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 the world (including ourselves) 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 (and perhaps even the old troublemaker’s blessing) 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 for no better reason than that if we don’t, who is likely to?
Suppose we start 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 and is present in the literature of many cultures, and we have no reason to suspect that wine as represented to us in literature and memoir through the ages 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 idea, but the thing itself has proven to be as unruly, restless, changeable and protean as Heraclitus’ stream — perhaps more so. Wine, after all 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 changes to their all-important 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 informally be called style: the many shapes wine is capable of taking on at the hands of innovative winemakers, canny business types, even 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 these natural and cultural influences, winemakers are constantly tweaking their approach. Should 20 or 30 or 50 percent of this year’s Russian River Chardonnay be treated to new oak barrels? Should our Côtes du Rhône blend contain a little more or a little less Grenache? Should the finished wine get a little more time in bottle before release this time around? All we know for sure is that the wine of one year’s can never the exactly the same as any other, even when the mass-market label, multiple-million-cases-a-year types are doing their best to pulverize it into sameness.
This might be the right moment to voice a question I’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, culturally, gastronomically — wine is ever on its way to somewhere. We’re just along for the ride.