A brief rumination inspired by the Come Over October movement.
I was very fortunate to be appointed to an endowed university chair about 20 years ago, which afforded me great freedom in what I could teach, so long as the classes contributed to the college education goals. My first new class was called “The Idea of Wine” and it quickly became the school’s most popular course, with a waiting list longer than the class list itself, even though the students knew it wasn’t a wine-tasting course and certainly not a wine-drinking course.
That’s the Idea!
Why did I call the course “The Idea of Wine”? Because ideas are important and how we think about things affects how we act. Many people seem to think about wine in terms of its alcoholic content and it is true that alcohol is critical to wine production. Wine isn’t just grape juice with alcohol added. The process of fermentation transforms the grape juice into a very different product. That’s why non-alcoholic wines must first be fermented and then the alcohol removed. You can’t avoid that alcohol step if you want to have wine.
So alcohol is part of wine, but if your idea of wine is alcohol, then it distorts the situation. I noticed this when I wrote a column a few weeks ago questioning whether wine is a good value in today’s marketplace.
This Article was originally published on The Wine Economist
