Should I know where wine is from?

I can consume wine without context, enjoying its color, odor, taste, and the heightened sensations of alcohol, and never go beyond that. However, I would argue it matters significantly where the wine comes from. Learning its origin can dramatically increase the experience and pleasure beyond the ordinary.

Place matters

Like no other consumable item, wine is connected to a place. Soil, sun, rain, elevation, vineyard position, viticulture, and production techniques come together in your glass. Like no other product, wine reflects the soul of its place, the care, and skill of people who shepherd the grape from the dawn of spring to the heat of harvest and on to the bottle.

There is more

A non-tangible ingredient can make a glass of wine something that inspires thought, reverence, and reflection. Once called to mind, it can inhabit a glass of wine and heighten the temporal senses making it ever more enjoyable. That ingredient is History.

The history of the ground, the people that toiled to cultivate it and tame the vines, the endless thought, work, and care, the labors of love, the wine consumed over the ages by the land stewards, priests, paupers, and princes. It all comes together in a glass of wine; it’s all there.

Sir Roger says

English philosopher and writer Sir Roger Scruton (www.roger-scruton.com) beautifully encapsulated this concept in an interview about his book I Drink Therefore I Am, A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine, “it [wine] doesn’t contain its meaning entirely within itself, you bring that to it through your own knowledge and your own fantasy.” Further on in the same interview, Scruton sums up a Persian poet’s concept of the human-wine relationship, “I bring to the wine the whole content of my own spiritual and moral experience, and then it reflects it back to me.”

Tuscany

Consider Tuscany, Italy, this ancient wine region with a most agreeable climate for wine grapes. Tuscany’s famous wines Chianti, Brunello, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, Vin Santo, and Vernaccia, are steeped in three thousand years of history.

The pre-Roman Etruscans, a highly cultured civilization that practiced grape cultivation, held elaborate banquets full of wine, drinking, music, dancing, and feasting. The Greeks knew this region as Enotris, the “land of wine,” while the neighboring Romans looked on in disdain.

Yet after defeating the Etruscans, the Romans absorbed their culture, including the prominence of wine in society. Where the Etruscan hilltop villages once stood, carpets of wine grapes now grow. The Christian monks and merchants from Siena planted vines and spread and improved viticulture during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were both born in Tuscany, where the Italian Renaissance was born.

Now the rolling hills of Tuscany and most of central Italy are fraught with endless rows of vines, producing unique, vibrant wines testifying to Tuscany’s history. When enjoying a Chianti, I pause to reflect on the historical soul of thousands of years of Tuscan wine civilizations and the richness of history reincarnated in a glass.

We now can add a step to wine enjoyment, look-swirl-sniff-taste-reflect.

Extoling Tuscany.

“Here, there is light, the sun. Radiant sunlight and the right soil are the soul of wine. But the tradition of the countryside and the memory of men are the solid basis of the extraordinary Tuscan wine culture.” – Giacomo Tachis, Italian wine expert, creator of super-Tuscan wine Sassicaia   

“Tuscany, as regards wines, has no equal the world over, thanks to a most felicitous nature, and to a civilization of the grapevine and of wine that has been decanted and refined over the centuries.” – Historian Ziffiro Ciuffoletti, from Journey through Tuscany.  

From Francesco Redi’s “Bacchus in Tuscany” – a poem glorifying Tuscan wines.  

The ruby dew that stills upon Valdarno’s hills,

Touches the sense with odor so divine,

That not the violet with lips with morning wet,

Utters such sweetness from her little shrine.

When I drink of it, I rise

Over the hill that makes poets wise,

Grow so sweet and grow so strong,

I challenge Phoebus with his Delphic eyes.

Give me then, from a golden measure,

The ruby that is my treasure, my treasure.