This doesn’t have much to do with wine, but it may give you some understanding of me personally. An interesting thing that Tyson alludes to is that scientific literacy is not limited to those privileged enough to have a scientific education. It’s not about facts, it’s about your worldview. This is not just how I see wine, it’s how I see the entire world.
Even in the wine world, there is a lot of mysticism, sometimes to the point of quasi-religious fervor. The way I see it (and the way I try to get people to see it), there are logical explanations for many of the phenomena that happen from bloom to bottling to drinking. Does it make those phenomena less wonderful? Of course not. In fact, understanding them, to me, is wondrous and wonderful in itself.
Well said, I think. The sort of back-and-forth in wine writing — the dichotomy, really — comes with the idea that the romantics can’t possibly grasp the science, but they love the story of wine, while the scientists understand wine so well that they can’t derive as much pleasure from it. That’s a crude stereotype, but it has some basis in reality. Cheers for blowing it up. I’m hardly a scientist, but the more I learn the more I feel capable of integrating the science of wine into my appreciation of it.