Letter to the editor: Is there a third way to experience wine?

The following received via email from Joël van den Hoogen, a Dutch creative director based in Amsterdam:

I read your editorial “The case for a rigorous, hybrid future in wine criticism” and found myself returning to one particular thought. Your framework describes two ways of encountering a wine, blind or sighted, but an experience I’ve had over the past few months made me wonder whether there might be a third.

Earlier this year I launched my first personal artistic project, What if Wine Was a Woman, a series of sixteen large-format photographic portraits in which each work begins not with a face, but with a wine. The DNA of a specific wine, its grape, terroir, climate, history, texture and emotional register, is fully deconstructed and rebuilt as an entirely fictional human personality.

What I hadn’t anticipated was what happened during the exhibitions.

Visitors were invited to taste an unknown wine and then find the portrait they felt belonged to it. Again and again, visitors, many with little or no wine knowledge, consistently gravitated towards the corresponding portrait. Not always, of course, but often enough to surprise us. And when asked why, they rarely spoke about flavour. Instead, they spoke about character. About recognising something they couldn’t quite explain.

I still don’t know exactly what was happening. But it made me wonder whether your discussion might have a third dimension, not blind and not sighted, but something closer to intuitive recognition. A way of encountering the character of a wine before analysing it.

I should mention, since you write extensively about South African wine, that one of the portraits in the series is based on a Pinotage.

Your editorial made me realise that perhaps we’ve become very good at discussing how wine should be judged, while spending far less time exploring how wine is actually experienced. If that thought resonates, I’d genuinely enjoy continuing the conversation.