This is your brain on wine
Proof that meditating while doing anything is good for you. And a crash course on an overlooked Burgundy: Passe-Tout-Grains.
It’s the end of the month again, and here are some things that wine taught me this month:
A new study found structural differences between a sommelier’s brain on wine and a casual wine drinker’s brain on wine. The somms were activating parts of their brain that use language and taste more easily. Studying wine is a lot like writing poetry—it’s the practice of putting words to something that hasn’t been described yet. Or it’s been described so many ways that it’s lost meaning, and your job is to give it new life. I don’t think this means you need to train like a somm, but I do think you should experiment with bringing a meditative quality to tasting wine. Meditation, btw, also changes your brain.
This oil lamp from Tuscany has stumped scholars for a long time, but they now know that it’s of Etruscan origin dating to 480 BCE, and the bull-horned figure on it depicts Dionysus, god of wine and pleasure, an icon of the mystery cults of antiquity. If you got the last issue of the zine, Wine = Ecstacy and Other Thracian Legacies, you know about the ecstatic dancing of wine-fueled mystery cults of yesteryear. Scholars think this oil lamp was the crown of many celebrations.
A property in California at the heart of the Yurok Tribes’ ancestral land is being given back to them. For 3 years, the tribe has been offering their expertise to the National Park Service to restore the land located in the Redwood National and State Parks. Now, they’ve been returned 125 acres of forest, and they will be the first Native people to manage tribal land in collaboration with the National Park Service. Read the NPR interview here.
How To Read A Wine Label
Did you know you can email me a wine label and I’ll decode it for you?
If you choose any word to familiarize yourself with here it’s the big, medieval-looking one—the one that’s most likely to fall out of your head. Passe-Tout-Grains. Say it 3 times, say it to your mother, say it your dog. Passe-Tout-Grains. When you see this word on the label, you know the bottle is made from Pinot Noir and a little Gamay.
Edited: Originally, I wrote that this is the “name of a region in Bourgogne, France.” Technically, this isn’t correct! Passe-Tout-Grains can come from anywhere in Bourgogne; in other words, it is not a subregion.
Thank you to Simon J Woolf for the edit and for validating that wine is, indeed, confusing.
Passe-Tout-Grains,
Kara
This is fantastic