The Wine Drinker As Flâneur
What's the point of understanding wine in an era when people do not want to understand wine?
The German cultural critic Walter Benjamin once wrote, “I would like to write something that comes from things the way wine comes from grapes.”
A few summers ago, I tried to plow through the 1,088 pages of Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. This five-pound doorstop of a book is incredibly dense, repetitive, disjointed, quite possibly insane—and many believe…