Wine, especially good wine, is something special. It has always been so. But why is good wine so much more than the sum of its parts? Researchers in both the traditional and social sciences have been attempting to answer that question since the first glasses of wine were poured centuries ago. Wine may be history’s most puzzling and most tested beverage. This work employs artistic inquiry in the form of a fictional short story to suggest attempts to define wine are doomed to failure, and that wine’s mystical powers emerge in conversation about it.
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