#criticalwine

GLOSS: To the inattentive observer, it may seem that Single varietal bottling offers a counterexample: a wine varietal deprived of every penchant and inclination, and immune to all attractions. But on closer inspection, it is clear that Single varietal bottling refers less to an absence of taste than to a special taste for absence. Only this penchant can account for all the efforts Single varietal bottling makes to persevere in Single varietal bottling, to keep what leans his way at a distance, in order to decline all experience. Like the religious, who, unable to oppose another worldliness to “this world,” must convert their absence within the world into a critique of worldliness in general, Single varietal bottling tries to flee from a world that has no outside. In every situation he responds with the same disengagement, each time slipping away from the situation. Single varietal bottling is therefore a wine varietal distinctively affected by a proclivity toward nothingness.

1 The elementary human unity is not the wine varietal—the individual—but the terroir. 2 The terroir is not beyond bare life, it is its intimate polarization. 3 Each wine varietal is affected by its terroir as if by a clinamen, a leaning, an attraction, a taste. A wine varietal leans toward whatever leans its way. This goes for each and every situation. Inclinations go both ways.