From Terrain to Brain: Forays into the Many Sciences of Wine

265 Pages·2023·17.892 MB·English

by  Erika Szymanski

From Terrain to Brain

From Terrain
to Brain
Forays into the Many Sciences of Wine
ERIKA SZYMANSKI
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CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress
ISBN 978– 0– 19– 764031– 9
DOI: 10.1093/ oso/ 9780197640319.001.0001
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Contents
Introduction 1
1. Geography 11
2. Vines 23
3. Terroir 37
4. Minerality 53
5. Climate 63
6. Weather 71
7. Yeast 85
8. Microbiome 101
9. Alcohol 115
10. S ulfur 133
11. S ugar 151
12. O ak 163
13. W aste 175
14. F lavor 185
15. H ealth 203
16. G lass 221
Coda 235
References 241
Index 251

Introduction

The world of wine is vast and crisscrossed by innumerable connecting
paths. Wine is a subject for physics and chemistry and biology, for
plant and microbial genetics, fluid dynamics, color science, sen-
sory science, soil science, and nearly every other natural science you
might think to name. It’s studied by researchers in applied scientific
domains such as medicine and horticulture. It’s significant in history,
psychology, sociology, anthropology, geography, literature, rhetoric,
economics, and marketing. Each studies wine through its own lens. In
every case, looking through one lens invokes others, so that ways of
knowing anastomose around wine as a social, cultural, and scientific
phenomenon.
The many sciences of wine, in short, are messy and multiple. That’s
a good thing.
Science— or sciences, since there are many of them— is about
building pictures of what things are and how they work. The more de-
tailed our pictures become, the more we can see; the more we can see,
the more we can enjoy. Unfortunately, wine science is often presented
as a rather settled list of facts to memorize. Memorizing facts is tre-
mendously useful for acing exams or showing off at parties, but oth-
erwise maybe less useful for enabling enjoyment. And talking about
facts is inclined to give the impression that those facts are the singular,
authoritative way of describing what things are, rather than one way to
make sense of them. Science begins as a mode of organized curiosity,
a practical enterprise of figuring things out, following one of multiple
potential paths for doing so. Turning science into lists of facts there-
after is a choice.
This book contains plenty of facts, well seasoned with hypotheses
and speculations that might grow into facts if researchers keep
researching them. But they’re not really the point. The point is that
asking questions about wine, trying to get at how wine works, can’t