Wine Meditation

The proper rituals of wine are purely meditative practices.

Those of you who make a lot of money doing what you do each day, will know that you tend to 'walk through the world' quite fast, and with a distinct order of priorities to all those things that your eye or your mind observes as you transit places, be it through crowds, office spaces, buildings...

And then when you get back to home base, you try to do what is popularly referred to as 'de-compressing.' Which might mean turning the television on, for example.

Oh, my life is so fast...
I didn't see the burgundy for the wine
stains.

This is incredibly dangerous because your brain is being fed endorphins from the process, not from its content. And what that means is that sub-consciously you will be associating (false) good feelings with highly problematic ideas and verbalized content and images.

The same kind of endorphin-led process structure is going on when you sit down to a bottle of very good wine.

It is critically important to have the right company when you are doing that. Or else just sit in a corner of a restaurant by yourself, perfectly alone - with the wine.

But whereas opium or the food of the mythical 'lotus eaters' of Homer's Odyssey will quite literally blank out from the immediate consciousness, memories of the past, especially those bad ones, and even recollections of the very recent past - like what happened earlier in the day - good wine will open the mind to memories of the past, and ideas about the future, but install the construction of all those thoughts into the immediate 'now.'

...Until of course, actual drunkenness takes over and then the whole thing descends into a vague confusion of thoughts and the blunting of important things.

In the world of the last two hundred years or so, the mass-production and commoditisation mindset has seen the relentless cutting of corners when it comes especially to time spent on anything.

Yes yes - you must 'de-compress.'

This week we have witnessed the French government spend half a billion dollars of taxpayer funds to destroy the physical commodity that has come from the French 'wine production industry.'

Call it whichever way that you like but the commoditisation of wine has been a serious mistake.

And the results are in and they are clear.

The fabricated 'causes' of the so-called glut or oversupply of French wines, include the market veering off to craft beers and other things, and even the effects of the Covid lock-downs although I cannot see how that could have been relevant.

The real cause is that you cannot commoditise wine-making. You cannot. You 'can' and it will seem to work for a while and then it will all be revealed as utter folly in the end.

Nobody wants to sit down quietly and comfortably to imbibe wine that is hopelessly 'difficult' to drink, to consume.

Not Tahoe but it's like that - you get
the picture. Late afternoon, chilly,
deep in the pine forest. And someone
is coming up the pathway...
Who is it?

Yes you swilled it around your mouth, towards the back palate, over the teeth at the front 'palate' - and you could tell from which terroir that it came - and you 'impressed' everyone that you were buying dinner for, to be with you there while you were intent on showing off.

And did you enjoy the drink, or did you wallow in the self-indulgence and ego glorification and was that really, the principal thing.

The Latin word is 'meditari.' The Greek is 'theoria.'

And it's a whole long process. Alcibiades enters the scene in The Symposium late, and already inebriated - and he wonders why everyone else there is sober, although clearly they have also been drinking. And he starts to speak 'truth' except not the sort that people would admit to wishing to hear in 'polite company.'

LOL

The French government intends to distill the spirit from the wine it is going to destroy to extract industrial alcohols and solvents and make cleaning fluid and such stuff. You see, that is all that those industrial stocks ever were in the first place. You're killing yourself drinking that stuff.

Time, my friends, it's all about time and how to enjoy life.

But I hear some of you complain: I need to have money, at least some money, enough to have time - the time to enjoy my wine.

Well that's fine too.

Oh god, it's JES. She's going
to make us leave the wine and
go do a work-out!
...I happen to know she loves
Sancerre, though.
So we shall see... What we shall see.

I believe you.

Yes you need some money.

And tell me, Admiral Kirk, who are you inviting to sit with you to open your favorite Saurian brandy, in the commander's state room?

French economist Manu Saadia wrote a book in 2016 called 'Trekonomics' in which he looks at the economy of scarcity by looking at it in reverse.

This is the so-called 'post-scarcity' economy of the Star Trek universe.

The fact is however, that the matter resolves not into simply a material scarcity equation, but can only be solved when intelligent humans discover that it is necessary to admit that humans themselves are the ultimate economy, and that some of them are appealing while most others are mediocre examples of what the human being can be or could be.

To understand wine, a great wine, you must understand how to reflect yourself in the great wine; how a great wine is a reflection of you, the individual, not you the industrial commodity!

Stay with us here on these pages - we will take you to places not even a monetary billionaire can take you no matter how smart or tough or 'well-informed' they think they are. Because what you are encountering here is something quite different. 

As we have retold here before on several separate occasions... ...there was this girl once, a woman indeed, who walked bare-footed up the garden path to the mansion house in Tahoe, and banged loudly on the door with her two Louboutins in one hand, and a bottle of red in the other and two glasses held by the stems: 'I'm lost and I need to find my way to my Grandma's house before nightfall -, can you help me?'

Blink blink.

Of course, the girl with only the one Louboutin is Cinderella.