Well, let’s assume that wine has become an aesthetic object. Adding to this taste, we transfer it into the sphere of aesthetic experience. I should also define what aesthetics is, at least trying, although I’m not sure if I am right now able or if I am yet able. Is anyone able to do it at all? Looking for the correct terms and sticking words to them so that they begin to resemble a liquid drunk in millions of litres around the world mainly so that – let’s say – Robert Parker could award his points, or some blogger could complain no longer being able to drink? After all, these are just words, and by blowing them like pasta, we cover another void for the hundredth time—such as weaving tapestries from nothingness.
The aesthetics concerns a rather exciting and mysterious field of experience: it tells stories about beauty, ugliness, sublimation or elegance, and touches on taste, critical skills and artistic perception. So there are two sides to aesthetics: passive and active, that is, it embraces the object, and also tells about its active contemplation, that is, about sensual pleasure and charm. Wine in all this needs to be classified (at least in Polish), and the lazy author will not want to undertake it as an exclusive specialist in fornication and a relatively poor educator. I can outline the framework, and I don’t want to deal with the boring placement of concepts. The aesthetics, then, includes what is above mentioned (and in what I mentioned above, we note that similar principles work everywhere and similar interests are always involved). If we are wrong in such premises, we will have to discard beauty and taste and forever remain on the shelves of supermarkets, among objects, although far from aesthetics.
From this, it follows that wine is a particular case of a work of art, an aesthetic object. Special, it means it would be necessary to clarify this concept, pamper it, lick and soak it up. Indeed, presumably, one should ask all those who have ambitions about wine (I think they have a purpose to write about it) to feel they are more reviewers of aesthetic objects than traders. For this, however, you need to get proper preparation and not to be an ordinary wine drinker who, being a simple consumer, craves only flavour, not understanding. The priests of taste (and I mean by this reviewers, lost between swallowing and slurping) should prepare for this. After all, when writing about a work of art, it would be good to know and understand it, not only from the point of view of tannins and acidity. The fact is that the enthusiastic reception of an aesthetic object requires a soul tense to the limits, more cracked in the experience of constant patching the nothingness instead. Simply saying, you have to be an artist to write about art.
We, on the other hand, are nowadays a flock of philistines. It becomes a shame to be an artist, as, in the end, the artist is a part of an elite (at least in Poland). The aesthetic object, i.e. wine, being material, is created from a dream nonetheless (I dare to remind you that we pay a lot of money for plans, and we can buy material things for pennies around the corner). Hence, the task of a severe reviewer would be to write about dreams. To create new ones. Exactly, to create. After all, dreams arise like music, that is, from nothingness. The craftsmanship consists of wrapping emptiness in such words where sentences become a melody and reconcile with what we feel in our mouths, tasting a work of art. Wine is just for this. To transform ordinary bread eaters into angels and artists, because only then our life in emptiness acquires meaning.