Well, if it isn’t our old friend Heraclitus, come to pay a visit. He’s been hanging around for 2500 years or so now and just refuses to go away. True, it’s not so much the man himself who can’t seem to exit stage right as it is his ideas — or his One Big Idea, to be more precise — summed up in the by now famous axiom: You cannot step into the same river twice.
Contra his philosophical nemesis, Parmenides, for whom fundamental reality consisted of a unitary, immutable thing called Being, Heraclitus maintained that the only stable reality is change itself. For this big thinker, all that exists is in flux, restlessly shifting from one state to another, never still or stable and never assuming exactly the same configuration a second time.
What’s true of the world in general must be true of everything in it. So, it seems we have a right to ask whether one can dip into the same wine twice. It’s a question that we here in the wine corner philosophy shop feel a responsibility to take up. If we don’t, who else would be foolish enough to try?
Suppose we begin by examining the evidence for the steady state argument. First off, let’s admit that wine has never been anything other than that which results when yeasts consume sugars present in grape juice, generating carbon dioxide and alcohol in the process. This, at least, is what all wine, ancient or modern, has in common: it all comes about in exactly the same way.
It’s also true that left more or less to itself, all wine will arrive at something like a consensus shape. Wine has a long history in many cultures preceding our own, and we have no reason to suspect that wine as represented to us in the literature and memoir of these eras is something foreign to us. When the past speaks to us of wine, we know what it’s talking about.
And it is just here, I think, that we run out of things to say on behalf of wine as possessing any kind of stable being. Wine may be an enduring concept, but actual examples prove to be as unruly, restless, changeable and protean as Heraclitus’ stream — perhaps more so. Wine, we’ll see, has many moving parts.
For a start, there’s vintage variation to think of, and all that that entails. Then there is the fact that vines have a limited life span and must periodically be grubbed up and replanted. Soils are constantly being renewed or eroded, with consequent effects on their microbiology.
To these factors add longterm shifts in weather patterns and the occasional existential threat, such as the phylloxera infestation of the late 19th century which resulted in wholesale replanting (and thus re-thinking) of European vineyards.
Then there is what might be informally called style: the many shapes wine is capable of taking on at the hands of creative craftspersons, canny business types, even by you and me as we vote with our wallets for the kind of wine we prefer to drink. In this sense wine is as much an article of fashion as hairstyles or dance music and is subject to the same trends and fads.
In response to both natural and cultural influences, winemakers are every moment busy with decision-making. Should 20 or 30 percent of this year’s Russian River Chardonnay be treated to time in new oak barrels? Should an estate’s Rhône blend contain a little more or a little less Grenache? Should the finished wine get a little more time in bottle before release?
All we know for sure is that the wine of one year can never be identical to that of any other. This is true despite mass-market label, multiple-million-cases-a-year types doing their best to Osterize it into a Stepford Wives sameness.
This might be the right moment to voice a question we’ve often mulled: Is there even such a thing as ‘finished’ wine?’ It’s a fuzzy concept, since cellaring wine, decanting it, even chilling it are all techniques you and I use to get it into the shape we find most gratifying.
Then, when we cork up what’s left over, without any attention from us at all, it goes on its own little evolution bender, speeding ahead, showing a different face on day two than it did on day one — and so for as many days following as any remains.
Historically, materially, culturally, gastronomically — wine is ever on its way to somewhere. We’re just along for the ride.