Last weekend, The New York Times ran a fascinating online exercise about focus and attention. They challenged readers to look at a single painting, James McNeill Whistler’s Nocturne in Blue and Silver, for ten minutes. Yep, that’s right: ten whole minutes of just gazing at an atmospheric, impressionistic, moody, shadowy late 19th century painting of dusk along an industrial section of London’s Thames River.

I participated in this exercise. At first, I shifted into my former-art-history-minor brain, trying to recall everything that I knew about Whistler and his compositions, about how he was one of the first American painters to eschew sentimentality and morality to make “art for art’s sake,” how he’d left the U.S. for Europe, how he’d been deeply influenced by Japanese art, how he’d likened painting to music, and how he’d painted a number of these “nocturnes,” or night paintings. I noticed his odd signature, a butterfly with a long tail. All of this esoteric art knowledge got me through, like, 57 seconds. For the next couple of minutes, my eyes darted furtively around the painting, frantically trying to figure out what else to look for—the brushwork? The focal point? The mirroring? The possible pentimento in the left foreground? 

I had a few friends, who also did the Whistler exercise, later tell me that this is when they quit, right around this three-minute mark. But for me, that’s when I turned off my art-history brain, shut down any sense of purpose, and simply started looking. I looked at the faint lights in the upper right, wondering if there was some kind of bridge or contiguous land. I focused on the shadowy building in the far right, with a tiny light on—was it an office? A home? I spent a good couple minutes looking at the various colors used in the water, and at the detail of the plants in the bottom left. Several minutes I cannot even account for, since I just sort of let my subconscious wander.

In short, the more I disconnected my mind from what I egotistically “knew” about art, the more I actually saw in the painting. Soon enough, my experience went from seeing to feeling, allowing myself to be fully present and enveloped by the atmosphere of the misty nocturne. With this approach, the last seven minutes of the focus exercise glided by in deeply pleasurable, meditative fashion.

So why am I—a wine writer for a wine publication—sharing any of this artsy stuff with you? Well, for me, this exercise in attention and focus is very similar to what I do when I encounter a really good wine. Before you roll your eyes, let me be clear: I do not believe wine is “art.” I have written about this numerous times. My main reasoning is this: No matter how great the wine, I’ve almost never encountered one that conveys complex emotions like fear or loss or grief in the way a great painting or piece of music can—though on rare occasions I have felt sadness in wine. I dealt with this idea in Godforsaken Grapes, where I quoted the great Burgenland winemaker Roland Velich: “Well, art is art and wine is wine. Wine is not art. Wine is older than art.” One of the things that makes wine writing so embarrassing is the recurring idea that wine is art.

Yet just because wine is not art does not at all mean that wine is not worthy of our attention. And the best wines are certainly a complex-enough aesthetic experience to repay that attention. It’s why wine is a part of culture worth exploring, studying, and appreciating.

A few months ago, Nathan Heller wrote a wonderful piece in The New Yorker on “The Battle for Attention,” which explored the question: How do we hold on to what matters in this distracted, chaotic, and technology-driven age? Heller invokes philosopher William James’ definition of art, explaining it as a dialogue between form and perception:

“In its objective state, van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ is daubs of paint on a canvas. On the moon, without an audience, it would be debris. It is only when I give the canvas my attention (bringing to it the cargo of my particular past, my knowledge of the world, my way of thinking and seeing) that it becomes an art work. That doesn’t mean that van Gogh’s feats of genius are imagined, or my own projection. It means only that an art work is neither a physical thing nor a viewer’s mental image of it but something in between, created in attentive space.”

We experience a similar thing with wine. The philosopher John Dilworth suggests—in an essay from the anthology Wine & Philosophy: A Symposium on Thinking and Drinking—that “wine is only the raw material for a series of highly personal improvisational experiences.”

No matter how many classes or how much book learning you do on wine, you can’t understand it unless you put in the time. You have to pay attention. That means, for at least a few moments, leaving behind what you “know” about wine, and simply smelling and putting it in your mouth. That attention is followed by the most important part: free association.

It is one thing to discern aromas and flavors of “cherry” or “vanilla” or “licorice” or “graphite” or “wet stone” or “petrol” or “cat pee” or whatever. But so what? There are no literal cherries or stones or cat pee in the wine. Your mind is simply trying to process the sensory experience of those smells or tastes, in the same way it does when you hear the sounds of music, or look at the brushstrokes on a canvas. But there’s another step after actually sniffing, sipping, and spitting: your mind free associating to create some kind of meaning.

We know, through various classes and certifications, how to train the nose and palate and the mind. But for most people, the next, crucial step of free association is an incredibly difficult one. As Dilworth suggests: “Most people are too inhibited to think of themselves as being capable of engaging in any artistic-like activity, let alone of a kind that requires them to freely and creatively extemporize a personal performance or interpretation of something.”

Thank god, then, that wine offers a quick solution to lower those inhibitions: alcohol. “The alcoholic content of the wine provides a kind of permission, or entry ticket, into a parallel world in which—in the terminology of Immanuel Kant—a free play of the imagination can take place,” writes Dilworth. This is why, when I teach a wine class, the room is awkwardly silent when we taste the first wine, but by the time I pour the fifth, everyone is shouting both their immediate and deepest thoughts on what they’re tasting.

So, when people ask me, “How do I learn more about wine?” my knee-jerk response is: Drink more wine, but probably spend about $5 to $7 more a bottle than you usually do. But this is being cheeky. The way you really learn about wine is to spend some quiet, focused time, paying attention to the wine in the glass in front of you. You basically do what The New York Times asked people to do last week with the Whistler painting.

Perhaps some will say this is just another precious liberal-arts, pseudo-intellectual argument on wine consumption. But I don’t think so. In Heller’s New Yorker piece, a humanities professor expresses how we need to be defiant in our increasingly STEM-based world, where too many “approach the work of human imagination with the objective rigor of a science.”

This professor says, “When I look at the world, I feel that something is being lost or actively undermined. Sometimes it feels like attention. Sometimes it feels like imagination. Sometimes it feels like . . . that thing you wanted when you became an English major, that sort of half-dreamed, half-real thing you thought you were going to be. Whatever that is: It’s under attack.”

Taking a few moments with a good wine—tasting, free associating, paying attention—is one small resistance to that attack.