by Dwight Furrow
Wine tasting is a great seducer for those with an analytic cast of mind. No other beverage has attracted such elaborate taxonomies: geographical classifications, wine variety classifications, quality classifications, aroma wheels, mouthfeel wheels, and numerical scores. To taste wine, in this dominant model, is to decode—to fix a varietal essence, to pin down terroir as if it were a stable identity, to judge typicity (i.e. its conformity to a norm) as though it were the highest aesthetic ideal. The rhetoric of mastery in wine culture depends on this illusion of stability: Cabernet must show cassis and graphite, Riesling must taste of petrol and lime, terroir speaks in a singular tongue waiting to be translated.
But I think this way of representing wine is misleading. Wine is not a stable object to be deciphered but a field of shifting relations into which the taster steps (like Heraclitus’s river.) What if its aesthetic force lies not in measuring a wine against its ideal type but in staging tensions, oscillations, and fleeting harmonies that refuse to hold still?
The claim I will develop is that wine is not a fixed bundle of flavors but a dynamic system, always in motion, whose meaning arises through modulation—the way its elements shift and inflect one another; through differential relations—the contrasts that give each element its character; and through synthetic experience—the way these relations come together as a whole unfolding across time. To taste wine well is not to solve a puzzle, but to follow its movement as it reveals itself.
If wine is an unstable object, nowhere is that instability more apparent than in aroma. Aroma is the paradigm of volatility, and yet much of wine discourse insists on treating it as a set of stable properties—as if “blackberry,” “violet,” or “smoke” could be pinned down like specimens on a chart. But volatile aroma compounds are restless: they evaporate, bind with others, oxidize in the glass, and degrade over time. And they rarely act alone. The same molecule can smell radically different depending on the company it keeps. Isoamyl acetate, for instance, can smell like banana candy in one matrix but is muted or transformed when paired with higher alcohols. Thiols may register as gooseberry in Sauvignon Blanc, but a subtle shift in concentration, or the presence of esters, can push them toward passionfruit or even boxwood. Vanillin, which smells straightforwardly like “vanilla,” deepens dark fruit in Cabernet yet reads creamy and sweet when supported by ripe Chardonnay fruit. Subtle shifts in proportion, temperature, or oxidation can ripple outward with outsized effects, tipping a wine from perfumed to cloying, savory to medicinal, inviting to dissonant.
Even more destabilizing is the promiscuity of olfactory receptors. Each aroma molecule does not map neatly onto a single receptor-type. Instead, a single aromatic molecule may stimulate many receptor types and each receptor type can be stimulated by many aromatic molecules. Each aroma emerges only from the combined effect of many compounds. Blackberry in a Syrah might be traced to a set of volatile terpenes—but which ones? Is the note a property of the grape itself, the yeast strain chosen for fermentation, the soil in which the vine grew, the glass in which it is served, or even the precise moment of the sniff when the balance of compounds has shifted due to oxygen exposure? The answer, of course, is all and none of the above.
Thus, to treat aroma as a stable property is to misrepresent its ontology. Aroma is relational and temporal, co-conditioned by chemistry, environment, and perception. To taste wine aromatically is not to decode a fixed message but to trace a constellation—a moving topography of fleeting signals, some bright, some shadowed, all interacting. The aesthetic challenge, then, is not accuracy of identification but sensitivity to emergence, to how the wine becomes itself through these volatile shifts. Wine does not “have” aromas; it performs them.
Modulation and Expressive Polarity
If aroma reveals wine’s volatility, mouthfeel and flavor structure show how that volatility is organized. The language of wine often emphasizes “balance,” as though a wine were an equation to be solved: acidity neutralizing ripeness, tannins checked by fruit, oak integrated into the whole. But balance is a static metaphor. It implies stasis, a beam held level. What wine actually gives us is movement—modulation—and what gives that movement character are the expressive polarities that shape it.
Every wine is articulated by tensions: acid against sweetness, fruit against earth, tannin against aromatic lift. These are the dynamics that make a wine expressive. And the way they modulate—oscillating, blooming, collapsing, tapering—determines a wine’s identity.
Consider a Mosel Riesling. It begins in sweetness, ripe peach and honey, but almost instantly acid cuts through, converting plushness into crystalline light. That oscillation—sweet to sharp, lush to taut—is the wine’s drama, a modulation across the polarity of acid and sugar. By contrast, a Napa Cabernet might place fruit and oak in tension: blackcurrant and plum rising with force, then contracting into graphite and cedar, tannin framing the body. The wine does not merely contain these oppositions—it stages their interplay as a temporal event.
Sometimes modulation is subtle. Pinot Noir from Volnay, red fruit rises as silk, only to be shadowed by sous-bois and mineral depth; the polarity of fruit and earth never resolves but instead hovers as an unresolved chord. At other times, modulation is more forceful: a young Barolo opens with perfume—rose, tar, violets—before tannin clamps down, reconfiguring beauty into structure, light into mass. Here modulation dramatizes the vertical axis of lift and weight.
Such shifts show why tasting is not recognition but tracing: following how the wine leans, yields, resists, or carries itself. Expressive polarities provide coordinates; modulation gives them life. What matters is not whether a wine is “balanced,” but how it moves within its tensions—how it dramatizes its own instability, how it performs the dance of fruit and structure, gravity and lift.
Temporality and the Architecture of Flavor
Wine unfolds in time. It begins with an attack, swells into a mid-palate, and recedes into its finish. These stages are the wine’s temporal architecture, the structure of its expression. To taste wine is to taste its exquisite timing. But this temporal unfolding is rarely smooth. Some wines surge, others falter, others echo themselves in surprising ways. A young Chablis, might open with a sharp saline bite, almost austere, before broadening briefly into green apple and citrus zest, then collapsing back into chalk and steel. Each phase feels different not just in flavor but in texture and energy. Contrast that with a fine Rioja Reserva where the movement is more layered: bright cherry and spice at the attack, a mid-palate where leather, tobacco, and vanilla emerge like secondary voices in a fugue, and a finish where dried fruit lingers against a faint bitterness of oak. The temporal sequence generates resonance. Flavors return, altered, as if echoing themselves. The wine is not a line but a spiral.
Some wines dramatize temporality with sudden swerves. An orange wine from Friuli may begin deceptively floral, lulling the drinker, before tannins crash in mid-palate, changing the entire register. Others achieve intensity through persistence: a Sauterne’s finish that seems endless, honey and saffron extending long after the liquid is gone, leaving the drinker suspended in aftertaste.
This temporal architecture shows that what a wine tastes like depends on how it changes. Does it bloom gradually, or snap from one register to another? Does it linger with subtle tapering, or cut off abruptly? These are aesthetic questions, not merely technical ones. The pleasure of wine is inseparable from how it stages its own development—its arcs, its echoes, its dissolves. To taste a wine, then, is not to capture a flavor profile but to track a performance across time: the attack, the bloom, the fade. Its meaning lies not in the notes it contains but in the rhythm of their unfolding.
Expressive Polarities and Character
If temporality is wine’s architecture, then expressive polarities are its grammar—the tensions that make its sentences intelligible and its moods perceptible. Every wine speaks through the push and pull of opposed forces: acid against ripeness, fruit against earth, tannin against aromatic lift, sweetness against bitterness. To call a wine “balanced” is to name the resolution of these tensions. But resolution is not always the point. Sometimes it is the unresolved polarity that gives a wine its voice, its singular character. Take German Riesling again. Its drama comes not from erasing the contradiction between searing acidity and residual sugar but from sustaining it. Sweetness expands, acidity cuts, and the two together create a crystalline brightness, a shimmering play that is neither resolved nor stable. Without that polarity, Riesling would be pleasant; with it, Riesling becomes electric. Or consider Nebbiolo again. Perfumed with roses and violets, almost fragile in aromatic lift, yet undergirded by tannins that are famously unyielding. The wine’s haunting power lies precisely in this contradiction: delicacy pulled downward by austerity, fragrance caught in the grip of structure. The polarity is never overcome; it defines the wine’s identity.
Even Chardonnay, the world’s chameleon grape, depends on how its polarities are staged. In Chablis, bright citrus fruit is juxtaposed with stony minerality, yielding tension and linearity. In a barrel-fermented Napa example, tropical ripeness collides with the toast of oak; the wine becomes lush, even theatrical. Both are Chardonnay, but each dramatizes a different opposition and, through it, a different character. These expressive polarities are the material through which wine achieves personality. A Pinot Noir can be brooding or playful depending on whether earth restrains fruit or fruit lightens earth. A natural Beaujolais can feel wild or carefree depending on whether volatility tips toward funk or toward aromatic lift.
Thus, the identity of a wine lies not in its varietal or geographic markers alone, but in how it inhabits its polarities. To taste is to sense which tensions a wine chooses to sustain, which to soften, which to dramatize. Character is not harmony but attitude: the manner in which a wine holds itself between opposing poles.
Context, Coherence, and the Myth of Objectivity
Wine, we are told, should be judged “objectively.” Blind tasting protocols strip away context—no label, no story, no food—so the wine may be encountered in its “pure” form. But this pursuit of neutrality is itself a fiction. Wine is never experienced in a vacuum. Context—glass shape, food pairing, company, even the time of day—inflects how its expressive polarities and modulations are perceived. What counts as “the wine itself” is always mediated by circumstance.
Take a rustic Chianti drunk alone. Its acidity might seem abrasive, its tannins coarse. Yet at a Tuscan table alongside pecorino, olives, and charred meat, those very traits become virtues: acidity slices through fat, tannins echo the bitterness of green olives, rusticity resonates with the earthiness of the meal. The wine’s coherence emerges with its context, not against it. Coherence, then, is not an intrinsic property of wine but a relational one. A wine “makes sense” when its expressive polarities, textures, and aromas resonate with their environment—when the setting, food, and mood complete its arc. To insist on tasting wines as if they were independent substances is to miss their ecological nature.
This does not reduce tasting to subjectivism. The dispositions of a wine—its acidity, tannin, and aromatic register—are real and enduring. But their manifestation depends on relation. To taste a wine well is to perceive how its tendencies can be amplified or softened by circumstance, how its character is co-authored by context. The best tasters are not neutral judges but sensitive cartographers of these shifting contexts, tracing how a wine inhabits not just the glass but the world around it.
Wine as a Site of Perceptual Training
If wine resists stability, if it modulates through polarities and shifts with context, then tasting becomes a form of training—an education of the senses. To attend to wine is to cultivate the ability to notice difference, to follow subtle variations, to track emergence and dissolution. Each glass is an invitation to refine perception itself.
The novice drinker may say of Pinot Noir: “It tastes of cherries.” And indeed it might. But repeated encounters reveal that the cherry note is sometimes tart, sometimes ripe, sometimes shadowed by earth, sometimes lifted by florals. With time, what once seemed a simple flavor becomes a shifting spectrum of possibilities. The point is not to fix “the real” cherry but to learn to perceive variation and follow relations. An experienced palate begins to sense how tannins anchor fruit, how acidity pulls aromas upward, how bitterness restrains sweetness. One does not merely detect components but perceives the choreography of their interaction. In this sense, wine teaches synthetic perception—the grasp of wholes as dynamic fields rather than sums of parts.
Such training reshapes attention itself. A glass of Champagne might first register as bright and festive. But attentive tasting teaches one to hear its layers: the mineral base note, the citrus midrange, the floral top notes flickering in and out. What was once a simple sparkle becomes a polyphonic structure. With practice, the ear for this polyphony sharpens—not just in wine, but in perception more broadly. Wine disciplines us into noticing the ephemeral, the emergent, the relational. The reward is not only a richer experience of wine but a more refined aesthetic sensibility—one capable of discerning nuance in art, in food, in life.
If wine eludes stability, if it speaks through volatility, modulation, and polarity, then tasting becomes something other than an act of classification. It becomes a way of knowing that is provisional, relational, and embodied—a Dionysian epistemology. To taste well is not to secure a fixed truth about a wine but to inhabit its flux, to surrender to the shifting play of its forces while still tracing their contours.
The Dionysian has always unsettled philosophy. Where Apollo offered clarity, form, and measure, Dionysus offered dissolution, transformation, and ecstatic relation. Wine enacts this tension directly. Its aromas evaporate, its flavors oscillate, its texture unfolds in time and fades. Nothing in it remains fixed. Yet precisely through this instability, wine discloses new modes of order—an order of resonance, tension, and affect.
To approach wine analytically—as typicity, varietal essence, terroir reduced to a set of markers—is to insist on the Apollonian alone. But to understand wine aesthetically is to embrace its Dionysian character as well: the way sweetness and acid sing against each other, the way tannins grip only to release, the way a finish lingers like memory half-effaced. Wine knowledge is not the accumulation of facts but the cultivation of attentiveness, sensitivity, and flexibility. It is knowing how to ride with difference, how to feel coherence emerge from relation, how to let a wine reveal itself without forcing it into preordained categories.
To taste, then, is to think otherwise: to know with the body as much as with the mind, to accept instability not as defect but as aesthetic resource. Wine teaches us that meaning can reside in movement, that character can arise from tension, that beauty can be fleeting and still profound. To taste the Dionysian is not to lose oneself in chaos but to find a different kind of order—the order of transformation.