Developing The Wine Mind

Wine Mind

What are all those wine experts noticing while they are tasting wine? What are those guys thinking about anyway?

Well, it might be their laundry. Or, the person next to them slurping and fumbling for the crackers. But, how did they learn about wine in the first place?

Most people learn about wine unconsciously, in random ways that they may or may not be aware of, or remember. A glass here, a bottle there, a cask of Amontillado in Jeres during a short Spanish winter—each experience unplanned, realized only as they become available.

Without a framework for learning and how their mind works when tasting wine, the whole process becomes hit and miss.

Sometimes, it’s great. Sometimes, it sucks.

But, wine is not a thought, it is not even a thing from the standpoint of tasting, it is a sensual experience. If you want to taste at a professional level, you need to separate your awareness of your senses from your awareness of your thoughts.

In short, you need to develop a wine mind.

Body, Mind and Wine

Your ordinary mind is fine for learning to taste the traditional way, which is grapes and geography. That’s perfectly valid but it’s like trying to learn about Picasso’s Guernica by learning the pigments and brushes he used or Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” by learning the difference in the Lydian mode and the Mixolydian mode in music.

The brushes, the pigments, the modes are all true, but they are irrelevant to your experience of the painting or the music.

Thinking about Stairway to Heaven is not the same as experiencing it live in concert.

Thinking about Guernica is not the same as standing in front of it and experiencing all 11 feet tall and 26 feet wide of it live at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain.

You think with a different part of your brain than the part of the brain you experience life with.

Developing a Mind for Wine

To develop a mind wine, you have to become conscious of your attention.

If you are sitting in your living room intently listening to a song and dancing along to the music, you may become completely unaware of what’s happening outside.

But, if a car backfires, suddenly your attention leaps to the sound of the backfire, and for a moment your awareness of the song goes away, and you are no longer aware that it is there.

Then, it shifts back to the song and you forget about the backfire.

Your awareness shifts because your attention shifts.

Awareness is attention.

You can’t control attention, but you can train it.

Training Your Attention

To train your attention while tasting wine, you just have to notice what you notice. If you’re driving and you tell yourself to notice only red cars, all of sudden you’re seeing red cars everywhere where seemingly there were none before.

It’s the same with wine.

Tell yourself to notice where your attention is, and suddenly you will become aware of where your attention is going while you are tasting.

When the wine equivalent of a car’s backfire comes and your mind jumps from one thing to another and back again, you’ll notice. You won’t be unconscious of your own experience.

When you can lay your attention on one thing and leave it there, you can learn to leave it on the senses and follow them as they change and develop, and the wine experience opens up to you.

Noticing What You Notice

To make it easier for you to practice, I’ve made a simple model of your mind with only three choices to look for as you begin. It’s a model of excellence.

Excellence can be the way the best military sharpshooters shoot a rifle or the way Beyonce sings a song—or, as in this case, the way the best professional wine tasters taste wine.

A full model is more complicated but this is more useful because you can carry it in your head or the back of a business card and to guide you in the moment to enrich your experience of the wine.

Three ways your mind thinks about wine that nobody notices

Wine is never about what is actually there—not what is scientifically measurable— it is about what you can perceive.

Life is perception, it’s not science. Drinking wine and thinking about drinking wine are two different things. Sure there’s a huge amount of science in wine, especially chemistry—but that’s not wine itself.

A Model of the Three Perceptual Positions of Your Brain

Where is your attention right now?

A model is only as good as it is useful. It’s not trying to describe all of reality, or reality at all in this case. This model is made using the basic NLP (Neuro-Linuguistic Programming) model of perceptual positions. It’s used as a way to think about the different ways your mind works.

The distinctions that determine the three parts are based on where your attention is at any given moment. There are three places, or positions your attention can go while tasting wine:

FIRST POSITION: direct experience of the wine

When you notice your attention is in first position, you will be fully associated with your body and your senses. Your attention will be on the tastes and textures in your mouth, the aromas in your nose and on where your body is in space. Nothing else.

In a real sense, you embody the wine.

It is the skill of great wine tasters to be able to become a conscious embodiment of the wine—to experience it through their own eyes, their own nose, their own throat directly, as it actually is, without the mediation of thought or opinion.

SECOND POSITION: other people

When you are paying attention to other people and their reactions you are seeing both yourself and the wine through their eyes. Other people’s judgements about you and about the wine are the wine equivalent of a backfiring car.

You are seeing the wine through their eyes, their nose, their body. Your mind has put itself in the other person’s First Position and you become unaware of yourself except as they see you.

This is a valid place for your attention to hang out, and for many people, social interactions are the reason to have wine in the first place.

But, it’s not actually wine tasting—it’s enjoying other people. Great. But, social relationships distract from what you experience while tasting. Shifting your attention to the first position might only take 20-30 seconds during the conversation, then it’s back to the people around you.

THIRD POSITION: thoughts and emotions

When you notice that your attention is on your thoughts, or your emotional reaction to the wine (versus the wine itself) then you are in Third Position. There’s nothing wrong with having emotional reactions and thoughts about the wine, but when your attention shifts to third position to do that, you lose track of the sensual experience of the wine that is occurring in your body.

This is what most people are doing when they are tasting wine, so they end up thinking about wine instead of tasting it and miss the wine itself. Which usually means judging it, giving names to the aromas and textures and such instead of actually experiencing the aromas and textures as they arise in you.

This is valid too, but there is no way you can experience the wine and think about wine at the same time, just like the Guernica example above.

On the upside, you will probably be a very successful wine critic.

Wine vs Wine Knowledge

Hopefully, you will come to realize that becoming aware of wine is becoming aware of yourself. I think you will find that training your attention in this way will serve you in all the other areas of your life.

Your attention will jump all over the place while you’re tasting until you train it to stay put. Whether you’re noticing the wine, or the people, or the facts about the wine doesn’t matter.

I just want you to do whatever you do on purpose and not be at the mercy of your unconscious and the influence of others.

Or, if all that’s too much to bother with, don’t worry. It’s not necessary, it just deepens your experience. Wine is meant to make you happy.

I encourage you to let it do that in any way that works for you.

I’m just giving you different ways of thinking about wine— and telling you what they don’t tell you in wine schools