Message in a bottle

Any wine is not just something to drink. The difference there is between any wine and any other drink lies in a very simple fact. Wines, because it is more correct to call them that, are real messages in a bottle, bottles of territory, they tell about places, people, traditions. Also of production techniques, of different types of grapes, which perhaps identify a territory, of particular landscapes, of climatic situations.

No other “thing to drink” succeeds in doing all this, in possessing an evocative, even symbolic value comparable to that which the thousands of different wines manage to represent. What follows from this is that no, talking about wine is not simply describing organoleptic sensations, but is a more articulate and complex operation, also sensory, but above all cultural.

Wine as an expression of origin, thought and identity

Judging its quality has to do with all of this, and not only with the personal taste of a taster or sommelier, however good and experienced he or she may be. Nor is it just about the oenological technique, or techniques, which constitute only one part of the story and perhaps not even the most central part, at least as far as the popularization aspect of the matter is concerned.

Personally, I have always tried to combine the more humanistic aspects of wine with that scientific part, linked to oenology, the study of viticulture, and the thousands of technical aspects that underlie production, but which alone are not enough to account for the uniqueness of the world of wine.

Even judgments in the end have to do with all this. They are the result of an overall analysis, of how that particular wine succeeds in representing its origin, which means terroir, of course, but also vintage, viticultural and oenological choices, even the “philosophical” convictions of the various producers that go into forming those messages in the bottle I mentioned earlier. Precisely this, in my opinion, is what matters.