Some Preliminary Notes on a Tasting

[semiotic analysis of above image forthcoming]

On an afternoon inundated with a chewy extraction of salt hanging crystalline in the air– a salinity in the feverish cadaver that is humidity– occurred a confluence of systems, a social representation of an image and the image itself, a portfolio tasting as a representation of a glass of wine. To suggest that an intentional assemblage of individuals tasting a homologous panoply of wine within a deliberate space is a system is to suggest the attributes of this system, the phenomenological components (space, material, aroma) consist of the simultaneous multiplicities of perceived values, hidden spaces of meaning, aesthetic capital.

The pinot blanc as a wine to one is a greasy, pitchy, resin and to another is creamy, sweet, papaya and to another wet schist, cool gravel, anise– a chemically-evolving system whose esters and phenols change with the sounds, pressures, deformations of the room. Likewise,the pinot blanc is a component of the portfolio tasting that performs different phenomenological functions, an object on a table being poured into a glass by an individual who lends new contours to the morphology of the wine.

This system is self-regulating with its overall display of austerity of material, economy of proportion, and most conspicuously its half-full glasses tumbling to the floor to become smaller pieces of themselves, waking the eudaemonic life of the room from a parasitic, salty slumber into the complexity of experiences exploding in the glass and throughout the room as the wine is soaked instead, into the fibers of a cloth.