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Grape Reticulation |
| 2021-11-09 |
Grape Reticulation
I had this conversation with one of my uncles. I was telling him I was looking for a Burgundy wine. I had seen that woman and tasted her lips and then lost her, and lost myself looking for her. Burgundy lips.
My uncle had his back to his Robert Parker tasting tour poster, in his restaurant. He paused, then explained to me, "It's just Pinot Noir, I can make you taste Pinot Noir from other places, they all challenge Burgundy easily".
That reminded me of a talk I had seen a few years back explaining how wine had become vectorized, grape varieties circulating faster than roman legions. The talk was pointing to a french book named Le Réseau et l'Infini (The Network and the Infinite). I now wonder if the book title is a pun on the french title of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, which is Le Zéro et L'Infini.
The Network and the Infinite is a 1997 book detailing our world getting mobilizable and modulable. There are almost zero borrowing to the english language in it, yet it points at the Kingdom of England as the origin point for the acceleration of the reticulation of the world.
By mobilizable, it qualifies assets being made mobile, able to sail the network.
I am at half of it and it's thick on setup and thin on examples. It makes it a bit harder to read, but at least it doesn't become a net of loose examples, it firmly carves its way, with an alcove here and there for examples.
The talk pointing at the book was highlighting how, in the last century, we used to point at wine by its "terroir", in contrast with the current century where grape varieties have come to the fore. Gevrey-Chambertin ? No, some Australian Pinot Noir.
The book is a quarter of century old now. It had probably already this "it has already happened feeling" then, but social networks were less explicit, less mobilizable then. Maybe mobilizable is subsumed in monetizable.
