Over lunch some years back, my late friend and Evening Land Vineyards founder Mark Tarlov traced wine’s enduring appeal to its being "adjacent to everything everyone wants to do with their lives." 

This thought has compassed my understanding of wine’s resonances ever since. No other human pursuit of which I am aware credibly claims such precise and varied points of access to something much larger than mere pleasure—something that might be called human fulfillment. 

In the wake of a recent surge of articles and statements from public figures apparently hellbent on warning of the risks of alcohol consumption, this largeness that wine invites us to needs equally fierce advocacy. This proliferation of recent mainstream journalism warning of the health risks of drinking alcohol—‘any amount is bad!’—is such that participating publications hardly need itemizing, though The New York Times is clearly the most eager and devouring among them. There are traces, and more-than-traces, of neo-Puritanism in these articles—an attempt to connect freedom with abstinence, and giving up drinking with empowerment. 

We know young people are drinking less alcohol of all types. The darker and more brooding storm cloud on the wine industry’s horizon is the declining wine consumption among self-professed wine lovers. The fine wine industry has been sustained for decades by passionate individuals who consume wine regularly. But right now, the specter of such professedly passionate folks drinking less is all that everyone involved in wine is talking about right now. At no other point in my fifteen years as a sommelier and wine shop owner has the continued participation of wine-loving people felt so tenuous. 

And yet. Wine contains the capacity to enlarge and enhance human experience in a way that’s more typically associated with visual art, music, and poetry. To view a picture or attend a symphony, though, primarily involves observation. Wine calls to us as active participants, and a more dynamic and collaborative invitation.

Wine first calls us into ourselves—towards an inwardness that  transcends simple vanity, or pleasurable time wasting. Good wine sharpens attention to our own sensual experience, and directs these impressions toward deeper understanding.Those of us who drink wine regularly, particularly with like-minded others, know this sequence well: Sensual impressions converge varietal, site, and human intentionality (that is, winemaking). This experience fires our curiosity. It invites a rare quality of thinking and feeling, a process that reminds us of our capacity for confronting life's largeness.

 In our screen-obsessed culture how many experiences combine intense enjoyment with the more labor-intensive (and richly rewarding) pleasures of articulating subjective experience?

Literature and poetry do, though fewer and fewer of us answer that call. (See: screens.) Movies do, too, to some extent, though a cinematic experience necessarily prioritizes observation over active participation. Wine helps us to recover some of the inwardness we so otherwise eagerly give away. A moment appears, moves, and is gone. Wine’s rewards are proportional to the quality of attention we bring to them. As a result, we learn to bring the best of us to the best of them. Our culture was once a culture of voluntary analog experiences. How many remain? 

To drink good wine attentively, with a full and open self, is to gain an expanding capacity to think and feel. In the age of endless scrolling, wine can return some of that attention—and, more crucially, some of ourselves—back to us. 

Another of wine’s enlarging effects involves how it carries us into realities beyond our own. Wine tangibly reminds us there are other worlds beyond our bubble. We begin by enjoying Burgundy’s wines; in time we come to learn that Burgundy is a way of thinking about the world. That single-varietal, place-centered wines express cultural priorities—in the value of unaltered naturalness, and in the value of bearing witness to it and its evolution. Soon we discover Burgundy’s aesthetic temperament, and its appetite for variety and distinctiveness over an idealized perfection. When we drink Burgundy, we drink an attitude about the place of humankind in the natural world. Delicious? Yes!  

Blending cultures such as Bordeaux or the Southern Rhône, on the other hand, view vineyards less crucially, and thus view winemaking as a creative endeavor, as opposed to viewing it as a form of stewardship. Blenders tend to direct nature toward their own ends, and edit out grapes that fussily resist directing. These wines, too, reveal much about their makers and the cultures from which they originate. 

The term ‘sonder’ describes the realization that the lives of passersby are as complex and difficult as our own. The word aches with lost opportunity, and powerfully conveys the strange elusiveness of connecting with those beyond our established few. We spend our lives in proximity to others, and others’ sensibilities, yet direct less attention towards this than most of us wish. Wine repairs this. Through individual wines we willingly meditate upon the worldview of their creators, and learn to truly see it. 

Emphasizing the largeness wine provides us likely scandalizes those wedded to the current anti-alcohol mood. But all reasonable persons agree that chronic stress and an oddly persistent meaninglessness are among our moment’s most urgent pressures——the real Goliaths of our time. Wine addresses these with an effectiveness that’s more potent and permanent than many alternatives.  

Perhaps the bigger question is  why, at this juncture, do self-improvement efforts so reflexively lunge towards sensual restraints? The ancients saw other possibilities. Dionysus, god of wine, is also god of creativity and divine inspiration. Plato in his Laws cited wine as a tool for achieving wisdom and balance. The Bible cited wine as a means to ‘gladden the heart of man,’ and Horace elegantly equated wine with both clear-mindedness and a deeper human fulfillment. Michel de Montaigne, perhaps wisest of all writers after Shakespeare, found wine to be ‘the most beneficial gift of nature to man.’ Wine remains the most abiding and powerful ritual of self-love available to us, whether we enjoy it in the company of others or alone.  

As with music or poetry, wine will not make us better neighbors or better people. But it can ground and enrich the self—the total self—in a way that dramatizes and broadens the experience of being alive. It leads to a closer and deeper awareness of the beauty and diversity among us, of which each of us form a small yet important part. 

We begin our wine-loving lives believing we possess wines. In time we come to know that great wines possess us, change us—and ultimately return us to ourselves richer, wiser, and even stranger—than we could ever hope.