From Terrain to Brain: Forays into the Many Sciences of Wine PDF
Preview From Terrain to Brain: Forays into the Many Sciences of Wine
From Terrain to Brain From Terrain to Brain Forays into the Many Sciences of Wine ERIKA SZYMANSKI Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress ISBN 978– 0– 19– 764031– 9 DOI: 10.1093/ oso/ 9780197640319.001.0001 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America The images preceding each chapter title page and the icons used throughout the book were designed and created by Sumanma Wadhwa. Contents Introduction 1 1. Geography 11 2. Vines 23 3. Terroir 37 4. Minerality 53 5. Climate 63 6. Weather 71 7. Yeast 85 8. Microbiome 101 9. Alcohol 115 10. S ulfur 133 11. S ugar 151 12. O ak 163 13. W aste 175 14. F lavor 185 15. H ealth 203 16. G lass 221 Coda 235 References 241 Index 251 Introduction The world of wine is vast and crisscrossed by innumerable connecting paths. Wine is a subject for physics and chemistry and biology, for plant and microbial genetics, fluid dynamics, color science, sen- sory science, soil science, and nearly every other natural science you might think to name. It’s studied by researchers in applied scientific domains such as medicine and horticulture. It’s significant in history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, geography, literature, rhetoric, economics, and marketing. Each studies wine through its own lens. In every case, looking through one lens invokes others, so that ways of knowing anastomose around wine as a social, cultural, and scientific phenomenon. The many sciences of wine, in short, are messy and multiple. That’s a good thing. Science— or sciences, since there are many of them— is about building pictures of what things are and how they work. The more de- tailed our pictures become, the more we can see; the more we can see, the more we can enjoy. Unfortunately, wine science is often presented as a rather settled list of facts to memorize. Memorizing facts is tre- mendously useful for acing exams or showing off at parties, but oth- erwise maybe less useful for enabling enjoyment. And talking about facts is inclined to give the impression that those facts are the singular, authoritative way of describing what things are, rather than one way to make sense of them. Science begins as a mode of organized curiosity, a practical enterprise of figuring things out, following one of multiple potential paths for doing so. Turning science into lists of facts there- after is a choice. This book contains plenty of facts, well seasoned with hypotheses and speculations that might grow into facts if researchers keep researching them. But they’re not really the point. The point is that asking questions about wine, trying to get at how wine works, can’t
The list of books you might like
