WINELINGUAL

Message in an uncorked bottle

The song begins with a 5-part harmony in Bb with the lyrics questioning whether life is real or simply a fantasy. The piano vamp and bass guitar shift the track to Bb Major at which point the singer confesses to killing a man and is accepting the fact that he's thrown his life away, the point is musically emphasized by brief modulations to Eb Major by the bass line which adds further despair to the gravity of the situation. It is at this point that the drums come in and continue the Bb Major vamp culminating in a guitar solo played in Eb Major. As the solo comes to a close, the entire band descends and abruptly cuts out into the new key of A Major, which is where the Opera section of the song begins. This operatic portion leads into the hard rock segment of the composition, which ends in a brilliant mixolydian scale in Bb with brief progressions into Eb Major and ending in a seamless transition to C Minor. It reverts back to Eb Major and then abruptly changes to F Major just before it ends with the lines "Any way the wind blows" which has been widely interpreted as the bohemian stance on identity.

Queen "Bohemian Rhapsody" 1975

I apologize for making you read that introduction and I'm fully aware that I've massacred a rock masterpiece by solely describing its musical blueprints. The fact is that I've been playing music since I was 6 years old and have a fundamental understanding of the mathematics behind song structure. But, who cares? I doubt that simply describing the fundamentals will make anyone want to revisit the song. Nor do I believe that describing my emotional response to it would help much either, but it is definitely more relatable. I can wax poetic about how amazing Bohemian Rhapsody is for as long as I have an audience, but nothing I say or write will ever measure up to you hearing it for yourself. Your response to it will be your own, and the best I can hope for is to turn you on to it and hopefully you'll be moved by it as much as I have been throughout my life. And if you don't like it, that's cool too, although you're kind of a soul-less idiot if you don't. Anyway, this is the same conundrum I experience when I attempt to describe wines for this blog. Although I haven't been drinking wine since I was 6 years old, I definitely consider myself an experienced wino and am continuing professional certification on the subject, but once again, who cares? I can't help but feel like I'm explaining the key of a song when I'm describing what the wine smells like, or how epic the solo is when I'm detailing the acid to tannin ratio. "Nothing really matters" indeed!

MUSICOPHILIA

The healing power of music

I can't help but hear music all the time and though it might sound strange, certain wines will remind me of a song. The idea doesn't seem so far fetched once I examine it further. Music and wine are both absorbed by our body, mind and spirit. Good wine, like a great song will stand out and eventually become a pleasant memory. The way music affects neural activity is a subject deeply explored by Oliver Sacks in his book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. Sacks writes: "Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination." There's nothing passive about the act of listening to music and this idea is easily translatable to drinking wine. Both have the ability to birth an instant pleasant memory that will forever exist in my subconscious. I believe that it is because of these formations of pleasant neural pathways that they can easily become intertwined with music, film, art, or books. I've also noted that serious wine drinkers are usually vinyl heads, movie snobs, and/or book nerds. I can honestly say that I've had a Châteauneuf-du-Pape that made a Bobby Womack song pape into my head, an old Chinon that reminded me of a Red House Painters tune and a Priorat that made a Dio-era Black Sabbath song get stuck in my head for weeks. It's nice to know that there's a scientific name for that thing that happens when a glass of red wine unexpectedly conjures the voice of Ronnie James Dio.   

SYNESTHESIA

A Synesthetic wine label

Synesthesia is defined as a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. This definition makes it sound like a treatable illness you see in a pharmaceutical ad, but I believe it's a gift we all possess to some degree. In the book The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia In Art And Science, author Cretien Van Campen describes how some musicians see the colors of a note and suggests evidence of synesthesia in the works of Van Gogh, Kandinsky and in Nabokov's The Gift. As it pertains to wine, author Jamie Goode's book The Science Of Wine shows how the idea of a synaesthetic wine label has already been explored by Eyrie Vineyards in Oregon. Wine labels from Eyrie Vineyards describe the wines with colors and brushwork and were born out of the nauseating task of written wine descriptor notes. I'm glad that science has my back on the whole Dio thing, but there's something too clinical about these definitions. The emotional domino effect that can be triggered by an amazing wine or song can't be fully explained by science anymore than mind numbing descriptors. There's a feeling of connection to all things that takes place that I don't think words will ever capture.

"LANGUAGE IS WINE UPON THE LIPS"

-Virginia Woolf

2008 Domaine Fourrier Vielle Vignes
Gevrey-Chambertin

Conveying this feeling of a connection to all things via words becomes a seemingly impossible task. Charles Bukowski once said that writing is like attempting to swat a fly in the dark and I'm sure writers of any genre have felt this way at some point. And yet, that's the beauty of writing; as the audience we get to read those attempted swats at the fly and somehow become part of the process along the way. As it pertains to wine literature, sometimes there's a novel inside that bottle and you can't convey it with rating systems, comparisons to other vintages, or aroma descriptors. Personally, a song is the first thing that comes to mind since I can relate the texture of a wine to a musical genre. Perhaps I am a synesthete, but I'm not one to place much importance on labels. An overlooked factor that's not often cited in wine reviews is the final and most important component to the entire process of reading about and purchasing a wine: sharing. I take into consideration everything I know about a person before I bring a wine to dinner and it reminds me of the times I used to make mixtapes for friends (ya, I used to be that guy). My goal with those tapes is the same as the wines I write about or bring to a dinner, which is to simply expose someone to something they may enjoy. The best wine I ever had is my favorite because it was shared the night I fell in love. The mixtape I gave to the girl I had a crush on, worked.

Last night, I brought 2 bottles of wine to a double date. At the height of the table's inevitable complaining about jobs, I stopped and asked what they thought of the wine and why they liked it. Before long, we began discussing food pairings, why they worked, what other wines would pair well, other restaurants we wanted to check out and so forth. The negative conversation blossomed into positive talks about life in general and the 4 of us wished the night didn't have to end. Art is to be consumed, art can never be explained, art is powerful; whether it's in a bottle, a plate, a book, a song, or in the eyes of another.