liquid music
After so many years of writing about wine I experienced another epiphany yesterday. In the company of 75 gathered aficionados I listened to winemakers and viticulturists talk about their land, their soil, the tender regard they had for their particular slope of eden.
And as they talked, we tasted wines made from their grapes ranging throughout the appellation, a cross-section of four of the AVA’s distinctive winegrowing areas.  And in each of the four flights (four vineyards x three winemakers = a dozen wines), the individual personalities, desires, and  vitality of those vineyards unfurled.
Wine. A living work of art existing for the moment of time it takes to travel from sip, to palate, to memory. Liquid music.  Like music, wine is a living creation, existing as long as it is tasted (experienced, played). Music isn’t quite right as an analog, but it’s more apt than painting (too concrete) or sculpture (again, extant in a specific time and place). Music exists in many states—altered states, if you will. In Brian Eno’s head, on a cocktail napkin at Brian Eno’s favorite saloon, in Brian Eno’s computer (software program where it can be emailed to his friends and collaborators), and finally in both the real spacetime world, as well as infinitely in cyberspace. (more…)
