Why you shouldn't drink and read philosophy...

A holistic approach to wine tasting...

The idea of basing ones ideas on looking at each wine as being an aspect of the whole, the ur wine – the process of treating each wine tasted as being a totality in itself.

Looking for the individual character in every one, and using that to bbuild up a greater more accurate picture of what wine is.

In fact it is obvious… the glass I hold in front of me is wine. It would suffice as a perfect definition of wine as it manifestly is wine. However there are other wines…. All of them are as much wine as the one in the glass I hold, bbut some of them are different, so some of them represent a different image of what wine is.

So by tasting wine and continually thinking about wine we can create a greater understanding of exactly what it can be.

Does the western analytical approach to wine oppose the kind of understanding that I’m suggesting?

It is a reductive approach that seems to muddy the water by encouraging a certain word association with various flavours?

Basically the west approach seeks to clarify the taste profile of the wine by means of several variables. The most easily measurable of them, and frankly the least important, when it comes to quality, especially as the intangiable ones are all taste related, and thus virtually unmeasurable….