New ideas in wine: how many of them do we take seriously?
As children, we were all told the same thing: after lunch, you have to wait at least three hours before entering the water, otherwise you risk congestion.
But if our certainties are often untested habits, like the one about swimming after lunch, then the question that interests me is not so much what's going on beneath the surface, but what would happen if someone actually tried to undermine that surface: how many new ideas capable of challenging the established beliefs of the wine sector would actually be taken seriously?
Perhaps most of these ideas would be dismissed as a passing trend, a niche phenomenon with no real future, something not relevant enough to warrant attention, because the pillars on which the industry rests are considered elsewhere, and are considered solid. This isn't necessarily a negative judgment on those who work in wine, but rather the observation of an almost automatic reflex: the newer an idea, the more convenient it is to dismiss it as a passing fad, so as not to have to seriously measure it against the foundations of what we already know.
Look at orange wines, natural wines, and alcohol-free wines: big headlines about how these products weren't "real wines," how they were actually "passing fads destined to fade away soon." And yet, articles have been written about them, opinions have been expressed, and most importantly, bottles have been sold, and we're still here talking about them.
Emotions are not innate, and perhaps neither are our certainties.
It's an idea that reminded me of something more specific: psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett's studies on emotions.
Lisa Feldman Barrett explains that for a long time we assumed that fear, joy, or anger were automatic, innate responses, hardcoded into our brains from birth. Feldman Barrett argues, however, that emotions aren't born ready-made, but are constructed each time by the brain through the same kind of predictive process Seth discusses: the brain develops hypotheses about what's about to happen, compares them with what it receives from the senses and past experience, and from that comparison constructs what we call an emotion. In other words, even something that feels instinctive and natural is actually the result of a process, not an immutable fact.
If this applies to a mechanism as deeply rooted as our emotions, one wonders how much it also applies to the much more superficial beliefs we carry with us in the world of wine: definitions of quality, hierarchies of prestige, ideas about what "works" and what doesn't. If even what we feel as instinct is actually partly constructed and therefore, in theory, subject to revision, perhaps even the certainties of the industry are, even when they seem as solid as a physical law.
And so the question remains open: how many of these certainties would actually stand the test, if someone decided to seriously undermine them?
Key points:
- Deep-rooted habits often remain beliefs that have never been truly tested.
- Orange wine, natural and alcohol-free, have demonstrated that fads labeled as passing can become consolidated over time.
- Human perception, according to Anil Seth, arises from continuous predictions of the brain, updated by sensory signals.
- Emotions, explains Lisa Feldman Barrett, are constructed each time, as a response to a predictive process.
- The certainties of the wine sector deserve the same critical scrutiny reserved for human perceptions and emotions.
