One of the greatest privileges of my having joined the ranks of those who call themselves wine writers has been the opportunity to attend and speak at the Wine Writers’ Symposium at Meadowood in Napa Valley for many years. I attended the most recent event this past February as a speaker, moderator, and mentor, and it was as wonderful as ever.

One of my favorite moments at this most recent conference was a talk given by Elaine Chukan Brown, who was given simply the four-word prompt: “the relevance of wine.” The talk they gave in response was an example of why they are one of the most compelling speakers and educators about wine today. For those unfamiliar with Elaine’s background, before becoming an award-winning illustrator, wine writer, and wine educator, they were a full-time lecturer in Philosophy at Northern Arizona University.

I was so taken by Elaine’s talk, I asked them if I could publish it on Vinography, since I had recorded it in the moment. They graciously gave me permission. What follows is a complete transcript of their remarks, lightly edited for punctuation and grammar. The excellent photo of Elaine above giving their remarks was made by the talented Alisha Sommer.

* * *

As many of you know, I’m a recovering philosopher. I work on it every day. Some days are harder than others. It never actually fully goes away.

Because of this, I’m going to go ahead and use that. What I want to do is consider briefly a couple of insights from William James. William James was born in the late 1840’s and he is literally regarded as the father of psychology. But he also, and this is the part that I’m going to talk about more, is the first to come up with a uniquely American philosophy in partnership with someone else. The point is that it’s not that he’s the first philosopher in the United States, it’s that he, along with someone else, is the first to create a uniquely American philosophy.

James is from Boston, and later in his career, he gives this series of lectures there in Boston. They’re kind of obscure, he’s not really known for them, but I tend to like obscurity, so this is my favorite bit of William James, these things no one knows about.

Anyway, in this one lecture, he talked about something he calls a certain blindness. And that is also the name of the lecture, “On a Certain Blindness.” Which he illustrates with a story. He was asked to give a talk on the eastern seaboard, but further south from Boston, and so he takes a train down through North Carolina and in that direction.

And now think about this. He’s traveling from Boston, right? The Northeast. There’s trees. There’s giant parks. There’s grass everywhere, right? The geese are in the river. You can go outside and walk around. And parts of the year, I don’t know why you would, because it’s so frickin’ cold. And by the way, I’m from Alaska. Boston’s worse.

OK. That said, think about this context he’s traveling from, right? American Northeast, late 1800s, trees everywhere, even more nature than we think of Boston now.

And he’s taking this train ride down the eastern seaboard. And he comes to North Carolina, and as the train sweeps around this bend and through this valley, he sees naked hills and just stumps everywhere. It’s clear there had been a forest there, and someone removed it. And James is horrified.

He finds it shockingly ugly. He cannot believe someone would remove trees that are so crucial to the beauty of the world we live in. And he just keeps going valley after valley with these trees cut down, and then at one point he looks over, and there’s a little cabin with a little smoke coming out of the chimney. And he thinks, my God, someone lives in this.

Coincidentally, he gets off the train not too long later and ends up meeting someone who says, “Well, how was the train ride?” And he says, “Oh, it was really interesting. I went through these series of valleys where all these trees were cut down.” Thankfully, before he could say more, the person says, “Oh my god, aren’t those beautiful?” And he thinks, “The hell? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“We cannot see the meaning of each other’s lives and experiences unless we’re willing to share them.”

Thankfully, he’s later in his life and has a little bit of circumspection. And so he says, “Well, what do you mean?” And the person says, “My family came here in my childhood, and we had nothing, and we had to make our own food and our homes and all of these things. But there were all these trees, and you can’t grow food inside all these trees. So my entire life, my family and the community that we’ve built have been working on clearing these trees, and now we even have a little home in these valleys.”

For the person that James was talking to, what he perceived as the ugliness of clear-cut trees was the beauty of a life successfully lived. And the insight that James gets from this is what he calls “a certain blindness,” the idea that we cannot see the meaning of each other’s lives and experiences unless we’re willing to share them.

“The meaning, the relevance of these things we encounter, that we think are so beautiful, are so compelling, that we’re so in love with, they’re not in those things.”

In his next lecture, which he called “What Makes a Life Significant,” he goes into this idea further, and he thinks about what it is to be in love. And he talks about how when you’re truly in love, like every detail of the person is like glowing and magic, and you can’t help but just be like, oh my god. And, but he’s listening to a couple who clearly have this thing, and he realizes that he doesn’t get it. He’s like looking at them, and they’re just aglow for each other, and he’s like, “Yeah, they’re fine.” He doesn’t get it. And he also realizes that if one of them started explaining what or why they were in love with the other person, that wouldn’t actually explain it. He still wouldn’t get it. Describing being in love doesn’t actually explain the experience of being in love.

So, as rude as this sounds, this epiphany builds on the previous one, but he says he realizes from these two separate experiences that the magic, the meaning, the relevance of these things we encounter, that we think are so beautiful, are so compelling, that we’re so in love with, they’re not in those things. There’s this weird trick where the person we’re in love with doesn’t have the things we’re in love with. If they did, pointing them out would mean people could get it. They’d see it too. So it’s a funny little paradox, right?

And similarly, the trees versus no trees. The trees themselves are in a funny way, irrelevant to the story of if they’re important or not. Which doesn’t make sense, but think about this, right? It is not the tree’s absence that makes James so compelled by the valley, and that changes his mind about the beauty. It is the person sharing the relevance of that experience, how it transformed that person’s life, how this whole area now is made possible because of all this work that just happens to have been based on cutting down trees.

Okay, so based on this, what the hell do we do as wine writers? We use the word storytelling a lot, this idea of narrative. I have to admit, okay, that I’m autistic. I can’t figure out what these fricking words mean. That’s part of the joy of being autistic — everything’s really literal, so what the hell is storytelling?

Again, forgive me, I’m a recovering academic philosopher. So, in a theory of historical significance, how do we make sense of what historical moments are significant? There’s a theory called NAME. Where N stands for novelty, which we could think of as the uniqueness of the event or the thing. A is the applicability – the relevance of it now. M is for memory, which we could think of as the relevance of it then. (As a quick side note, the Paris tasting was not relevant then. We have made it relevant now. That’s why we talk about it so much).

Anyway, and then E is effect. Part of why the Paris tasting wasn’t relevant then was because it had almost no effect at the time. It’s the repeated revisiting that has given it that effect. Okay, anyway, those are side notes.

So again, NAME. Novelty or uniqueness. Applicability of relevance now. Memory, relevance then. Effect or impact on the surroundings – everything around it.

So in the case of the trees, we’re looking at an individual community, but the impact of removing the trees was huge. The trees are a symbol of this much larger thing.

So what I want to suggest is that we can step back and apply these things to how we address wine. Most of us in this room are so used to valuing wine that the history of wine writing, besides being impressively boring, is treated as if we all know wine’s significance.

But if we’re to take James’ lesson seriously, when we write about wine in that kind of way, where we’re writing about the wine itself, the only people we can convince, the only people that will find that kind of writing compelling are the people who already believe wine is significant.

But as we have heard, wine is about relationships, wine’s significance changes over time, and we’re maybe at this huge new boom coming up that we can’t see yet. The only way to do something like capture that boom is by building those relationships with the people that do not already believe there is magic in every single detail of a glass of wine—those that are not already in love with it.

“The wine itself does not contain its own significance. Our task as communicators of wine is instead to share the very things that give us the choice to see its significance.”

And the way to do this, paradoxically, just like the story of the trees, is not to talk about how we cut them down. It is not to write and talk and share about the wine itself. The wine itself does not contain its own significance. Our task as communicators of wine is instead to share the very things that give us the choice to see its significance.

One of the most important final works that William James wrote was his book on pragmatism. Pragmatism is the uniquely American philosophy that James helped found. In his book on pragmatism, James makes a comment. He says, and it’s so obscure and tiny you might miss it entirely, but again, I’m all about obscurity, so this is my favorite part of the entire book. James writes, “Significance is a choice.”

So now, if we put this together with what we have talked about already, it’s not the trees being cut down that is so important. It’s that the trees being cut down provides a means to talk about what was so significant about this multi-generational—not just survival story—but a complete transformation of the landscape, the culture, the engagement of people, the relationships of these people with this place, and all of this historical change.

Similarly, and this is harder for me to wrap my head around, too, but like in the in-love story, there’s this weird trick where if you don’t already see what there is to love about that person, listing the things that you love, or that the other person loves, is not going to show you anything. So you have to share a different kind of story.

“For us to share the significance of wine, we must set aside the need to talk about it and instead treat wine as the means through which we instead have the ability to describe a context, an impact, a life change, an economic transformation, or the building of cultures and relationships that offer us the ability to choose to see its significance.”

And so what I’m suggesting is that wine’s significance comes not from communicating as if we’re already love with it, which is what, my god, all us wine writers, wine industry, wine marketers, every part of the industry does.

We’re so outrageously myopic. Just like I said, the Paris tasting in and of itself was not significant; it had almost no effect at the time. But wine’s belief in it did. Our persistent determination to make it significant is why it’s relevant now and why it has an effect now. It did not then.

What I’m saying is that for us as communicators, the paradoxical thing is that for us to share the significance of wine, we must set aside the need to talk about it and instead treat wine as the means through which we instead have the ability to describe a context, an impact, a life change, an economic transformation, or the building of cultures and relationships that offer us the ability to choose to see its significance.

Thank you.

Photo of Elaine Chukan Brown by Alisha Sommer and courtesy of the Wine Writers Symposium