Winetasting and Mindfulness
Mindfulness when you meditate is one thing. What else are you going to do as you sit but notice what appears in your mind? Mindfulness outside the embrace of meditation's mandala is another thing, and really the point of meditation. We meditate so that we can bring mindfulness into our daily lives.
You see by the title above that I somehow relate or equate tasting wine with mindfulness. Granted, inebriation stands antipodal to mindfulness, but I wrote tasting not drinking. I speak of the thoughtful, logical, and mindful method by which wine professionals and enthusiasts taste wine.
For years I tasted wine in a professional context, just to know what I was talking to customers about. The tasting room frequently had bottles open, sometimes large flights of them. We would taste, spit, and discuss. This helped me represent wines to customers as fairly as possible. Even if I didn't like a particular wine, someone else might.
Tasting wine in such a context means ignoring price, reputation, and everything else about a wine that cannot be sensorially evaluated. After evaluation, you can decide if a wine is worth the price or equal to its reputation, but first you regard the thing before you. The method is simple, only requiring that you notice what your senses receive.
With the first step, you look at the wine. You might tilt the glass up to a light, the better to see the wine's colour. It happens enough at tastings that someone accidentally pours wine on their face as they peer. You don't need to do that.
Depth of colour suggests more has been extracted from the grapes, especially for red wines. That means the juice and skin have spent time together. The juice of most grapes, red or white, is white. The colour of wines derives from contact with the skin.
White wines become darker with age and red wines grow lighter. All end up brown. You can, therefore, get an idea of the wine's age by noting its colour. You can also just appreciate the colour. The point is, you shouldn't rush the liquid to your mouth: the wine's colour says something too.
Step two, you sniff the wine. Swirling the wine in the glass releases the esters and aldehydes that produce the aroma of the wine. Proper wine glasses are shaped to concentrate that aroma. Filling a glass unswirlably full is right out.
Take several short sniffs of the swirled wine. The olfactory bulb, your smell sensor, overloads quickly; long inhalations don't, well, smell so good. Those esters and aldehydes that you smell may make you think of various fruit. You are not imagining this. The aldehyde that makes an orange smell like an orange or a raspberry a raspberry may be present in the cabernet sauvignon grape that made your wine.
Take note of the complex melange of aromatic elements The soil from which the grapes grew will effect the aroma of the wine, and so will the oak barrels in which the wine might have been fermented and aged. Not all wines receive barrel fermentation or aging, but the telltale is the very smell of a wood shop. New oak barrels, as you might expect, give the strongest oak aroma to a wine.
After sniffing the aroma, taste the wine. Let the wine hit all your taste buds then swallow. A couple of short exhalations thru the nose gets more molecules to the olfactory bulb. You probably know that your taste buds record only sweetness, bitterness, sourness, and saltiness. The aromatic details and complexity arrive via the olfactory bulb, the smell module inside your nose.
You can feel the texture of the wine on your palate, thin, rich, or whatever. You can also feel the acidity, or the bubbly prickle of captured CO2 that sparkling wines offer. Red wines sometimes have an astringency, like brewed tea. It comes from the same source as tea: tannic acid. Grape stems and seeds left in the fermenting juice are the source of the tannic acid. Aging diminishes the bitterness and astringency of tannic acid and allows oxidation to change the flavours of the wine.
You can swallow the wine now (a professional, facing a flight or more of samples, will spit). Now you process the experience.
I suppose this all sounds lardy dardy, especially if wine doesn't interest you. It shows a process, tho, that can be used elsewhere. Ezra Pound wrote a book, The ABCs of Reading, which offers a similar means of looking at the object in question. You do so by doing so. You don't go by what someone told you, you examine the item yourself.
One can easily judge a wine by its price tag or label (too expensive, too cheesy). These represent extrinsic facts of the wine. The intrinsic facts pour from the bottle.
I find this methodical tasting process useful because it removes the like/dislike duality from the evaluation. You note the sensory experience of the wine. Judgments of quality come after.
This process of evaluation tenders the qualities of the wine before judgments of value can be made. I'm no longer just talking about wine. In terms of the creative urge, one should practice a similar effort. Avoid critical judgments before the creative event. Edit later.
I came to write poetry because the definition of a poem seemed so large and embracing. Leastwise, once I discovered that a poem need not rhyme or lope with regulated metre. Gary Snyder famously made a poem by writing out a beef stew recipe. This astonished some, but for Snyder it was a moment of uncritical acceptance of an idea. He did not prevent the possibility. More like: The process of this stew is a poem.
The creative process consists of letting things happen. Just as you let yourself just taste a wine rather than the implication of its label, so you can let the creative process bear you to new precincts rather than report from the same old neighbourhood. Assumptions of form, audience, and reputation stand as barriers to that process. Mindfulness clears the path.