I was sober for over fifty years. A daughter of an alcoholic, growing up in a culture where alcohol was considered a national sport in all jokes, I was a party pooper for most of my life. I still cannot drink more than one glass of wine, cannot have it more often than once a month, and cannot use strong liquor.
However, I am an amateur wine snob.
It happened almost five years ago. My husband brought home a bottle of wine and warned me that I ought to taste it because it was the most expensive wine he had ever bought. The first sip of wine exploded in my mouth and my nose with flavors and aromas of fruit, berries, and spices that lingered long after I swallowed the drink. I could not content myself, "What wine is this? It is so tasty! It is like a fruit candy in my mouth". The following weekend, we went to a bookstore to educate ourselves about wine.
The bottle that seduced me from my sobriety pedestal was San Polo Brunello di Montalcino 2013.
Brunello is Tuscany's longest-lived, rarest, most expensive, and most revered wine. The Brunello variety is a series of Sangiovese unique clones collectively called Brunello, which means 'the nice dark one' in the local dialect. It came from a walled medieval village, Montalcino, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. South of the Chianti Classico region, Montalcino is clinging to a warmer rocky hilltop where vineyards, based purely on Sangiovese, produce complex, layered, lavish wine without blending with other varieties.
A Brunello clone of Sangiovese was initially isolated and planted in his vineyards by Ferruccio Biondi Santi in the 1870s. The result of his efforts was the opposite of the light red and not age-worthy Chianti at those times. Brunello gave flavorful, full-bodied, intensely colored wine that attained its full potential after significant aging. Biondi Santi developed standard techniques today but unheard of in his time: limiting the yield of the vines, keeping the grape skins with the juice during fermentation, and aging for years before releasing the wines. In 1980, Brunello di Montalcino was one of the first Italian red wines to be designated DOCG status (MacNeil, 2015).
As I immersed myself in the world of wine, I was mesmerized. An entire multidisciplinary science--from chemistry to history and neuropsychology--stood behind this drink containing about 10-15% of a mind-altering substance called ethanol.
Wine tasting is a multisensory experience. My favorite part is smelling the wine. Can you isolate and identify the aromas when smelling the bouquet in your glass? It is entertaining and could be puzzling. Anyone can develop this skill to a certain degree. Collecting empirical data from each experiential learning and analyzing them increases the range of recognizable scents. The experiences engage the olfactory epithelial neuroreceptors in the nose and stimulate the olfactory sensory neurons, transmitting the information directly to the first cranial nerve. From there, the sensory information goes directly to the olfactory bulbs in the reptilian brain- the ancient 500 million-year-old part of the human brain.
Have you seen wine connoisseurs or sommeliers swishing the wine in their mouths in a funny way when they tasted it? They do it to create the most whole picture possible of the flavors of a particular wine. The sense of taste is complex. In addition to the tongue taste receptors, it involves the epithelium innervation of the cheeks, tonsils, and pharynx. The sensory information is relayed to four out of 12 cranial nerves and further to the brainstem and limbic system structures. The conscious perception in the cerebral cortex and awareness of smells and tastes are almost instantaneous. That was the explosion of flavors and aromas I experienced during my first sip of Brunello. Taste and smell are connected (Adler & Samsonova-Jellison, 2017).
I got interested in wine because it engages the sensory pathways we don't fully train and develop throughout our lives --olfaction/smell and gustation/taste. However, phylogenetically, they are connected to the oldest parts of our central nervous systems. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the survival of our species depended on developed senses of smell and taste. Technological vector of civilizational development stripped our kind of the necessity to rely on the senses of hearing, smelling, and tasting. Instead, we overload our vision because our survival now depends on how fast we can process the information our brains receive through the sense of sight.
The more I learned, the more I saw every new bottle as a person with its history and story, just like it happens with people. Every person carries the microscopic prints of personal experiences as stronger or weaker neural connections in their brains. Those connections may transpire as faint memories or as habitual behavioral patterns. The wine in your glass also carries the climatic conditions of where it grew up, the quantity of sun and rain it received, and the chemical content of the soil it absorbed. It has prints of the harvest moment, the fermentation conditions, the barrel exposure, the bottle transition, the temperature fluctuations during storage, and the time in the bottle.
From this perspective, the famous Latin phrase In vino veritas takes on a deeper meaning. The wine can tell you its story if you know how to read it.
Wine came late into my life, but I am glad it did. Youth can be ignorant and careless. Maturity values the mileage of life, balance, and uniqueness of every moment. Going back to Latin, "Carpe diem." Or, in my case, "Carpe Vinum."
Please drink responsibly.
I am grateful for your attention, intelligence, and compassion.
Mtsyri
Sources:
Adler, R. S., & Samsonova-Jellison, O. V. (2017). Music therapy for multisensory and body awareness in children and adults with severe to profound multiple disabilites: The MuSense Manual. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
MacNeil, K. (2015). The wine bible. 2nd ed. Workman Publishing.