Haptic taste is conniving, because it is felt thought: it is sympathy dis-posed to encounters. Haptic taste is a silence that feels, a thought that does not know in an objective way—like when a wine strikes you between the back of the neck and the top of the spine, giving you that little push that makes you straighten up and your eyes shine. The haptic develops the truth of wine as the result of a situation. Wine meets the truth of its taste in the rightness of an oblique and conniving encounter. Suitable or not, it adapts itself and us— or maybe not. Without either a method or intention, we make and appreciate wine with disciplined anarchy, according to the consistency of the life that we make and that leads us through the only world we inhabit.

8 WITHOU T COMPETENCY Compassion in Place of Competition; Communality in Place of Competency; Making Experience in Place of Being Expert

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ompetence and professionalism, professionalism and competence. Competent persons are needed, we need true professionals. These mechanical refrains are like the commercial jingles of a life regulated and performed according to impeccable instructions that define the hoped-for goodness of our existence and social actions. Thus all the ills that afflict us are the result not only of stress or a lack of communication or correct methods but also of a lack of competence and professionalism. In the case of wine, we are warned about the incompetent people who talk a lot in place of the people who really know. But are we sure that incompetence is the real problem, or is it rather the desire to be always talking, whatever the circumstances? Here I would suggest another vigorous “turn of the screw” or “one more ride on the merry-go-round” (depending on your preference for Henry James or Tiziano Terzani): I shall replace the professional not with the charlatan but with the amateur, and competence not with ignorance but with compassion and comparticipation. Competence is authoritative; compassion and comparticipation are manifold. The decency of the amateur increases when confronted with the authority of the person who is formally recognized to be

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“competent.” Sometimes this decency becomes embarrassment, a sense of inferiority or indifference. The committed amateur takes delight in what they do and as such differs from the cocky and arrogant and from the buffoon who wants to overturn the  relationships of power, only to reinstate them in another guise. The amateur recognizes competence but feels that their unstructured relationship with wine works well and is gratifying; on the other hand, the “competent” person fears any disrespect for their authoritative knowledge. Authoritative, indeed, refers to only one author. Objective and methodical wine tasting, as learned by competent and expert people, leads many to think that wine cannot be appreciated without possessing competence—that is, without a specific language for framing and describing wine. (I am deliberately not saying “enjoy” here but rather “appreciate,” since this framing refers to money and price, commercial value and comparison.) The “world of wine,” as some call it, is exclusive because of its paywall; the price of admission is learning a specific culture. If, by necessity or virtue, you stay outside, then you must be respectful and polite. This means “knowing your place.” The “free ambiance of epistenology,” however, does not exist in one place, it is dis-placed and not very polite. It does not delegate to others but exposes itself and is exposed. It is neither moved nor discouraged by authoritative competence. In fact, it knows that authorities and cultures are constructed and negotiated in relation to power relations. Therefore epistenology avoids all established and exclusive domains because its mission is inclusive: compassion is manifold. I spent an evening in Georgia (the country) with some very competent professional journalists. A small group of farmers invited us, rural families who have always made wine for selfconsumption but whose amphorae have recently become fashionable from Copenhagen to New York. They prepared a “wine

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tasting” on demand for these journalists, who would have reviewed the wines for their newspapers and magazines. The tasting was in a basement in the deep and open countryside, surrounded by dirt roads, stones, and mud. We were received in a room that reminded me of a garage crammed with old appliances, random tools and equipment, jars full of everything, a few amphorae, large bottles without labels, shelves, and a worm-eaten table. On this wonky table sat a set of bottles, thirteen, with four glasses—four—for us, who indeed numbered four. After a quick presentation of the wines—as mentioned, Georgians say little or nothing about wine as a thematic object—the professionals asked the guide and interpreter where the tasting would be. “This is the place, it’s his basement,” she replied. Then, the most competent of all the journalists asked, “Can we at least have a glass for each wine? As this is what is required when one wants to compare.” The request is translated; a local goes out and, panting, out of breath, returns with a few glasses—not quite as many as the wines— chipped glasses, all different, some even cloudy. Meanwhile, two Georgian girls put cheese, bread, and vegetables on the worm-eaten table, as wine here is drunk with food. At this point, the ultraprofessional gets a bit worked up: “Stop! I’m trying to work here. Please, take this food out, because wine must be judged professionally and objectively, without eating or smelling other things.” Then the quiet decency of the amateur emerged: floored by such authoritative and authoritarian competence, the Georgians removed the food from the table. The professional remained alone, with the delusionary objectivity of some glasses lined up, a few bottles, a pad to write on, and a seriously focused nose, mouth, and hand. I watched the scene with great attention and much amusement. I tasted all the wines, using the same glass, standing up and leaning against an old washing machine, close to people whose language I could not

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understand. I remember this as the most educational and powerful tasting experience I have had over the past few years. I moved from competence to compassion by opening my perceptive faculties up to the flow of experience, where all the lines brought together in the moment were not objects and people but processes and bonds. “Competence” comes from the Latin expression cum petere: it means going toward, joining up to reach the same point. From it derives the verb “to compete”: to try to converge on the same objective, with everybody on their own, as in a sort of contest. The bond required by the preposition cum paradoxically falls apart in competence, becoming a competition where there are the first-place winners, the stars, and the leaders on one side and the runners-up, the extras, and the losers on the other. Winners and losers. Competence relates to the juridical domain. The competent element is the person or organization in charge, who has jurisdiction—therefore a judge who has the power and discretion to make judgments. The competent person is one who is entitled to respect and deference as an expert who can judge. At the same time, the competent person is one who is competing. Within a haptic approach without themes, objectives, or methods, competence represents the concrete danger of severing the interwoven ties and connections that make up what we are. Competence circumscribes themes and fields—the “world of wine,” “the world of music,” “philosophy of,” every field demarcated with its own competent people—and indeed one can only compete on one subject. Competence produces—rather than being the result of—specializations and sectors and does so by shattering the unity of feeling by thinking and thinking by feeling. By being constantly focused on the thematic and comfortable myth of mastering a small realm, competence projects itself

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onto wine, making wine compete when this is not its purpose or raison d’être. In contrast to competence, which is allegedly detached so that it can judge objectively, compassion is connected; it participates in the flow, immersed within the context to whose creation it contributes. It is not passive submission; it does not mean that everything is good. In fact, it is the most appropriate tone for an oblique approach, for taste understood in the present experience as “this is what I need” or “this is what I don’t.” Cum pati—feeling together—without aims or intentions or destinations, without needing to be the first to arrive. It is taking care for, as it is with: to take care not of but rather with wine. Compassion is synthetic; competence is analytic. Feeling with compassion does not mean that we have to like everything, although, as Montaigne said, having easier and freer taste sometimes helps us be more open and profound. It allows us to better tolerate imperfect occasions when we drink wine. Tasting with compassion means lingering on the edge, not succumbing to judgment by the ego. It means perceiving the processes dreamily, appreciating them as they change. Epistenology is dreamy and oneiric. One day, my great Georgian American friend John told me a story about another friend we have in common: a great and generous person named Ramaz, who is also a wine grower. Once a couple arrived in the natural-wine store he used to run in Tbilisi. They were a German couple in their midfifties, and the husband was passionate about these kinds of wines while his wife was somewhat skeptical and indifferent. This German gentleman asked to drink a wine with a quite conventional taste, easy to drink, and he did so because of his wife, who otherwise would not have enjoyed it. Ramaz, who is as generous as he is impulsive and extreme, accompanied the Germans out of the

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natural-wine bar and pointed out a nearby supermarket where the man could find the wines his wife liked. This was not compassion but a lack of tact. A brick wall of authoritarian and authoritative competence had been built up and a customer ran into it, all in the name of a “truth” about wine, regardless of experience. Epistenology, however, proposes an oblique understanding whereby the self puts aside the ego in favor of complicity, “connivance,” with wine mingled with manifold compassion. This approach dismisses any absolute truths about wine, even about the wines we have loved. Wines were loved by us in that moment, and any attempt to build a definitive theory around them is doomed to failure. Read the following excerpt and replace the word “Art” with the word “wine,” and the (various) musicians’ proper nouns with wine growers’ ones or wine labels, as you prefer: I often said— & I shall continue to repeat it long after I am dead— that there is no Truth in Art (no single Truth, I mean). The Truth of Chopin, that prodigious creator, is not the same as Mozart’s, that luxuriant musician whose writing is eternally dazzling; just as Gluck’s Truth is not the same as Pergolesi’s; any more than Liszt’s is the same as Haydn’s—which is really just as well. If there is an artistic Truth, where does it begin? Which is the Master who is wholly in possession of it? Is it Palestrina? Is it Bach? Is it Wagner? To maintain that there is one Truth in Art seems as strange to me, as crazy, as if I heard someone declare the existence of  Locomotive-Truth, or House-Truth, Aeroplane-Truth, Emperor-Truth, or Beggar-Truth, etc.; & no one would dream of  propounding such an idea— at least not publicly— (out of modesty, perhaps, or plain common sense) for a “type,” even if genuine, real, must not be confused with Truth. And Yet, Critics

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This excerpt is from Erik Satie’s terrific writings, collected in A Mammal’s Notebook. Dear Wine Critics, with all the authority of your magnificent knowledge and authorized competence, need I say more? We do not need to thematize or, in other words, to study and become an expert in wine in order to encounter, discover, and understand it. This view bears on the dispute in aesthetics as to whether knowledge and pleasure are related or independent ways of judging. (There are very different positions taken in relation to wine tasting. In my experience, it is difficult to appreciate a wine that we do not like, so they are usually related, even though it is possible to distinguish between them. At the same time, pleasure is not stable and fixed; it is not something “given,” and even the pleasure of taste can evolve and change for a number of reasons.) Over and above this debate, epistenology stands at a different level, because to discover wine with a haptic sensitivity means conniving with wine. Accordingly, a multitude of relations, stories, and images grow; they are immersed in the same atmosphere of wine and to whose creation wine contributes. Sure, if you want to analyze wine—its colors, aromas, tastes, terroirs, modes of production, vineyards, and styles—then it is certainly appropriate to know about it. However, knowledge— what I have acquired as a person who has studied—does not guarantee a comprehension of the experience that we are having

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here and now with wine. What about experience, then: Is the expert one who is experienced (from the Latin expertus, past participle of experiri, to try, to experiment)? Is the expert necessarily able to make an experience? Experience points toward an ongoing movement that extends life between the past and the future. Thus experience is always “experiencing” owing to its inchoate nature, which also means that it is exposed to the uncertainty of what will come. To experience always means to be exposed to a flow, a tension between the already known and the unknown to come, because each time is always (like) the first. Therefore even if I have drunk it a thousand times before, the wine I am drinking now is always different because I am different too. (Heraclitus was clear about this point—everything flows, nothing stands still; no more needs to be said.) It may seem paradoxical, but having experiences and “being an expert” are not the same—they are almost opposites. To be an expert means that one has had experiences in the past. Past experience, however, by no means guarantees any consistency in the present, nor does it provide any reassurance about the future. This is because all experiences are different, and the things that were known can be proved wrong by something new and unexpected. Most important, expertise can slow down or even impede our understanding of experiences because it is a position that can facilitate closure rather than exposure. There is no question that everyone has received unexpected information about wine or anything else from incompetent people—a comment, a gesture, or a look that illuminates an experience. There is nothing strange in this: it is how life is generated. Since perception is imaginative and creative, we need to encounter the strange, the unknown, for there to be movement. If this were not the case, we would be trapped in an eternal present, like in the movie Groundhog Day: the eternal return

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of experiences already undergone, the endless repetition of a script already written (although, even in the movie, repetition always produces some variation). Sometimes wine experts forget this or may never have considered it, but true artists have always known it. To have experience, we need to be ignorant, just as we need to forget if we want to create. Tasting is experience, so it requires ignorance. The comprehension of wine is an experience of connivance that does not require competence but rather a diffused and distributed attention to processes. Are those who know nothing about wine therefore at an advantage? Not necessarily. Epistenology does not eliminate hierarchies only to reintroduce them in reverse; if anything, it displaces them by changing the questions. The passage from (in)competence to compassion can come about in two ways: the first concerns people who have become expert and, with (the illusion of having) this “acquired” knowledge, manage to develop an awareness that helps them to set it aside, to let it fall by the wayside every time they feel, taste, listen, and look. The second relates to people who have no expertise but who are attentive and open. People who take pleasure in the encounters they have, experiencing them with care and passion. Awareness is what can join the knowledgeable and the ignorant together, an awareness that signifies a commonality of destiny and life in the only world we have and inhabit. To warn about the expert’s expertise does not mean rejecting knowledge per se. Rather, the opposite: it means addressing knowledge from a broader perspective that does not see culture as the acquisition and transmission of pre-established knowledge. Thus one should consider “culture” as a future participle; where cultus designates the past, culture indicates something that has to be cultivated, in the ongoing tension of a yesterday looking forward to a tomorrow. You might ask, “What is wrong with

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recording data within the cult—cultus, cultivated—of knowledge that has been transmitted from the past?” Nothing per se. The problem is that culture, understood as cultus, constitutes a form of capital that creates various kinds of positions, institutions, and domains. Culture is also agriculture, which involves the invasion and colonization of lands inhabited by others. The authoritative expert, who in this case is a competent and well-studied agronomist or oenologist, says, “I’m going to teach you how to make wine. You have potential but don’t know how to exploit it, and what you’ve been doing up to now is wrong.” In effect, this is exactly what the evangelizers and colonists said to indigenous people. Thus epistenology is not cultured; it is cultural instead, a process that is always ongoing. It is not expert; it is experiencing instead. When the tasting of wine is confined to “good taste,” what we are supposed to have acquired and received from the teachers (it does not matter whether this be at school, at university, in the wine shop, during a sommelier course, or even from me), then culture is just in its past form. It is the transmission of data, the imposition of codes. Here, culture is the colonization of thoughts as well as of senses; the strongest impose on the weakest how they should properly work. Expertise, made through the acceptance of codes that generate the domains of competent people and experts, is based on the principle of imitation. Imitation produces identification and cataloging, procedures, protocols, and bureaucracy. Authoritative competence arises from a mimetic desire. The imitated model is perpetuated by duplicating what has been received and learned: the masters are more expert and competent than I—until I outdo them, competing on the same ground. To dismiss expertise also means to change the relationship between the apprentice and the teacher by destroying all the imaginary about the guru. We overcome symmetric relationships

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with the “without either a theme or method” approach. The relationship between the teacher and the apprentice should not be seen as a hierarchical exchange in which the former gives and the latter receives, like an empty box to be filled (with what?). The master says, recognize the good or the bad, the right aromas or the smell defects, what is wrong because it differs from the rules instilled. In epistenology, the master does not instill notions but suggests hypotheses and accompanies the student along a short tract of the path. Everybody traces their own paths, like an entanglement of knots and lines, in a kind of solitude that is always naturally, structurally social. In epistenology the teacher is worth nothing without pupils—expertise needs ignorance like wine needs grapes. The master is aware of this value so never knows what he or she is going to teach in advance, because teaching must be created and constructed each time, together with the pupils. Knowledge is an ongoing process of creation, like taste; transmission is not knowledge. This is why I suggest approaching wine with connivance: to gain an awareness that goes beyond culture seen as parentage and direct transmission. Epistenology is nomadic and always a little orphaned. It does not lean on its masters’ shoulders, even though it had and continues to have a large number of them— all those who participate. However, if you want to continue to taste with competence, professionalism, and expertise, so be it. There are worse faults to have. But there is a different approach leading to another path, one of unpredictable, exposed, and enriching experiences with wine.

9 WITHOU T JUDGMENT Exploration and Discovery in Place of Judgment; Correspondence in Place of Comparison and Evaluation

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ecause I love and feel a strong bond with you, I do not judge you. I live you in the encounter and in the exploration, along the lines of experience. I look after and take care of you. Judging is a thematic way of confronting oneself; it is a face-to-face relation that detaches and distinguishes. Instead, exploration is a discovering and enveloping process; it is lateral and diffused, stretched out in the ongoing situation. It absorbs as much as possible without focusing on objects or single aspects. Intellectual, rational, and methodical judgment requires an authoritative competence, but diffused and exposed exploration and potential discovery—like the rejection or the absence of any  interest—requires manifold compassion. Love appreciates without reflecting. When one loves wine one does not criticize it, and everything participates in a story into which images flow, polyphonically in unison. For a lover with a wine, distinctions and analysis may occur subsequently, but they do not serve to explain. They rather tell us about an encountered and discovered beauty, about a received joy. When we really like a wine or a person, every detail is observed and described with an aura of eros or filìa; it is like a circle. Because we are involved, we describe the details as if we wish to announce, or even explain, the reasons

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why we have been taken up into this loving flow. However, when we refuse or reject that person or that wine, the same details become the reason for our dislike. If the worst fault can also become the best quality, maybe we need to place the question about the judgment of wine on a different level. (A technicalphilosophical clarification: the displacement I’m talking about does not concern any “judgment without reflection” as a general guide for our life choices, a sensus communis, which is not the opinion of the majority but rather what is potentially available to everyone. The point here is the judgment of wine as appreciation, which is held to be rational, objective, and methodical. A judgment without reflection, a commonsense opinion, could also lead us toward an atmospheric way of discovering, toward a haptic way of perceiving as possessing touch. This is not what happens when one is faced with an array of glasses grasped by grimfaced tasters.) Abandoning the judgment of wine as a fixed method—“visual, olfactory, and gustatory analysis,” the first Pavlovian reflex linked to the act of drinking—is the consistent consequence of what I have written so far. Epistenology suggests replacing judgment with exploration, understood as the global value of the experience we are living and creating. Once that value replaces thematization, exploration will replace judgment. This shift, however, is a rather difficult one: we have an inherent tendency to judge, particularly things that seem to be made to give us pleasure. An important step to reduce this fetish about the rational nature of judgment is to subtract the value from its reduction to monetary currency. In Italian, the words value and valuta (currency) have the same root (from valère, valitus, someone strong and robust, from which derives valetudo, to have value, to evaluate). The famous quality/price ratio in both eating and drinking has always triggered a feeling of tenderness in me. It is the wish

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to measure enjoyment and pleasure using an objective “tool” that instead reproduces the same discourses and diatribes about taste and standards as they change in relation to situations, needs, and sensibilities. Hence the quality/price ratio is a way of restating our (non)love or our (dis)affection for the experience we had with something we encountered: I would drink it again, I would do it again, or not. In the end, the quality/price ratio is much ado about nothing. It is difficult to learn how to practice abstention from judgment. Consequently, I design tactics and traps to divert myself from specific, intentional, and focused attention, instead diffusing it throughout the environment. Initially, it is helpful to address the attention toward something other than wine and then return to it, maybe just for a moment, ensuring that the intellect avoids starting to reason in accordance with previously assimilated standards we believe we possess. Little by little, this haptic way forward embraces and amplifies, reducing rational individuality by spreading it throughout the overall experience. Another good exercise for deflating the intentional and individual self is to “identify” with wine, to feel as if we were that wine, imagining its life and the stories that led it here. This brief identification fosters a manifold compassion that in turn prevents the judgmental self from starting its dance. Earlier in my journey with wine, my epistenology technique procrastinated with a large degree of sarcasm about dismantling and crushing the methodology of judging wine, using either tasting or sensory analysis or a combination of both, like the aroma wheel, where describing and judging are one and the same. The problem with playing with taste is the illusion of objectivity and detachment it provides. In fact, we can taste, discover, and enjoy not because we are outside and detached but because we are totally inside.

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Haptic perception, identification and empathy with, avoids the frame of detachment and judgment. (Beyond both Kant and the immanent and singular value of judging, beyond the proposals that overcome judgment from within traditional aesthetics, the term savoring has been proposed—epistenology tries to practice an understanding with wine without judgment for strategic reasons and after experimenting with the possibility and success of such an approach.) I suggest approaching exploration and enjoyment from a different perspective (partly inspired by Zen thought, partly by François Jullien, Tim Ingold, and Michel Serres). This thought, taken from a classic of Zen Buddhism, The Blue Cliff Record, expresses it clearly: “When the dispositions of judgment of intellectual conscience end, only then can you understand to the fullest. Thus, when you will see like in the old times, the sky is the sky. The earth is earth. Mountains are mountains. Rivers are rivers.”1 Serious philosophers might see a theoretical impossibility here, or a difficulty in thinking such a movement through to the fullest. The point, however, is not theorizing it but making it, living it, practicing it. Do you remember? One of the main characters in the first part of this book was a technologist colleague who contributed to the thoughts felt with wine that I have elaborated over the years, and for this I thank him. Here is another short tale, a little haiku, that concerns him. During a thesis defense on wine with an ecological and epistenological approach, the examiner, my colleague, was somewhat perplexed and summarized his objections with a sentence that I found perfect: “A defect is a defect. End of story.” Dry and peremptory, a definitive and irrevocable condemnation. Indeed, so it must be because judgment has to do with acquittals and sentences. Like competence, judgment is also a legal term, from the Latin jus dicere: the judge is one who speaks on behalf of the law.

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Judging means according to the law, thereby applying general rules to a specific case. Norm is a term that may derive from the Greek root gn, indicating knowledge, as in gnosis and gnoma—in Italian an instrument for land surveying, a set square used to measure right angles—hence a rule. Therefore judging a wine is to put it in the dock or behind a school desk, to check if it is in accordance with the norm, with good behavior and knowing its place. Judgment here is a business for judges, for competent people and authoritative experts. If judgement requires expertise and if, as we have already clarified, being an expert does not necessarily mean being able to make experiences, then it follows that the judgment does not relate to the experiences undergone. The expert can gain experience by abandoning prior knowledge, but then he cannot judge. On the contrary, most of the time we think that gaining experience is important to the ability to judge. Does this raise a laugh? Is it paradoxical? Sophistic? Only if you wear the glasses of judgmental, analytical, and theorizing competence, which epistenology tries to uproot and displace. Sometimes I set another exercise, called “the wine advocates,” just to tease Robert Parker and his supporters. First, people drink a wine, then the roles of defense lawyer and prosecutor are randomly selected, and, independently of what they actually thought about that wine, they need to find reasons for defending or prosecuting it. This exercise works better when somebody who hated the wine in question performs the defense, and the other way round. This performance puts professional judgment under the spotlight, as well as the strict regulations that must be followed even when what the participant feels is the opposite of what she is publicly expressing. In this way, the participants in the exercise gain an awareness that facts are made and constructed, as are judgments.

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Not long ago in Rome I tasted several Champagnes. (I allow myself the affectation of Champagne, because in general I like it a lot. I confess, I am easily satisfied by Champagne, and I can rarely withstand the metaphysics of the bubbles.) It was a nice day and an interesting and well-spoken guide was presenting, but at some point I heard phrases such as “wine of the highest quality,” “exciting even though not perfect,” and “a product with an intrinsic quality.” With this setting as background, the bubbles came to mind even before I drank them, with this dance of comparative mentalities, all those adjectives thrown into the mix as if obvious, as if the words “perfect,” “intrinsic,” and even “highest” are all stable and clear expressions. Of course, these adjectives refer to norms, set squares, and standards. However, since these are not a permanent given, merely assumptions (facts are made, we already noted), we can understand the process by moving in the opposite direction. When we say that the wine we are drinking is “exciting but imperfect,” we are just expressing the shame caused by our astonishment at not having immediately acknowledged that what was previously defined as “perfect” has now changed, has transformed itself, has moved on. There is no “intrinsic quality,” especially when it comes to artifacts made to satisfy, on the one hand, the creativity of the maker—little does it matter if this is a poetic, rural, or economic satisfaction—and, on the other, the enjoyment of those who are going to taste them. A wine is not an airplane, an engine, or a bridge. Quality, goodness, and perfection are not the starting points for measuring the value of taste. On the contrary, quality, goodness, and perfection are redefined and reshaped each time anew by the experience of tasting. If we reflect on wine, thinking of it as a product or commodity, we will inevitably judge it like the bureaucrats of taste, applying protocols learned from masters who have instilled them in us as fixed and definitive truths. Instead, if we feel with wine

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as life and experience, it is never the case that “a defect is a defect, end of story.” I feel really sorry for my technologist colleague. What we define as a defect depends on where we place the pole-vault crossbar and on how we build the norm ex post: if you like and are taken with that wine, then there is no defect, but otherwise there is. This depends not only on your rational judging self but also on the situation you are living, the confluence of lines, the global experience: it is an ongoing and overdetermined scenario. As Miles Davis once said about improvisations and errors in music, there is no such thing as a wrong note per se because it all depends on how you resolve it with the following note. Everyone knows that wine is undoubtedly also a commodity and a product. We are playing a different game here, however, designing alternatives and telling other stories. The creativity of the haptic is a process of the ongoing adjustment of the experience of enjoyment, of exploration and comprehension that improvises strategic dispositions with the wine we drink. It might be argued that practicing the noble art of judgment is both fun and human. One may say that without rankings we lose interest, and human beings classify to avoid boredom. This may well be true, but, to be precise, this happens here, in the West. It may not be true elsewhere. Epistenology is displaced, is elsewhere and barefaced, so it proposes a different way of feeling. You insist: What is wrong with ranking and competing? Let us think about competitions, sports, the Oscars: it is all about competition, ranking, a dizzying array and an endless fixation with listings and podiums. Authoritative judgment has the professional face of the critic, those who have secure and expert judgment, who know how to compare things. It is also said that comparisons are needed to improve ourselves—but in relation to what?

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Consider conventional scholastic education based on the acquisition of facts and thoughts and on culture seen as the transmission of data instilled in students by a teacher. The rules of comparison and competition are part of this model. Some claim that competition is even good for young students as it makes them better and stronger. The aesthetic domain of judging wine perfectly imitates scholastic institutions. Assessment is based on competition and comparison in order to hand out marks and report cards. In the first part of the book I suggested contrasting this approach with a shamanic kind of aesthetics (I use the word “shamanism” strategically here, as if this were a universal category, while, of course, there are many and diverse forms of shamanism). During the exercises of epistenology, each wine is drunk alone. One glass at a time. Nothing is to be compared, because every encounter is an experience that is valid for itself, and in this way, value is detached from evaluation and currency/ money. Therefore any comparison creates a juxtaposition that, once again, leads to an encounter seen as a focused and thematic relationship aimed at verifying consistencies, conformities, and differences. Epistenology does not compare and contrast. Undoubtedly, the term comparison does not always mean a competition but rather the exhibition of cultural and stylistic differences, with neither a judgment nor a search for a unique synthesis or approval. Nevertheless, comparison fosters the rise of an area in which judgment can flourish. What we risk, and what usually happens, is the hegemony of the dominant norm, of the strongest one, which has become established because it “won”—value as the winning force. Rather than seeing wine as a commodity and evaluating it using industrial standards, here I will be using amphorae, maceration, and subtle smells as examples since nowadays they are

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the key areas of analysis for particular models of wine. When, from a comparative perspective and according to the judgment of an authoritative and expert critic, a natural wine may not respect and coincide with the current canons, the poor wine loses face; it is defeated, removed, and nullified. Comparison always implies criteria, and for this reason epistenology strategically suspends them and puts the expert aside. Because epistenology is nomadic and compassionate, an anarchic knot of lines, it means being tactful and attentive to the “lesser” norms, those below, those that have not won—on one side or the other. This is why I believe that what my Georgian friend said to the German gentleman was inappropriate, since in that situation the lesser norm was that of his skeptical and indifferent wife. It is for the very same reason that, unlike in my previous writings, here I do not include the names of wines, great and excellent wines, like many others I have loved, that have been the winners in one field or another. Here, we dedicate ourselves to the unknown ethyl alcohol, to the ordinary nameless wines, but with the same compassion and consideration. (Epistenology is not very sensitive to the laws of communication and marketing! Not only are there no rankings or ratings, there are not even the names of wines! A publisher interested only in marketing and immediate results would have explained, “This is how life works.” Take care, however, because marks for wine and their brands can go out of date very quickly, and life is not a currency.) We replace comparison with a correspondence with wine. It is not a frontal encounter; it is a compatibility, an emotional engagement, with the flow of questions and answers, with tied and untied knots. We can neither improve nor compete in relation to a predefined norm, but, rather, we trace paths in order to evolve and enrich ourselves. Gaining experience with wine, appreciating it haptically, is different from the intellectual

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consciousness involved in judgment, because it is an overall experience in which wine is not an object, and it is scrutinized with intentional and specific attention. In contrast, it is a situation where wine has a role that is more or less important, depending on the occasion. Along a different path, it may also become the protagonist. Experience with wine and not of wine. Epistenology cannot judge because, otherwise, the judge (who is always involved and linked to the relationship she has to observe and describe) would also be judged. This means understanding that, when we say “this wine is the best,” “the best in its category,” “the finest of all,” we are simply congratulating ourselves because we judge ourselves capable of judging and knowing how to recognize excellence and quality. Without realizing it, we congratulate ourselves using the spectacles we have constructed for ourselves to wear in order to drink and savor wine. Therefore, can we no longer use the terms excellent, best, or worst? Of course we can. Epistenology runs through these words, revealing them as naked in their harmlessness, in their processes, and once they have been renewed, they can return to be used with a different meaning where we do not talk only about wine, but with wine. Epistenology is committed to the suspension of judgment or, in other words, to a responsibility toward continuous exploration as a correspondence to be achieved. This responsibility is a communal construct because taste is social. Communal but without proxies, because we all contribute to this achievement, without precooked norms or identification with teachers to be imitated. Once that intellectual judgment has been debunked, imitation and identification are dissolved. Culture is always something one has to create, a process of learning, and not a container of data. Therefore taste without judgment is taste without pre-established norms. Nonetheless, it is rigorous, attentive, and precise, taking on board all the ties it can feel,

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taking responsibility for orientation and choice. In this sense, even though it does not judge, in this approach taste always tries to be just (ius, from the Latin root ju: to tie, what keeps tied). Taste is the glue, but it relates to justice and not to law. What about the culture of wine? What about the cultivation of knowledge about making, names, places, time, and the land? I am not against culture; rather, I would try to foster it through beautiful images. I would like to repeat: good culture is always in the future participle, and it is never sclerotic, or other than what it is in itself. It takes care of what lives outside itself while being part of it, like the ignorance on which culture depends, like the lesser and the defeated, who neither emerge nor speak. If culture is aware of this, including the understanding that the experience of drinking cannot be reduced to itself and must be just one element among many others, then hooray for the culture of wine.

10 TASTE IS NOT A SENSE BU T A TASK Unified Perception Without Goals in Place of Trained and Aimed Sense

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verything that is part of the processes occurring in experience contributes to making the taste of wine. Thus in the actual situation the taste of wine is no different from tasting with wine. Epistenology was born when I felt I had understood this passage. Everything that flows can be equally important for perceiving with touch (apton), that kind of feeling obliquely that is tasting with wine. To release tasting from the prison of sense as well as from correct rationality, we must also free it from the doldrums of correct pairing. When I presented the Italian edition of the book in wine bars and restaurants, the organizers often asked me what wines I was using as examples so that the chefs could match them with the right food. This was followed by my usual amiable clarification, combined with a degree of disappointment that epistenology was not fully understood by my hosts. Using this approach, a right pairing, based on the alleged correctness of taste, is pure folly. Of course, this does not mean that we mustn’t consider making a choice of what to drink that we imagine can be fulfilling, but for this precise reason we can make this “perfect” and “complete” bond ourselves by creating combinations that are not preestablished and preordained.

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I once set the following exercise: participants had to swap clothes— shoes, shirts, colors, accessories, everything possible—pairing them in the most curious and unexpected ways and thereby creating previously unimagined, or what they saw as possibly kitsch, combinations. Then they drank wine with food in a strange and carnivalesque atmosphere. Pairing emerged from this experience under a different light. By enacting a transformation, the participants understood that pairing is a creative possibility and not a duty to be fulfilled according to rules that have been assimilated. What we call “pairing” is not a paired relationship, like a couple, because, at the very least, it is a threesome. Food and drink do not correspond to each other but to us, and we are not neutral or “transparent analysts” of what would go best with what but active participants in this correspondence. If something makes me feel good, then that is the perfect match. An approach called “food pairing” promises gustatory happiness by combining foods and wines chosen with method and analysis. This objectivity would allow us (of course, with accompanying copyrights, courses, and credit cards) to learn how to combine ingredients and flavors not by chance but by following the necessities of “science.” As a result, there would be one food and one wine and their encounter according to what science, with its tools for analyzing elements and segments, tells us about flavors and their more or less enjoyable combinations. This is the judgment of taste based entirely on a scientific approach. The premise of this objectifying and analytical model is a biophysical naturalism that quickly demonstrates what a worn-out idea it is. Indeed, we cannot deconstruct the food, wine, or other drinks we experience and then reconstruct them into flavors and discrete, simple, atomic elements. Abstraction is the only way to do this, after the experience is over or by observing it from the outside, assigning values to what we eat and drink

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rather than flavors. A predefined and regulated pairing is the triumph of a thematic approach that dissects, divides, and then recomposes, like Lego. Even a child knows, however, that she can build whatever her imagination and the possibilities for combining provide without needing to submit to either restrictions or preestablished rules. But the scientists who pair drinks with foods view themselves as functionaries who must serve the hegemony of established knowledge—which is not all that established anyway—rather than encouraging new possibilities and combinations. Another phantom has recently been haunting the rooms of this abstract, thematized, and objective tasteology—which is the mother of all the competent, methodical, and judicious degustoramas—and this is the ghost of the neuro. In science, there is a neuro of everything, which makes sense some of the time (we will not go into the details, but obviously wines and serious diseases are two separate things). But what is the meaning for us of neurogastronomy or neuroenology (which, if I wanted to be a bit more of a Dadaist, I could write as n(€)enology)? In a nutshell, they explain, they show us that nowadays, thanks to functional (neuro)imaging, we can at last know—with a “naturally” analytical knowledge based on sight, on solid and certain scientific perceptions—what happens in our head when we taste and smell. Do you know that what is happening in your brain when you feel these tastes and aromas is this way or that? Good. In reply, all we can say is, “Wow, so what?” (I know, this is a caricature, I’m making fun of something that can be actually be quite important in some cases, but bear with me, don’t look at the pointing finger, look at the moon.) What does this knowledge say about the experience I am having—not about the processes taking place in my little head but about what I actually feel and taste in the experience with wine, in that specific situation in which the

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wine also participates? Tasting with wine is a qualitative experience that is always different and is an overall, ecological experience. We do not smell aromas and flavors because what we are doing is actually eating and drinking. We are immersed in atmospheres, within situations that carry us away and to whose creation we contribute. To feel tasting with wine has nothing to do with the neuro. Our perception is always and only ecological: situational, relational, and always mixed up with all the rest—this “rest” being that part of the whole, whose lines, whose knots, touch us, make us move, or, in other words, feel, perceive, think, and certainly taste. Epistenology helps us to gain awareness of this process. Even if we dissect the ingredients in a wine and place the elements and object into pigeonholes, they are not the cause of the experience and of what we feel; they rather follow it analytically in order to make articulation and discourse, classifications and culture, possible. As emphasized above, however, the comprehension of a wine and the tacit or explicit expression of its discovery do not relate to any previous knowledge or study of it. Similarly, any knowledge of the neural processes that purport to discover how we experience wine is superfluous. This is why I propose a connivence (connivance) with wine rather than a knowledge of it. A nearness that knows, without need of analysis. It would be meaningless to think that a man does not know his wife because he is uninformed about her DNA. Likewise, a tacit and nonthematic connivance with wine can be fully expressive, lacking nothing. The term haptic indicates a sentient approach and behavior that expose themselves to the improvised creativity of the experience, without preprepared and precooked menus devised by the analytical brain. It is a way of feeling by thinking and thinking by feeling that does not refer to a specific sense. There is only one unitary sentience, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty stated—a

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sentience that also extends beyond itself because intertwined with the “rest.” With wine, before taste comes all the rest. It is like a meshwork that continually produces smells and flavors, aromas and visions, in a tapestry of ongoing and interstitial differentiations along its path. These differences provide a position and function for something that otherwise would always be displaced: projects, motives, varying situations, and unforeseen elements. Isolating the sense of taste from the rest in order to abstract the classifications and banal interactions of smells and flavors is an in-depth and complex operation to the same degree that it is illusory and unfulfilled. Approaching wine haptically means accepting that taste is not a sense but a feeling/thinking that requires commitment; it’s a task. It is paying attention, first and foremost, to the flow of the river, regardless of anything else. Of course, the river has solid banks where we sit to rest and contemplate—but without the flow of the water in which we have to swim, there would be no banks. (I gestured to this in the first part of the book, referring to Being the River by Giuseppe Penone.) This awareness of the flow and the link between acting and enduring (what John Dewey calls “doing and undergoing”) is an act of devotion toward its truth that is, as is ours, the truth of experiences with food and wine. In this sense, gastronomy and wine always concern bonds, compassion and love, and consequently food pairing is unnecessary. As with many other rational and systematic models, we believe we contrast the randomness of choices with studied and analyzed necessity. However, this has nothing to do with replacing predetermined choice with fortuity; it concerns, rather, the possibility of an action that, on the one hand, is not left to chance and, on the other, is not guided by analytic algorithms that make all the decisions for us. The need for bonds and knots makes it possible to decide the combinations for each

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specific situation, allowing us to encounter and discover a particular wine or not on a singular and particular basis. Taste is a task because it always is confronted with something with which it has to relate: unforeseen events, obstacles, unusual experiences, all kinds of reasons. In a world not of objects but of processes, wine does not exist but is continuously made. The same is true for taste: it is neither an isolated natural sense nor a cultural acquisition, learned and transmitted. One makes taste, moving like a bundle of lines that change over space and time. One cannot be taught and trained to understand taste as a task. Instead, it can only be the result of an education based on feeling and unified perception. Instruction teaches us how the senses work (sweet, savory, tannic, acid, violet, asphalt, berries), whereas education takes care of and hones both how we feel and the processes of feeling. The instruction of the senses, which in the conventional model of wine culture is often considered the only possible form of teaching, may initially seem to be both necessary and gratifying, but ultimately it turns out to be somewhat sterile and rather boring. Here, wine becomes a map to be read and followed according to established coordinates, and those who are sensitive and attentive will quickly get bored. We lose interest because it is impossible to move forward to a different floor, to a further level. In effect, we buy and drink bottles of wine and not flavors, tastes, or aromas. Within the model of instruction and transmitted culture, wine as a complete entity stands on the sidelines, precisely because it cannot be encountered. Being educated to feel, on the other hand, means learning to be exposed to the encounter. To educate may mean two different things: on the one hand, it means to instill knowledge into someone; this is what I call instruction. On the other, it means to lead out (ex ducere), to extract, bringing the inside out, into the world, making it move and walk according to potentials and specificities that

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are respected and to which we pay attention. Therefore to educate does not mean to impose something on somebody but to expose and to be exposed. It does not mean learning this or that content, nor is it concerned with recognizing objects and their specific features. On the contrary, it means tuning ourselves into the flow, the process, or, in other words, learning how to learn. Elsewhere I called this approach wisdom, the wisdom of taste and the taste of wisdom. Taste is a task because taste is a foretaste: it is an attempt, an ongoing test. To educate ourselves with wine means educating ourselves for happiness, as Sandro Sangiorgi aptly pointed out, but also for indifference, pain, and boredom. Becoming educated also requires an education in metànoia (from the Greek metanoèo: to change one’s mind), changes in one’s way of living, including the way we feel and think with wine. Tasting is an education and a commitment: it is a process whereby agreements, negotiations, and conflicts occur through harmonizing, adjusting, and creating correspondences— questions, answers, executions, saliences, implementations—with the environment in which we live and to whose creation we contribute. This is why, in contrast to what is usually believed but that at this point along the journey should now be clear, taste is never individual and private. Taste is then an ethical task because it concerns daily life and the care we take with our own little lives. It is also, however, implicitly political because our little lives ultimately correspond with the vast life of us all. As an ongoing correspondence and process, taste is never only mine because it is always a commitment to answer something or someone. To cor-respond means responding, and responsibility is the ability to respond—to the wine I drink, to the situation I am living in, to the community I live with, to the stories and the history that have shaped me so far. (The conflict of interest among the different wine models—the conventional versus the natural,

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technological versus traditional, and all the various associated versions—is effectively a conflict between the different correspondences of taste, between different versions of tasks and responsibilities.) If we exist as knots of moving lines entangled with other lines in an infinite process—through to the time of the Apes, of Adam, of the Big Bang, of cosmic consciousness, or Deus, sive Natura— then, ontologically, individuals do not exist but are rather only temporary positions along a path. These positions represent the individualities and identities that, in space and time, we think and feel we possess. The same goes for wines, as for anything else. In other words, the characteristics of human beings, of people and wines, are not fixed and everlasting features. They signal, more or less rigidly, the merging of biographical, familial, cultural, social, historical, geographical, temporal, and meteorological lines, which can vary. Taste is not a sense but a task, because we make it as we go along (Ludwig Wittgenstein): like the rules we construct for moving, thinking instead of simply applying them. Even when we recognize a wine as “that wine” and highlight the value of discovery for a taste that we already know—this often happens, as we are too lazy and domesticated to change habits easily (scholars say that taste is neophobic)—we are never really confirming but deciding, each time anew, the next steps to take. I always eat the same things, I’ve been drinking and enjoying the same wines for years, and now you’re telling me that I’m deciding things anew every time? Yes, that it is precisely the case. Here is another objection, that of the (presumed and socalled) realist: “You say that identity doesn’t exist, and neither does individuality, wine, and taste, because nothing is fixed and all the postmodern yadda yadda. Nonetheless, we can recognize

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a wine as a wine that we have already drunk, let’s say a Brunello. So, how are things really?” First, things are not in one way or another; instead things tend toward. (I am not rising to the bait here. As soon as epistenology adopts a classic argumentative logic, it has betrayed its purpose.) The State of Things is not just the title of a Wim Wenders movie, nor is it posttruth; it is rather a disposition to being true. When, tasting, I recognize a Brunello as such, and possibly as the same one I drank yesterday, I am actually corresponding to the task, to the commitment of feeling the strong and intertwined bonds with the lines that come from the past and memory. (By the way, let us keep in mind that only a few people, in relation to the global population, would be able to do this, making it an interesting question that reminds us of the experts and competent, authoritative people.) Here the knot is something that is stable. Imagine seeing me every day. With every tomorrow, I am different from today—I might have lost some more hair; my skin is a bit more oxidized— and last night I even read a book by Slavoj Ýiĥek—but these variations are hardly noticeable at all. You recognize me as the same person. The lines that I trace and weave correspond with yours and what we call the “past”; memory is, in this case, the continuous flow along paths walked together. Now imagine seeing me in twenty years’ time, if I am still here. I might now be overweight, or maybe some ailment has gradually changed my shape, manners, colors, temperament, and thoughts. You might struggle to recognize me as the same person at least to begin with, because, in this case, the variations would be evident and the stability of my identity concealed. (This is why recent photos are required on IDs.) The lines that tied us have gradually come undone, memory is vaguer, and both time and effort are required to recall it. We need to reweave a fabric that went missing over the years

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because other fabrics have been woven. This is precisely what happens with the Brunello: you ask a ninety-year-old local if he recognizes the wine called “Brunello” as the one he used to drink when he was eighteen. He will not say that the wine is the same, but, nonetheless, it has similarities, and if this is not the case for the old man, then it will at least be for the community where that wine was born and evolved. The identity of one wine cor-responds to the perceived intensity of the knot woven by all the lines that produce its perceptual reality. This intensity establishes the similarities, identities, or variations that we severally notice as something familiar: a family resemblance (Wittgenstein again), a facial trait (a sensory “profile”), a way of walking (the “gustatory dynamic”); a personality (a style, the “terroir”). Or simply a surname? In effect, we should also consider the complex question of the names that make things: the performative power of a name (from Hugo von Hofmannsthal to John L. Austin—just to show off a bit of culture, again). However, there must be something since otherwise it would not still be called a Brunello. The identities we position as ours and others are a continuous correspondence between stability and variation, like harking back to memories tending toward the next step to be taken, to what is called the future. Therefore recognition is also a creative act, but precisely for this reason it is not free or left alone as an individual decision. It is rather a corresponding act, a responsible one. Epistenology encourages the creativity of responsibility— the space of intertwined bonds—where freedom is implicit. Ties bind me, more or less tightly, to the decisions I take, where the freedom of changing my mind is always a possibility but with more or less evident and significant consequences. When a new wine denomination is created or when another is modified or removed, this kind of process is at work on a larger scale.

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Educating ourselves to feeling as a task and a responsibility also means experiencing time in a different gear. In the instruction of taste, the one that trains authoritative and competent experts, the clock measures time. After all, the professional circumscribes his work by marking the hours and the days. The competent person has no time to spare, while the amateur’s is free and inhabited. The acquired and learned taste of wine can be remunerated: value/ currency, time/money. We must pay for the expert. Conversely, gaining experience is a gift; it is free. Tasting with wine is neither measured nor paid for; it is a delight. We do what we love doing and, now and again, time can be stolen or created. This leads to creativity and commitment. Just as in art, even when you make wine or food with care, attention, and love, it is often impossible to separate “free” time from work time, and, anyway, it is not really important. Consequently, time spent tasting with wine is not occupied but inhabited time. We run on the taut or bent ropes of the world’s surface, feeling its substances and thereby expanding time. Some of the most interesting exercises I set for educating ourselves to have this feeling deal with playing with time. These exercises of slowing down sampling times, going in slow motion, or using an expanded rhythm in the frequency of tasting the same wine, allow us to pay attention to how the void after that sip speaks to us in such a way that we lose awareness of the ticking clock. Feeling the tasting with wine is then a way of dwelling with a time that is not the abstract time of moving clock arms but the concrete time of making things. Making them with the heat, with the cold, with the light and the dark, with the wind, the sun, or the rain, on the grass or by the sea, or on a table inside a house, and even in a wine shop. (This has to do with the verticality of the vine that Gaston Bachelard highlighted in his work about the alchemists’ vine, with all its magical powers. The vine

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links the chthonic forces of the earth with the sky, and this striation consists of the lines that we trace and cross.) This different temporal dimension of the task opens up the narrative quality of tasting with wine: without a theme or a method, without judgment or competence, epistenology does not deal with profiles to be described but inhabits stories to tell.

11 STORIES WITHOU T INSTRUCTIONS Examples That Educate in Place of Explanations That Instruct

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he sentence “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms” is attributed to the American poet Muriel Rukeyser. I like to couple it with one of Albert Einstein’s thoughts. Einstein is not being a postmodern charlatan and/or a dangerous advocate of post-truth when he remarks: “The true difficulty lies in the fact that physics is a sort of metaphysics: physics describes ‘reality.’ However, we do not know what ‘reality’ is, we only know it through the description given by physics.” He tells us, with simple brilliance (after all, he was Einstein), that we know nothing about naked truth; we know it only through our descriptions, through the lenses we wear to see and speak about it. By describing the physical world in terms of atoms and electrons rather than Jupiter’s ire or Eros’s winging arrows, we are still telling a story. This does not mean, however, that how reality is described is not important. Given the peculiar kind of scientific frame we live in, it would be wrong to describe physical reality as if we lived in the age of the gods. At the same time, this does not mean that atomic physics is not a story just like the story of Jupiter. A story is not a tall tale; it’s not necessarily part of the fantasy genre, even if fantasy is a story in itself. It is not a false invention

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contrasting with the truth of facts. Does the idea that the universe is made of stories imply neither that its scientific description is false nor that the mythical account might be true? It rather encourages us to understand that we have only stories to tell. (I am emphasizing “only” because I am thinking about a child being deprived of Santa Claus—a child who has grown up with the myth of facts and “objective” data.) We can do nothing other than narrate, whether it be about physics, philosophy, poetry, painting, or wine. This is the task we always have before us. Epistenology suggests that we consider, in the face of our experience with wine, facts as something made, as elaborations that never place us in direct contact with reality but rather with the presumption that we can objectify it from the outside, from above, with a neutral and detached gaze. As I have tried to point out several times: the idea that facts are made does not mean that they are mere constructions of the ego, the subjectivism of a Promethean id, but rather that they are ongoing flows of lines and relationships. With this approach, nothing is lost in the friction with the world, and reality does not evaporate. On the contrary, the world is a dense tangle that we cross by inhabiting it, by feeling its rough surface through contact, endlessly occupied because it weaves us into its life of enigmas and obstacles. The fields of advanced physics and philosophy of science have their own well-established traditions and large followings. By contrast, in the much less evolved domain of “wine tasting,” unfortunately not a few still think that an analytical description that references specific aromas, tastes, and flavors produces an objective grasp of the wine’s true and proper reality, part of the conquest of scientific progress, and not, as it should be considered, a poetic narration. So, rather than a wine narrated by a story, you have a gas chromatograph account instead! This is the prevailing model, and my poor, afflicted ears have even heard

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such statements as “nowadays, wine can be made and evaluated with a precision never before achieved.” Unfortunately, those who adopt this kind of approach believe that it is necessary to train others to understand the elements of this process, instructing them on the appropriate methods and tools. According to the perspective of epistenology, however, taste is not a sense but a task, whatever language we use or view we adopt. We are telling stories with wine and telling wine through a story. A story is a relationship in precisely the same way that a personal relationship is. Even when people assign scores to wine, what they are really doing is grading their relationship with wine and not the wine as a finally appreciated reality. What epistenology wants to do is merely to make this point explicit and appreciable, with the aim of liberating our perception from the harness produced by the illusion of being in control and frustration about lacking any competence. We can observe without objectifying—and this is the participational knowledge that the relational model of the encounter with wine proposes. This form of observation, however, entails a form of describing that is always also a description of ourselves. This means tracing both the movements that we are continuously making and those that transport us, as if we were both swimming and being swept by the river’s current (again, the interplay between doing and undergoing). This is why I have proposed connivance as a model for a lateral and less centered form of encounter—to avoid the risk of a bird’s-eye view that dominates. The description of wine as a description with wine and hence of us with it becomes a narrative that is always in the making. As such, it does not intentionally try to represent an isolated and divided element or perception: I do not abstract wine from its surroundings, as if it were an object, with the illusion of being outside the flow in which I am participating; rather, it captures,

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with care and attention, the images created during the living experience. The “good” does not exist on its own; it is made or, in other words, it is narrated. It is in the story that lines intertwine and wefts are woven so that values and tastes are made and become facts, because facts grow as they are made. Do you get it, dear philosophers who are so fearful of the lack of an objective sense, so sure that a flaw is a flaw and that the good is stable and certain? Have no fear: at the level of the crystallization of the flow of lines in the world, a banana is undoubtedly a banana, an oyster is an oyster, and an artichoke is an artichoke. Epistenology does not transform wine into water; if anything, it mixes them— mixing wines or mixing wine with water is another exercise we perform during our meetings. (A friend of mine once made a large wooden goblet in which we mixed a load of wines produced in Lucca province. In this way, at long last, we created a true wine of the terroir, a common result not linked to the expressions of individual wines but a knot of lines that came together with no other intent, even though some complained: “what a waste.”) What interests us in this strategy of disempowering the ego and adopting an oblique perspective without either a theme or intention or method is not ontological prejudice. Rather, we care about what we should do with artichokes, oysters, bananas, black currant aromas, and saltiness once we encounter and experience them. Bananas and artichokes can be used in different ways, which also change in time and space. As Einstein reminds us, all that we can do, in the end, is to describe the reality that we encounter. The term story, which encompasses knowledge and research, has the same root (historia, istorìa, id-stor) as vision—to see, to represent, to encounter. What is at stake here is how we narrate, elaborate, attend to, and take care of the beings that live in the world with us.

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In the experience of haptic and aware drinking, we need stories because with them we lead and are led, without instructions. To instruct, from the Latin in-struere, means to add layers, one over the other, and then to connect them into a structure. In fact, structure has the same root as struo, “to construct.” To give instructions means to offer rules and tools aimed at putting elements together, and an instruction is usually an order to be followed: the instructor both commands and trains. Thus instruction is knowledge acquired by transmission, where one learns by receiving what was constructed previously. Instructions are specifications and analyses that do not only guide but explain and are explained to us. Specifications inform about what, not for nothing, is called the “product” and the materials employed in its making. For wine, there are “fact sheets,” which some people even use while drinking—excuse me, tasting—in order to try to understand it. Conversely, stories tell us about the processes and elements in movement, about the vitality and evolution of materials along paths and journeys. Stories are descriptions and narratives of the movements that we are and in which we are, without any bird’s-eye views. The story is a narrative in the moment, as we go along. It is the reweaving of the fabric of past and future threads in knots of the present. Even when referring to events in the past, storytelling carries these lines into the present life of those listening. Stories are not acquired knowledge but participatory; stories are paths interwoven, over and over again. Stories guide and educate but do not specify or, even less, explain. This is why taste is not a sense to be trained but a task, the creative continuation of the river flow that transports us. Without providing instructions or training, stories are the dense fabric of education as ex-ducere, leading out, not an imposition but an exposition. Instructing is explaining what I should feel and think with wine and what I need to do to achieve it. To explain, in fact, is

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to assume that those speaking know more and better than those listening, since the latter are expected to receive passively, like a container to be filled. Nevertheless, the poet admonishes us: “Education is not about filling a pail, but about lighting a fire” (attributed to William Butler Yeats). To educate means to create an active movement whose direction is unknown, a labyrinth of freedom not as volition (the ego that decides as if it were an individual) but as attention, distributed and diffused between doing and undergoing (from competence to compassion). To educate means to create a space for responsibility and care, where the variable and mobile margins of any possible choice are neither predefined nor permanent. By educating, knowledge is made without instructing or explaining. Explanation presupposes a knowledge that is entirely separate from ignorance while, in effect, this separation is an illusion. The master does not explain. If anything, she suggests and coordinates, leading along a part of the journey. In the transient moment that epistenological experience tries to be, wine is an element of a communal task to be accomplished. This communal making is precisely the meaning of communication. (The Latin verb communicare comes from communis, which is making something common.) Communication is neither an exchange of information nor its percolation from a knowledgeable, competent, and expert teacher to ignorant learners. It is, rather, the realization of a common space where comprehension is not an obligation but an infinite process. This is a communication with wine, a storytelling that epistenology performs. Now, if you want, you can go ahead with the sommelier courses and exams, but I suggest that you take what your master says as a guide, transforming the words from cultured explanations into stories you are being told. The more you participate, the better those stories will be.

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Telling stories without instructions but with care and attention to feeling with wine, with neither a theme nor a method, makes it necessary to transform the usual questions. Questions such as what the wine is—if it is to be considered more as a work of art or as a living being, if it is a product or a friend—are set aside and melt away like foam in the sea. The making of wine corresponds to the stories at our disposal, stories that we can consistently create. Being haptic, stories generate longitudinal thoughts in a disarticulated flow of lines, thereby creating florid images, gardens and forests of images. Here, wine is a whole that flows, corresponding with what it encounters. Conversely, instructions, being optic, integrate various elements latitudinally, organizing them one on top of or next to the other but still as isolatable elements. Following this model, wine is a combination of single aspects that correspond with one another: acidity, tannin, flavors, and even the vineyard, the style, the vintage. Elements, places, and times that are considered in sequence. Instead, allowing oneself to fall under the sway of stories—residing in a world that remains fluid and does not objectify every aspect of experience or transform them so that they fit into predefined categories—keeps us open for all that always has its existence in the in-between. This realm of being between is where knowledge with wine is produced. It comes into being, participating in and inhabiting the processes. Consequently, epistenology is an ongoing exercise that makes us aware that knowledge and its subsequent culture are neither the vertical integration of data nor the acquisition of elements in sequence but rather a continuous generation of stories. During epistenology sessions, I frequently propose reading fragments of texts that the participants have brought from home: fiction, poetry, and essays. In this way, wines become the silent companions and counterpoints to the communications in which

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they are not directly involved as protagonists but to whose form and shape they contribute, just like any other element present. In one variation of this exercise, which usually produces an intense and special atmosphere, I ask the participants to write an anonymous message on a subject of their choice and addressed to someone else present. I then read all these messages, keeping the names of the senders and recipients secret. This anonymity creates a common space, a powerful communication where all the participants focus on the story being told so that individual messages between two people become stories we all have in common. Our attention is not focused solely on one aspect: it is like an orchestra playing alongside people who dance, feel, and drink. And wine here listens, working as the background. Wine is the sea that carries the message, thanks to its inebriating and psychotropic power: the alcohol in wine is more powerful than all the aromatic nuances and specifications of the senses. Nonetheless, people who taste wine act as if the alcohol has nothing to say, as if it is an insignificant, variable effect. One performs almost as if it has nothing to do with what is called “quality”: what nonsense. (What about the Greek philosophers? And the shamans who drink alcohol? And all the doors of perception that alcohol has allowed us to open? I will come back to this later.) While instructions provide analytical details, stories guide and provide examples. The description of a wine is always a direct or indirect description, but with wine, that is, with the in-between, the description is the atmosphere in which we participate together. Even if we talk about something else, we are still creating a story with wine, with it and thanks to it. Even without any verbal clarifications, even without talking, we still tell stories. Another exercise that I sometimes suggest is drawing with wine, a more difficult variation of making a drawing of wine. While the latter is helpful in replacing a normal descriptive

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manner with another that is silent and keeps concepts at bay, in drawing with wine we must effectively go beyond the representation of the perceived in order to delineate that which is invisible to the eyes, the nose, and the mouth. In both the drawing of wine and drawing with wine we are constantly amazed by the fact that for many the inability to draw is not perceived as a problem. If I cannot speak or write, I am illiterate and ignorant, but if I cannot draw or sketch, no one really cares. Thus, in its own small way, epistenology also contributes to challenging the conviction that culture is only verbal, conceptual, and mental. Returning to take care of the hand that imagines, that draws and paints—many told me they hadn’t allowed a pencil to wander over a piece of paper for a very long time before doing this exercise— opens the doors to a narration with wine that is extraordinarily beautiful. Almost always there is some sort of resistance: “No, I don’t know how to draw or paint,” so the phantom of ability and competence emerges once again. But, as Vincent Van Gogh reminds us, when we say, “I am not a painter,” this is the moment to start painting. With wine, one can begin. This is why epistenology is therapeutic. On a different but analogous level, I sometimes ask my pupils to write a short poem, improvising and overcoming their reticence and the fear of being judged—without any judgment about wine and ourselves. We are not competing either among ourselves or with the great poets, nor do we have any objectives or goals we must reach. We are discovering, humbly and at a grassroots level, the power that life gives us, together with the wine that warms us. Epistenology does not intend to inform us but takes care in forming us. It does not instruct; it educates. It does not aim to teach us something but wants to learn how to learn in a continuous process. It narrates; it does not explain. Thus the encounters

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where epistenology grows and evolves are places of constant study, where thinking by feeling and feeling by thinking go beyond the main canons of concepts and words. Here, a different communication develops, a compassionate and haptic community where each person—with all the available tools created in the moment, before any instructive specification, whether these be words and writings or gestures and drawings, sounds, looks or smiles—takes care of and enriches the perception of all that surrounds us, which perceives and feels in its own right. Epistenology is a school, in the original meaning of scholè: a place of equals where one goes not to learn something but to restore and vivify the spirit. It is a place where time is not of the clock or tied to money but is a task, something that we feel we carry on because it is always both necessary and enjoyable. We go beyond the culture of wine in order to avoid it becoming a yoke, coercion, a limitation on the development of images. This strategy of disempowering culture is helpful, above all, to people who are its hapless victims; it relocates culture, through awareness, within the nurturing that corresponds to the flow of the river, the process that it does not determine or dominate but in which it is included and transported.

12 TERROIR IS THE WORLD Terroir Is Not Stable and Fixed. Wine Does Not Express the Terroir; Rather, It Corresponds with It

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long with communication, professionalism, and competence, there is another overused and misleading term in the world of wine that reverberates both obliquely and strongly: terroir. Here are just a few examples taken from the usual selection of set phrases made for accordion and incense: “our wine is just the expression of the terroir”; “with this wine we only want to valorize the terroir”; and—two birds with one stone—“the problem is that we do not sufficiently communicate the potential of our terroir.” When we use expressions like “terroir,” what are we really talking about? In the first part of this book, I avoided talking about zones and vineyards and wrote only a little about my favorite wines— those natural wines that are claimed to be, or so they say, the most powerful and faithful expressions of their terroir. This was not due to carelessness or haste. Neither was it due to a lack of interest in the subject, nor a lack of competence and culture that in fact I have never boasted of possessing. By now you may have realized why I remained silent on the subject: terroir is not a stable piece of space; terroir is made, always becoming something new. Like taste, terroir is also a task that requires work. Let me then clarify why the more natural and therefore alive the wine

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is, the less it expresses the terroir it comes from but rather the terroir to which it corresponds. Provenance is likewise not an expression but a correspondence: derived from the Latin pro venire, it means to come forward, to come out, and even to grow. Provenance is not the passive imposition of a past that arrives in the present as a recognition that passively ratifies. It is rather the unfolding of the what-has-been into the present, an active overflowing of lines of connection. To avoid any possible misunderstanding: a revised past has nothing to do with it, nor does any post-truth. The present is, conversely, the time that flourishes from previous knots that we create instant by instant and that is available for the tasks that prepare the future. Therefore this correspondence between wine and “its” terroir is completely reciprocal in the sense that I have proposed in this work, a correspondence of questions and answers, agreements and disagreements, looser and tighter knots. Wine calls and responds or, in other words, corresponds, with the terroir, just as the terroir responds and asks, or corresponds, with that wine. Replacing “expression” with “correspondence” is strategically crucial because it allows us to open up to a way of feeling where everything flows and is tending toward, and where barriers and boundaries appear for what they are—wire cages, possibly hard and metallic, but still full of holes and a very large mesh. They are nothing more than fragile conventions. Above all, those who make and drink wine should sense this. A terroir is neither a cage nor a fenced farm; it is a hive as big as the whole planet. I know, epistenology now becomes even more annoying, stealing the king and queen’s very last asset, their most precious one, the so-called expression of origin. However, believe me, my companions in this haptic approach, this is a strategy of respect and value, not of annihilation and spite. When I say that a terroir does not exist but is made, it is not in the sense understood by

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the great wine industry and the advocates of an exclusive and solitary truth about genetic variety. On the contrary, it is in the sense that the terroir is not an abstract space to be rejected or exhibited, brandished like a banner or a trophy. It is rather a place to be built and flowed into, to be created continuously with care and attention. Professor Ann Noble, the inventor of the aroma wheel, during a dinner once answered a question relating to the fact that her device was indifferent to locations when cataloging aromas—the wheel contains Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Pinot Noir, etc., as if they were universal categories. She told us: “Terroir does not exist,” and we all jumped up in indignation. At the time, epistenology had a long way to go, and now I would no longer be shocked but indignant anyway, even doubly so, owing to her implication that varieties of wines are fixed ontological elements. The phrase “terroir does not exist, terroir is made,” revealed by epistenology, therefore has a meaning that is the opposite of that suggested by the inventor of the aromatic wheel. If terroir does not exist, even less so do wine varietals that reside as icons in catalogs. The need to localize and catalog wine-growing regions within rigid and predefined boundaries arises from the gross error of considering terroir only in relation to the soil and the private ownership of the fields where grapes are grown. Yet is not the vine precisely the verticality that connects the subsoil with the sky, gifting us the fruits of these connections? Therefore who can say what the boundaries of the sky might be? Who owns the subsoil, the wind, the rain, and the sun, which are equally essential to the making of wine? Terroir is not only horizontal but also vertical. This expansion in dimensionality, where the air and the land reference each other and therefore correspond, prevents any hypostasis. “Expressing the characteristics of a terroir” is both a senseless and a banal cliché. We cannot know what these

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characteristics will be because they are always created anew and depend on the correspondence of many different elements. Knots of lines made of the air, the light, water, the rain, soils, small and large animals, objects and humans that come and go and that day by day, night by night, move and produce life without any defined and precise boundaries. Try to create boundaries and fences around the clouds and the sky, around the birds in the fields, around the water in the seas and rivers, around the sun and the moon! However, are these not all essential in the making of the wine of this terroir that you praise so much? Therefore the terroir is not a field and even less a park. The experiences we have with the world cannot be the experiences of a closed and limited nature, like a park to be preserved. A terroir is a question that provokes experience rather than a predetermined answer; it is not the cause, it is a process. Once we have appreciated this relationship, our drinking glasses will be tinkling with joy. In fact, every time we breathe the question arises: What is the terroir continuously becoming, here and now? When we inhale and exhale oxygen and breath, we contribute to making the place and the time in which we live. Wind and breath, inside and out, produce life by corresponding: “Inhalation is wind becoming breath, exhalation is breath becoming wind,” as Tim Ingold describes it. Terroir as a closed and abstract space answers to the objectivist model according to which it is perceived and eventually measured at ground level, as if there were no air, no sky, and no light. It is a complex experience to feel and live the air, oxygen, the sun, and the moon, and therefore we forget them, as if they were not necessary for life and wine, preferring an illusory, solid, horizontal terroir. This prejudice insinuates itself everywhere and is transversal. I once heard someone wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt and tasting “naturally” say “Hasta el territorio siempre!” (At that

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moment I realized that the age of wine fairs of any shape and kind was coming to a spiritual end.) There are also market- and brand-related reasons that the terroir is exhibited as a static and objective postcard, since a representation of wine zones in spatial terms, concealing the real hive in favor of a fake fence, promotes a model of private, fragmented, and divided domains. In this way it can be ranked and sold at very different prices. This process removes the correspondence between living elements and their endless flow under the green carpet of a fenced, protected vineyard or inside some kind of container in a wine cellar. On the other hand, in order to challenge such a misleading model, it is enough to cite history well known to us all: Bordeaux and Champagne wines were created to please the English palate, and we will drink them in the future thanks to China. In general terms, when a bottle is opened and drunk, the importance of its relationship with the air is immediately manifest. However, as soon as the wine has been oxygenated, boundaries disappear. Is there a need for any more proof that the terroir is made through endless correspondence? Our strategy lies in reclaiming places, their air, sun, and water, and giving them back to the wine in the world, to life with wine. This is because the terroir, as a horizontally limited, objective space, is allied with objective science and paradoxically also with the technology that the champions of wine’s territorial expression see as the enemy. Indeed, if the aspiration is for this expression to adhere to a predefined and pre-established reality—the wine, the characteristic flavors and aromas we expect—then Italian oenologist Luigi Moio is totally right. He says, “We are convinced that these native yeasts, mostly belonging to the nonSaccharomyces genus, tend to make wines uniform, covering the distinctive characteristics of both grape and terroir. What the advocates of ‘natural fermentation’ call ‘the taste of terroir’ is

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indeed reduced to a mélange of higher alcohols, acetates, and phenolic flavors produced by these non-Saccharomyces yeasts. Wines produced in such a way are all similar, whatever the terroir.” The fixed idea of the terroir as an object, a defined and precise element like the “distinctive characteristics” of the grape, is clearly echoed in these words. If we accept this vision, then debates around whether I am more terroir-driven than you will abound, the usual competition with rules and standards followed to get the highest marks. To have the most precise terroir, the more sharply focused postcard, and to avoid surprises, the competent oenologist informs us that yeasts must be trained and instructed to perform the right tasks, which are those we expect to see. From here on, the path leading to Ramon Persello’s way of reasoning is all downhill. However, the underlying model of knowledge is the same. If you do not know Ramon Persello, dear reader who is not an expert on diatribes about wines, let me refer you to a debate you can easily find out about on your own. He is a strange and iconic contemporary Italian oenologist who elaborated some chemical formulas to “improve” and enhance wine aromas, particularly for Sauvignon Blanc generating the indignant reaction of many and treading a subtle and ambiguous line. What is of interest here, however, is improving in what sense? In the sense of making wines richer and more aromatic. The more always beats the less, an aesthetics of amplified cleanliness that takes as its model a visible as well as a predictable olfactory goodness. For this reason, in some epistenology exercises I suggest that noses should not be put in the wine glasses, so, for example, we drink directly from the bottle or from containers that prevent smelling the wine directly. (When I do this, I often tell the participants to consider Ramon Persello’s aesthetics.) However, a postcard as an abstract transfiguration of the terroir does not tell us much. Think, for example, about spending

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some time in Paris—not as a tourist; you are there for work or to take care of a sick relative. You are living in the suburbs. This too is a terroir, if admittedly marginal and minor. No Louvre nor Eiffel Tower, although you might be unaware that they exist and thus not miss them. (There are many people who have never heard of the Louvre, Pinot Noir, and many other things essential to some.) You live near a square and a street like many others in the world. You will meet people doing the same things you do in Berlin, Bra, or Barcelona. These too are terroirs. The life of people on the streets, the traffic, bicycles, public parks, cafes, and kebab shops, and of course the sun, the rain, the soil, the air, and the clouds: the terroir grows and evolves within this entanglement of traits. In what sense are they “characteristic”? What makes something a characteristic? Epistenology lives elsewhere, between verticality and the horizon. Slipping away from worn-out arguments and displacing itself elsewhere, epistenology suggests a different move: the more recognizable a wine is, the less it interests me. The better it completes its tasks, the less it helps me to feel the tasting of it and the less it contributes to the atmosphere where the substances dance and correspond with each other—the process that I feel with the haptic approach and that candlelight can illuminate. Opening up wine to the attention of the world does not need new methods. It needs communication with wine, not with methods or instructions but with stories, communities, bonds, and images through the wine itself. In this way, to give value to places, things, and people, we need to turn our heads, placing all back in their flow. What is a terroir’s “vocation”? In what sense should it be good or bad for something? What does it mean when we say that the Sangiovese doesn’t “come out well” here? It should now be clear that this adaptation to what is “good” corresponds with the flow of lines that continuously entangle for the purposes of making

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commitments and fully legitimate decisions relating to the market, the economy, and aesthetics. These decisions are the outcomes of the society we live in and that we continuously create. Why only Chardonnay and Pinot Noir in Burgundy? How did the idea come about that these varieties were the best? One could say that this is because over time they have satisfied expectations, that they have been appreciated, hence they won. OK, but who liked them? Some important consumers, experts, and the market in general. It is the criteria of the majority that have won because other wines, usually considered “inferior,” can be and actually are produced, even in Burgundy. The terroir is a dynamic area, a land of struggle and power relations where the winner reduces the spaces, casts aside the losers, and then, naturally, tells a story. Now, since epistenology is in tune with inverse and minor canons, it loves first and foremost encountering those wines that have nothing to prove, that do not need to express anything or perform the tasks expected of them. Epistenology is anarchic not only in relation to drinking but also in relation to making. For example, I believe that making cultures richer through unexpected varieties that are “inappropriate,” “unsuitable,” out of place, and lopsided is a pleasurable task. In this way, we displace the evolution and origin of life with new correspondences with the place in which we live and make, in our continuous moving about. Then there is the category of the vintage. The rhetoric around the vintage, the best and worst vintages, represents the objective and classifying hypostasis of its paroxysm. An excellent year, a bad one, in relation to what? If it relates to the quantity of grapes ripened and the resultant wine produced, it is both understandable and honest. We see the value of wine as a currency required for living, which, nonetheless, is legitimate these days. This expression, however, usually refers to the “quality” of the product

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in relation to a standard that is in turn the elaboration of a statistical average. So here we have a twofold, illusory abstraction: the mummifying of wine making, activities performed by the bureaucrats of qualitative, objective, and inert standards; and the removal of results and processes that differ one from the other, created by statistics and marketing experts. The goal is communicating data—not as work to be done in common but as the transmission of information— according to criteria of convenience. (You will have noted that the terms goal, appropriate, and product are all part of the thematic model of the optic, of judgment, of professionalism, of method, and of instructions.) With regard to vintages, the only real stars are those in the sky, under which grapes grow and bear fruit every year. There are no good or bad years. Consistent with the approach I’ve proposed, if a year corresponds to the meteorology occurring at the time, to the entanglements that were produced, and therefore to all the work involved to make that wine, it always constitutes a renewed and constant miracle. Every year is perfect, perfectum, complete, lacking nothing. When we realize a lack, it is because of a retrospective look, a hindsight perspective to which, again, we would like to correspond. The wine corresponds with the terroir and the year rather than expressing it. The year is a period of time, a segment cut out from the meshwork, a ring composed of lines that in turn are tied to others, and so on, without end, back to the beginning. Anarchy in wine making, however, does not signify individualism and a celebration of the label. An interpretation of natural wines as wines that express the styles of the people who make them has been recently suggested to counter the idea of terroir as a productive designated standard of predictive, channeled, and instructed typicality. Again, we need to move away from the doldrums of the idea of expression and suggest an

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alternative path. The earth and the sky, the wind and the rain, plants and soils, animals and birds, and many other things, including human beings, of course, make wines, particularly alive and vital ones. However, this does not mean replacing terrain and vineyards with labels and authors. It is not necessary to consider wine as a “style” related to production philosophies and objectives. The idea of the author of a wine, with her cometlike moments of adulation, with the masters and protagonists following in her wake, needs to be dismissed. Epistenology supports the minor key and, in contrast to the master on the podium explaining and teaching, proposes a mastery both shared and constructed together with the pupils. The wine of a terroir is a process of growth—where birthplaces, things, and people continuously combine—that corresponds with the world. Authors and styles fall within this process wherein there are no pre-established and distinct elements but where everything evolves and tends toward. They can be recognized as “this” or “that” rather than something else because the lines, which have already passed through, arrive and combine with our present flow, permitting us to recognize and feel the stability and common traits within a continuous variation. Consequently, epistenology does not believe in authorship rights. In effect, a reverse authorship would be both beautiful and advantageous, in which every endorsed wine would be drunk and lived as a collective property, from bacteria to human beings to the divine mind and celestial forces. What I try to bring to the foreground when I invite participants to drink wine without considering its origin and without telling them what the wine is or who produces it, or when I try to distract them from the label and signatures, is that wine does not have a single author but many creators. Wine is not autopoietic; it cannot make itself on its own. Along and within the flow of the river, however, there are

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many different ways of swimming and acting. It is possible to distinguish between ways of caring and ways of choosing. The first relates to an awareness of attention and correspondence, the second to the desire to control with intentions and expressions. Within the logic of choice, individual freedom, design, and goals come first: I choose the way that will take me there. Within the logic of care, I follow the flow, to which I adapt. Action is not designed; it proceeds as I go along, it lets things take their course and allows me to be, intervening only in the junctures in order to leave what is transpersonal— the sky, the earth, the clouds, and the air—free to flow and grow without a goal. For epistenology, a natural wine is a wine of care and not of choice. A wine of care is a wine from a place that corresponds with the world as infinite knots of unpredictable and uncontrollable lines. The logic of choice is the opposite: I intervene and adjust in order to put things back in their correct place, to perform the right tasks— and for this reason the wine I make is less vital, because life is selfproducing movement. In Daoism, wu wei describes the excellence achieved when the artist sets acquired techniques aside and does as little as possible to create the work. For any activity—whether it be butchery, swimming, working in gold, music, agriculture, oenology, philosophy—it is necessary to acquire the ability to appreciate and work with empty spaces. These are what dialectically define and give sense to the whole—in other words, the spaces, junctures, and interstices. Thus what is produced is not a transformation due to the intervention of an executor; rather, the transformation appears to come about on its own, working precisely in the empty spaces. The artist Ding thus responded to Prince Wen Hui, who was astounded by his proficiency in butchering: “At the beginning of my career, I could only see the

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ox. After three years of practice, I no longer saw the ox. Now it is my spirit that works, rather than my eyes. I know the conformation of the ox and only attack the interstices.” Therefore the greatest skill in butchery occurs when the butcher’s intervention is minimal. The same goes for wine. We have had enough of the wine of nations and parochialism, enough of themes, methods, intentions, sensorial trainings, and judgments; we have even had enough of the mythology surrounding grape varieties. So, what is left? All the wine is left. Within a desert of burning scrubland? On the contrary: a huge and florid field unfolds, where it is possible to think, imagine, and dream again. So let us restore the place of “origin,” running over the Earth’s crust without enclosing ourselves within artificial boundaries, because we now know that this “origin” is always part of the flow. It will not be a great loss. We are no longer in eighteenthcentury Europe, we do not live among the nobility, and neither do we live blinded by the sun of industrial progress: those lines no longer speak, nor do they produce florid images. We should rather bring wine to the world, making it a universal drink, with its terroir the place where we all live together. The terroir of wine is not a geographical space nor a piece of soil regulated by norms and rules. Neither is it just a historical time (Zeit). It is not just aromas, techniques, and traditions. All these contribute but only within the wider process of the movement that constantly makes the world and at the same time creates its inhabitants. Just like taste and life, terroir is not a noun but a verb. It is an active volcano, erupting and knitting different lines together. The lines of human and other-than-human beings. Thus the strategy overturns itself, not to diminish the value of wine but on the contrary to keep it safe from the nefarious influences of commodity markets and the criteria of the majority so it can be the drink of us all. Challenging paradoxes that are only apparent,

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we can “valorize the terroir” only by knowing nothing about it, by making it a new experience every time or, in other words, by starting anew every time, ignorant and without knowing the language. Therefore when you, our wine grower, tell me: “My wine is the expression of my terroir,” what you are saying is that you and the wine correspond with the terroir that you made and the world in which it is inscribed. If you are satisfied with the result, this does not mean that the terroir has expressed itself in the best way according to what it was yesterday. It means, rather, that this is how you—and the community and society you belong to— want your wine to correspond tomorrow. So thank you, wine grower, nurturer, and even “producer” of wine, for the wine you make. However, this is not formally speaking your wine, it’s everyone’s wine insomuch as we all live in the same place, the only society and the only world we have—the terroir of Planet Earth. And you, dear friend who drinks, do not stop saying that you feel the “taste of the terroir” in that wine—it is entirely legitimate. What you are effectively doing, however, is not recognizing an established fact by applying your skills; you are rather promising, saying “yes” to a gamble or an appointment, a fact that is still to come.

13 INEBRIATION AND INTOXICATION Cultivate Inebriation Rather Than Intoxication, Taking Care to Keep Oneself Immersed in the Flow

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pistenology proposes a strategic disregard for intentional, analytic, and optic tasting in favor of attentive, atmospheric, and haptic drinking. In this book I have tried to lay waste to traditional scrubland and cultivate new gardens by creating a different perspective and a new language to talk about the value of drinking with wine. A book whose traces lie in wine may seem of little import. Nonetheless, as you will have appreciated, this medium, the wine, dis-placed in the world, opens up to so much more, even aspiring to secure the ends of the skein or the meshwork of lines in all experience. To conclude this journey, however, it is now necessary to clarify one important point: although epistenology recognizes the importance of alcohol, it does not encourage drunkenness. What we are looking for with wine is inebriation. (I could mention Charles Baudelaire, Benjamin Franklin, and all the other oenophiles, but why do so when they are already so well known?) Distinguishing between drunkenness and inebriation does not mean supporting a strategy of control or praising the right mean. It is not an invitation to self-restraint, quite the contrary: inebriation instead of drunkenness is consistent with the approach proposed. Drunkenness is in fact optic and intentional; it is

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embedded in the life of goals and results— or it expresses the opposite, the cruel and desperate failure when such results have not been achieved. Moreover, drunkenness celebrates the vacuity of free time compared to work time, two worlds kept rigidly distinct. Getting drunk, even if every day, is like a month of holidays earned through the yearlong sacrifice of the other eleven subordinate and modest months. From boredom to excitement, from euphoria to depression. In contrast, inebriation is haptic and  attentional, free from the yoke of goals and results; it is not free time but time set free, it corresponds with the process and disposes itself to the flow. Latin language suggests another important aspect: ebrius means to be taken with wine. Thus epistenology suggests being bathed in the flow of the river, continuing to swim, remaining aware, and maintaining a haptic and conscious way of behaving (once again, the link between doing and undergoing). Feeling the tasting with wine, then, does not mean getting wet by drowning. Inebriation is not the happy mean. The inebriated are not somewhere between being drunk and being sober (whose Latin root is the same as e-brius: so-brius) but rather literally on a different level. The inebriated wakefulness of conscience is a wisdom achieved each time we are taken with wine, spending time with and taking care of it. There is not a given rule or a recipe: disciplined and attentional anarchy will always transport and lead to swimming in the flow. At the beginning of Pétronille, a novel by Amélie Nothomb, she claims that inebriation cannot be improvised but rather falls into the realm of art—but I concur with only the latter part of this statement. Epistenology is precisely the creative improvisation of feeling and living life as a task and commitment that lies within the realm of art—the art of distributed and diffused attention and of taking care as we go along, as we do when we live.

Inebriation and Intoxication Z 179

Some time ago I received an e-mail from someone who claimed to be concerned about my health, encouraging me to look after myself between one epistenology “show” and another. He attached a few statistics about the number of deaths caused by alcoholism every year, making no pretense of concealing his sarcasm, on the contrary adopting a macabre and sinister tone. I initially considered this warning to be a bit of foolishness that had entirely misunderstood the meaning of the approach proposed— and which I continue to advocate. I subsequently realized, however, that a reflection on this matter was opportune. Although global wine consumption has increased slightly since the early 2010s (with the United States the largest consumer country), other alcoholic drinks are usually the cause of these fearsome illnesses. Wilberforce, the main character in Paul Torday’s novel Bordeaux (The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce in the UK), comes to mind. Wilberforce becomes an alcoholic who drinks expensive and very famous wine in order to avoid the anguish of a life in which the emptiness of his achieved and failed objectives suddenly became apparent and overwhelming. Torday’s story is interesting because it highlights something you have probably often noticed: people with culture, competence, and expertise usually consider themselves to be immune from this problem. Expert drinking, including its effects, is held to be different from ignorant drinking, but this is not quite the case; I have known many competent wine experts who were very much like Wilberforce. The same can be true of the champions of natural wine, though the effects are less invasive because of the lower presence or complete absence of some additives that are usually present, such as sulfites. One may say that alcoholism happens when culture and competence are linked to passion and love. However, epistenology proposes being inebriated by love and not drunk with it. To nurture inebriation means to pay

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attention to the poisoning and psychotropic qualities of alcohol. It means to be taken with wine and to take care of this long and diffused love rather than being at the mercy of its waves, dragged hither and thither, wet to the skin. Inebriation is neither Apollo nor Dionysus but something in-between— another god-to-come is possible where the I is egoless, oblique, without intentions or a stable identity. Once, during a very intense evening of epistenology, I lost my vigilance after a particular exercise; the window closed, my consciousness darkened, and I drowned in the river, soaked and immobile. I then appreciated that in such situations wine moves away from us and the relationship breaks up—the wine goes one way and I the other; we are separate and distant from each other. The wine that makes you drunk is not drinking with wine but by wine, where you have lost your agency; and, quite paradoxically, it becomes purely a drug, an object with which to achieve a goal. This can happen even if one’s initial approach to drinking was different. In fact, sometimes our attention wanders and a threshold is crossed. At the time in question I went beyond this threshold, like taking a long jump, beautiful but disqualified because you stepped beyond the line. The vigilance of the inebriated is a disciplined and ongoing education in listening to our own capacity of taking in alcohol, and this is particularly true for those who want to be masters and lead others. There are no fixed limits, but it is important to know how to remain in the flow, to be vigilant in keeping alive and fluid the ties and connections to present experience with respect to the past and the future. This is the ability to move along the subtle line that separates the in vino veritas, where one feels the processes of the world in every single moment, from the drunken moment, incapable of creating

Inebriation and Intoxication Z 181

images, which severs ties and withers feeling (as explained by Horace, Atheneus, and Erasmus, among others). We started the journey in Georgia and in Georgia we end. A good tamadà, a supra master who leads the symposium, drinks a lot without getting drunk; if it does happen, he will be greatly ashamed. In Barga, at the event I told you about before, I was a very bad tamadà, because the tamadà must develop the wisdom of drinking as a task to be accomplished time after time in the name of attentive and careful inebriation. In Georgia I tried a fruitful strategy (everything I have written about here has been personally experienced and lived through), which consists in taking care not to immediately double the pleasure of a wine by drinking a second glass too early and, in contrast, to extend the pleasure of that first glass as much as possible. Stretching the pleasure of any glass to the utmost does not mean eking it out or drinking very little, and even less so does it means tasting it. It means experiencing the verticality of the atmospheric act of drinking wine, like a memory, an echo and a flow of images, thereby dilating time in a diffused, spatial format— an atmosphere in which wine distends (itself). The amount of drinking thus depends on how much time it is possible to develop and create, with the lines and knots that each of us must tie and untie. One of the exercises I often set in order to feel the expansion of time with wine is a parody of a “blind tasting.” In fact, rather than obscuring the wine label, I blindfold the participants, making them blind not only to wine but also to the entire environment. I often play music and lower the lights, subsequently serving the wine in cups to be shared rather than individual glasses. Touching and seeking each other out in order to pass the cups without spilling the wine; slowing down the gestures that bring wine to the lips; disempowering the optic in order to

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discover the powers of the haptic. All these passages permit us to perceive perfectly the resonance of wine that connects to and simultaneously produces this expansion of time. You enjoy each sip longer not because you are focused on the wine as an object, because this would mean returning to the frontal model and to intent. Rather, because the wine stretches itself along the grain of space and time where attention is diffused and the various elements present now are con-fused (that is, fused together and not able to be analyzed as discrete elements). In this way perception expands, corresponding with the inebriation; they dance together. As with polyphony, the boundaries of identity are lost without being fused, while the individual subjects feel and live their belonging to the common destiny of the only river where we can swim, with compassion. Taking care of inebriation consequently means connivance with the experience of limits, beyond the rational and symmetric ways of optic sobriety and its mirror image— drunkenness. Moreover, how this experience feels changes each time. It is impossible to demonstrate scientifically what we know through experience or, in other words, that every encounter with wine produces different kinds of inebriation effects depending on the wine encountered and the qualities of that particular experience. This impossibility is completely normal: any scientific demonstration is optic and objective, while we are experiencing at the level of haptics, of feeling by thought that avoids rational and analytic arguments. Epistenology is anarchic but communal and therefore religious (from the Latin re-ligare, a binding together, a connection). It remembers and communicates our ties by creating others in turn, over and above the illusory nature of separate individual existences. Therefore alcohol is not just a neutral and objective given that always performs the same function. The spirit of wine is a subtle fermentation—subtlety is what is essential, the spirit

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a breath that connects the essences that are dynamic and fluid knots, always entangled, hence con-fused, without fixed identities. The spirit of wine is blown by the wind; it has no boundaries and is not stable. The quality of the inebriation lies in how we ride the crest of the wave of this breath in the flow. Inebriation is a question of air and water. A Chinese proverb expresses this sensation well: “Do not say any one word specifically / realize completely wind and waves.” Once, at the end of a series of meetings, a young Maasai woman came up and confessed to having initially participated with some reluctance, but, little by little, this approach had seduced her, changing her perspective on wine. Such a confession was one of the best gifts that epistenology can receive, which it contributed to in its own right. The free, unregulated, but disciplined relationship with wine, over and above the discourse, before and beyond any explanations and instructions, was a leap in the dark where she found a sea, a sky, a land where she could swim, fly, and walk. In her culture people do not drink alcohol and wine is forbidden, but nonetheless the breath and the flows of its essence still spoke to her, and thus a new correspondence had been realized and new ties created. This is what I mean when I say that epistenology is not instructive but educative, because in the end what it inspires is the experience of continuously feeling ourselves to be alive, becoming more human every time. With wine, this is possible for all of us. It’s time to close; the journey has come to an end. And I will not say another sentence of mine, but I fade with a relevant and beautiful quote by John Dewey: [The role of the educator is] to arrange for the kind of experiences which, while they do not repel the student, but rather engage his activities, are, nevertheless, more than immediately enjoyable

184 Y Taste as a Task since they promote having desirable future experiences. Just as no man lives or dies to himself, so no experience lives and dies to itself. Wholly independent of desire or intent, every experience lives on in further experiences. Hence the central problem of an education based upon experience is to select the kind of present experiences that live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences.1

NOTES

6. Without a Theme 1. “L’amore non lo canto, è un canto di per sé, più lo si invoca meno ce n’è.” Per Grazia Ricevuta, or PGR, was an Italian rock band, active between 2001 and 2009. Montesole is a live album recorded in 2001.

8. Without Competency 1. Erik Satie, A Mammal’s Notebook: Collected Writings of Erik Satie, ed.  Ornella Volta, trans. Antony Melville, Atlas Arkhiv, book 5 (London: Atlas, 1996). This volume contains several drawings by Satie.

9. Without Judgment 1. Thomas Cleary and J. C. Cleary, trans., The Blue Cliff Record (Boston: Shambhala, 2005), 62.

13. Inebriation and Intoxication 1. John Dewey, Experience and Education (1934), in The Later Works of John Dewey (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 13.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

T

he bibliography lists only some of the references that have more evidently accompanied the writing of this work. In compliance with the book’s proposed objective, nothing else has been added. The objective was to try to restore a thought process in its building and rebuilding as life that might be casual or even improvised. If this work does not want to have an object but tries to gather the earth by touching it, it would be pointless to exhibit a catalog of acquisitions or to apply oneself to explicatory notes that dissect the text. If there are some readers who are interested in reconstructing the genealogy of this essay, I will refer you, on the one hand, to my previous studies listed in the bibliography and, in particular for this specific subject, to those on wine, a substance in which I have taken an interest for over twenty years. On the other hand, I refer you to the path that has traced heretical and daring connections among different references: the “second” Wittgenstein (fundamental here, in particular, with regard to criticisms of the objectivist model, for the discussion on “following a rule” and for nonsystematic style as a theoretical choice); Derrida’s philosophy (the grammatological dimension of whose idea that every origin is inscribed, the idea of the text as fabric, and the “concept” of

188 Y Bibliogr aphical Note

difference as infinite reference, has been cultivated herein, without, however, any attraction for the verticality of transcendence); pragmatism (for its insistence on the notion of experience, for the importance of the biography and the lived as unescapable parts of the theoretical discourse); and the anthropological approach of Tim Ingold (the idea of the living being as lines, a thought that is also present in Deleuze and Guattari). Ultimately, there are the thoughts of Italian philosopher Aldo Gargani, one of my direct masters, who made his mark on me a long time ago and is greatly present here both for his criticism of the deductivelogical, scientific model and for writing as the denuding of oneself. I believe that the intellectual references in this work can be better understood in the light of this eccentric pentagon, personally and freely reworked. There are possibly many other references, links to, possibly intentionally hinted at elements as well as those whose marks I have not noticed. In fact, that is another story that will be written elsewhere.

ESSENTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agamben, Giorgio. Taste, trans. Cooper Francis. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2017. Arnaldo da Villanova. Trattato sui vini (Liber de vinis), ed. Manlio Della Serra. Rome: Armillaria, 2015. Auvrey, Malika, and Charles Spence. “The Multisensory Perception of Flavor.” Consciousness and Cognition 17 (2008): 1016– 31. Bachelard, Gaston. Earth and Reveries of Repose: An Essay on Images of Interiority, trans. Mary McAllester Jones. Dallas: Dallas Institute, 2011. Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang, 2010. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: And Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael  W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008. Böhme, Gernot. Atmosfere, estasi, messe in scena: L’estetica come teoria generale della percezione. Milan: Marinotti, 2010. Bruno, Giuliana. Surfaces: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality and Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Capalbo, Carla. Tasting Georgia: A Food and Wine Journey in the Caucasus. Northampton, Mass.: Interlink, 2017. Chauvet, Jules. Le vin en question. Paris: Jean-Paul Rocher, 1998. Coccia, Emanuele. Sensible Life: A Micro-ontology of the Image, trans. Scott Alan Stuart. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.

190 Y Essential Bibliogr aphy Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. ——. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Derrida, Jacques, and Ferraris, Maurizio. A Taste for the Secret. Cambridge, Mass.: Polity, 2001. Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Minton, Balch, 1934. ——. Experience and Education (1934). In The Later Works of John Dewey. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Su Penone. Milan: Electa, 2008. Feiring, Alice. For the Love of Wine: My Odyssey Through the World’s Most Ancient Wine Culture. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method. London: Verso, 2010. Gargani, Aldo Giorgio. Il sapere senza fondamenti. Turin: Einaudi, 1975. ——. Sguardo e destino. Rome: Laterza, 1989. Gibson, James J. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966. Goode, Jamie. I Taste Red: The Science of Tasting Wine. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016. Goode, Jamie, and Sam Harrop. Authentic Wine Authentic Wine: Toward Natural and Sustainable Winemaking. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Hennion, Antoine, and Geneviève Teil. “Le goût du vin. Pour une sociologie de l’attention” [The Taste of Wine: For a Sociology of Attention]. In Le goût des belles choses, ed. Véronique Nahoum-Grappe and Odile Vincent, 111– 26. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2004. Hillman, James. The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life. New York: Random House, 1999. Ingold, Tim. Anthropology and/as Education. New York: Routledge, 2018. ——. Being Alive. New York: Routledge, 2011. ——. The Life of Lines. New York: Routledge, 2015. ——. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. New York: Routledge, 2013. ——. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. New York: Routledge, 2000. Jullien, François. Essere o vivere. Milan: Feltrinelli, 2015.

Essential Bibliogr aphy Z 191 ——. Il saggio è senza idee. Turin: Einaudi, 2002. ——. A Treatise on Efficacy: Between Western and Chinese Thinking. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004. Korsmeyer, Carolyn. “Touch and the Experience of Genuine.” British Journal of Aesthetics 52 (2012): 365– 77. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. L’occhio e lo spirito. Milan: SE, 1989. ——. The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Mol, Annemarie. “I Eat an Apple. On Theorizing Subjectivities.” Subjectivity 22 (2008): 28– 37. Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays (1588), trans. Michael Andrew Schreech. London: Penguin Classics, 1993. Nichols, Tom. The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowldege and Why It Matters. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Noble, Ann C. “Describing the Indescribable.” Food Science and Technology International 20, no. 3 (2006): 32– 35. Nothomb, Amélie. Pétronille, trans. Alison Andersen. New York: Europa Editions, 2015. Pasqualotto, Giangiorgio. Estetica del vuoto: Arte e meditazione nelle culture d’Oriente. Venice: Marsilio, 1992. Perullo, Nicola. Ecologia della vita come corrispondenza: Frammenti per la spoliazione del senso. Milan: Mimesis, 2017. ——. “Estetiche della degustazione.” In Dietetica e semiotica, ed. Gianfranco Marrone and Dario Mangano. Milan: Mimesis, 2013. ——. La cucina è arte? Filosofia della passione culinaria. Rome: Carocci, 2013. ——. Taste as Experience: The Philosophy and Aesthetics of Food. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. ——, ed. Wineworld: New Essays on Wine, Taste, Philosophy, and Aesthetics, Rivista di Estetica, n.s. 51, year 52. Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 2012. Peynaud, Émile. The Taste of Wine: The Art and Science of Wine Appreciation, trans. Michael Schuster. San Francisco: Wine Appreciation Guild, 1987. Polanyi, Michael. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post- Critical Philosophy (1958). New York: Routledge, 2002. Rigaux, Jacky. La dégustation geo-sensorielle. Montreal: Terre en Vues, 2012. Rigaux, Jacky, and Sandro Sangiorgi. Il vino capovolto: La degustazione geosensoriale e altri scritti. Rome: Porthos, 2017.

192 Y Essential Bibliogr aphy Sangiorgi, Sandro. L’invenzione della gioia. Rome: Porthos, 2011. Scruton, Roger. I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine. London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2013. Serres, Michel. The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies. London: Continuum, 2009. ——. Il mancino zoppo: Dal metodo non nasce niente. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2016. Shapin, Steven. “Château Neuro.” Los Angeles Review of Books, December 30, 2016. ——. “How to Eat Like a Gentleman: Dietetics and Ethics in Early Modern England.” In Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as If It Was Made by People with Bodies, Situated in Space, Time, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority, ed. Steven Shapin, 259–86. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. ——. “The Sciences of Subjectivity.” Social Studies of Science 42 (2012): 170– 94. ——. “A Taste of Science: Making the Subjective Objective in the Californian Wine World.” Social Studies of Science 46, no. 3 (2016): 436– 60. Shepherd, Gordon M. Neuroenology: How the Brain Creates the Taste of Wine. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Smith, Barry C. “The Chemical Senses” In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Perception, ed. Mohan Matthen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. ——, ed. Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Soldati, Mario. Vino al vino. Milan: Mondadori, 1971. Somers, Chris. The Wine Spectrum: An Approach Towards Objective Definition of Wine Quality. Ashford, South Australia: Winetitles, 1998. Torday, Paul. The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008. Veronelli, Luigi. Il vino giusto. Milan: Rizzoli, 1971. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. ——. Philosophical Investigation, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. 3rd ed. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001.

INDEX

Antonioni, Michelangelo, 95 Aristotle, 54 Atheneus, 181 Austin, John L., 150 authenticity, 61– 63, 65– 67, 80 Bachelard, Gaston, 45, 102, 151 Barthes, Roland, 78 Baudelaire, Charles, 31, 63, 177 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 50 Berenson, Bernard, 56 Beuys, Joseph, 58 Borges, Jorges Luis, 80–81 Buddhism, 73, 132 Cavandoli, Osvaldo, 27 Châtelet, Gilles, 67 communication: and community, 69– 71, 137– 38, 158– 62; and imagination, 76– 77; and terroir, 169– 71; world of wine, 108– 9 competency: competence, 117–18; 120– 27; competition, 135– 37;

expertise, 16, 37– 38, 59, 109–10; expertise vs experience, 75– 79; judgment, 132– 33 correspondence, 27– 28, 34– 35, 51–52, 58, 89– 92, 100, 115, 137– 38, 147–50, 164– 67, 169– 75 Daoism, 173 Davis, Miles, 135 Derrida, Jacques, 11, 49, 54, 64 Descartes, René, 18 Dewey, John, 145, 183 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 73 Duchamp, Marcel, 51 education: conventional scholastic, 136; élevage, 27; imposition vs exposition, 146–47, 157–58, 161 Einstein, Albert, 153, 156 Erasmus, 181 expertise. See competence Fernández, Macedonio, 80 Feyerabend, Paul, 112

194 Y Index food: diet, 33– 34; dietetic science, 35– 36; and haptic, 43, 78– 79; Hippocratic/Galenic diet, 35; philosophy of vs philosophy with food/wine, 9–10, 49, 97– 98; food-pairing, 57, 141–43 Franklin, Benjamin, 177 Galilei, Galileo, 18 Gargani, Aldo, 109, 112 Georgia, 96–102, 118– 20, 181 Gibson, James, J., 46 Greimas, Algirdas, 81 Guevara “Che,” Ernesto, 166 Hamsun, Knut, 60 haptic: vs optic, 4, 54, 65, 70– 71; perception, 4–5, 7, 45–51, 55–56, 58, 63, 92, 96, 101, 103, 120; taste, 43–44, 52, 61– 62, 83, 115–16, 144–45; vs touch, 42–43 Heraclitus, 124 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 54 Hillman, James, 73, 88 Hippocrates, 35 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 150 Horace, 181 Ingold, Tim, 7, 132, 166 James, Henry, 117 Jodorowsky, Alejandro, 89 Joly, Nicolas, 30, 60 Joseph, Beuys, 58 Jullien, François, 52, 110, 115, 132

Kant, Immanuel, 54, 132 Kierkegaard, Søren, 91 Kubrick, Stanley, 102 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 50 Locke, John, 18 Maynard, Amerine, 40 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 92, 144 meshwork, 60, 92, 110, 145, 171, 177 Miles, Davis, 135 Moio, Luigi, 167 Montaigne, Michel de, 121 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 43, 50 Noble, Anne, 40, 99, 165 Nothomb, Amélie, 178 Ocampo, Silvina, 80 oenology, 26, 40–41, 72, 104–5, 112, 126, 167– 68 Parker, Robert, 40, 133 Penone, Giuseppe, 28, 73, 145 Persello, Ramon, 168 Peynaud, Émile, 26, 72 Riegl, Alois, 43 Rigaux, Jacky, 80 Robinot, Jean-Pierre, 60 Rukeyser, Muriel, 153 Sangiorgi, Sandro, 147 Satie, Erik, 123 Schoonmaker, Frank, 40 Schütz, Alfred, 108

Index Z 195 Serres, Michel, 92, 112, 132 Shapin, Steven, 99 Shusterman, Richard, 52 Soldati, Mario, 23, 81, 83 task: attention, 23, 52, 88, 102– 6; choice vs care, 173; intention, 60, 103; nurturing, 113 Terzani, Tiziano, 117 time: atmosphere, 25, 29, 40,45–46, 55, 67, 98–100, 102, 123, 142, 144, 160, 169, 181–82; chronological, 14, 25; event, 5– 6, 10–11, 19, 60, 82, 146; measured vs inhabited, 151, 174, 178; as a task, 9, 48, 162; weather, 166, 171

Torday, Paul, 179 touch. See haptic, vs touch Van Gogh, Vincent, 161 Veronelli, Luigi, 83, 105 vintage, 29, 30, 105, 159, 170– 71 Wenders, Wim, 149 wisdom: of drinking, 178, 181; of taste, 62, 147 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 16, 39, 51, 148, 150 Yeats, William Butler, 158 Ýiĥek, Slavoj, 149

ARTS AND TRADITIONS OF THE TABLE: PERSPECTIVES ON CULINARY HISTORY

Albert Sonnenfeld, Series Editor Salt: Grain of Life, Pierre Laszlo, translated by Mary Beth Mader Culture of the Fork, Giovanni Rebora, translated by Albert Sonnenfeld French Gastronomy: The History and Geography of a Passion, Jean-Robert Pitte, translated by Jody Gladding Pasta: The Story of a Universal Food, Silvano Serventi and Françoise Sabban, translated by Antony Shugar Slow Food: The Case for Taste, Carlo Petrini, translated by William McCuaig Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History, Alberto Capatti and Massimo Montanari, translated by Áine O’Healy British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History, Colin Spencer A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America, James E. McWilliams Sacred Cow, Mad Cow: A History of Food Fears, Madeleine Ferrières, translated by Jody Gladding Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor, Hervé This, translated by M. B. DeBevoise Food Is Culture, Massimo Montanari, translated by Albert Sonnenfeld Kitchen Mysteries: Revealing the Science of Cooking, Hervé This, translated by Jody Gladding Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America, Frederick Douglass Opie Gastropolis: Food and New York City, edited by Annie Hauck-Lawson and Jonathan Deutsch Building a Meal: From Molecular Gastronomy to Culinary Constructivism, Hervé This, translated by M. B. DeBevoise Eating History: Thirty Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine, Andrew F. Smith The Science of the Oven, Hervé This, translated by Jody Gladding

Pomodoro! A History of the Tomato in Italy, David Gentilcore Cheese, Pears, and History in a Proverb, Massimo Montanari, translated by Beth Archer Brombert Food and Faith in Christian Culture, edited by Ken Albala and Trudy Eden The Kitchen as Laboratory: Reflections on the Science of Food and Cooking, edited by César Vega, Job Ubbink, and Erik van der Linden Creamy and Crunchy: An Informal History of Peanut Butter, the All-American Food, Jon Krampner Let the Meatballs Rest: And Other Stories About Food and Culture, Massimo Montanari, translated by Beth Archer Brombert The Secret Financial Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Supermarkets, Kara Newman Drinking History: Fifteen Turning Points in the Making of American Beverages, Andrew F. Smith Italian Identity in the Kitchen, or Food and the Nation, Massimo Montanari, translated by Beth Archer Brombert Fashioning Appetite: Restaurants and the Making of Modern Identity, Joanne Finkelstein The Land of the Five Flavors: A Cultural History of Chinese Cuisine, Thomas O. Höllmann, translated by Karen Margolis The Insect Cookbook: Food for a Sustainable Planet, Arnold van Huis, Henk van Gurp, and Marcel Dicke, translated by Françoise Takken-Kaminker and Diane Blumenfeld-Schaap Religion, Food, and Eating in North America, edited by Benjamin E. Zeller, Marie W. Dallam, Reid L. Neilson, and Nora L. Rubel Umami: Unlocking the Secrets of the Fifth Taste, Ole G. Mouritsen and Klavs Styrbæk, translated by Mariela Johansen and designed by Jonas Drotner Mouritsen The Winemaker’s Hand: Conversations on Talent, Technique, and Terroir, Natalie Berkowitz Chop Suey, USA: The Story of Chinese Food in America, Yong Chen Note-by-Note Cooking: The Future of Food, Hervé This, translated by M. B. DeBevoise

Medieval Flavors: Food, Cooking, and the Table, Massimo Montanari, translated by Beth Archer Brombert Another Person’s Poison: A History of Food Allergy, Matthew Smith Taste as Experience: The Philosophy and Aesthetics of Food, Nicola Perullo Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Food, Roger Horowitz Chow Chop Suey: Food and the Chinese American Journey, Anne Mendelson Mouthfeel: How Texture Makes Taste, Ole G. Mouritsen and Klavs Styrbæk, translated by Mariela Johansen Garden Variety: The American Tomato from Corporate to Heirloom, John Hoenig Cook, Taste, Learn: How the Evolution of Science Transformed the Art of Cooking, Guy Crosby Meals Matter: A Radical Economics Through Gastronomy, Michael Symons The Chile Pepper in China: A Cultural Biography, Brian R. Dott