Wine, Pleasure, Beauty
Wine, happiness, a culture of pleasure. An exploration that roams from a local wine drinking community to a whole world of passion, beauty, and pleasure that awaits us out there. You know, eat, drink, and be merry-type stuff. Let's dive into wine and pleasure, but not take ourselves too seriously. After all, as a friend of mine likes to point out to beer geeks and wine freaks, "we're just talking about 10 minutes of pleasure, that's all."
To connect with me elsewhere, I can be found on Twitter @RonMarks, on Cork'd to share what we're drinking, or for my more personal mindcasting stuff, check out www.ronmarks.tumblr.com, or you can simply ask me a question here
Cheers!
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Showing posts tagged philosophy
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”Truth, like art, is in the eye of the beholder. You believe what you want, and I’ll believe what I know.
~ Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (via gatekeeper) (via fairphantom)
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”Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
George Bernard Shaw (via theblondegypsy)
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”Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived. The truth is too complex and frightening; the taste for the truth is an acquired taste that few acquire….
….The world winks at dishonesty. the world does not call it dishonestyWalter Kaufmann (via shynessisnice) (via fairphantom)
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A thank you, and a note on this new wine blog of mine
First of all, I would like to say thank you to all of you who have started following this blog, which I just started for avocational reasons a couple of weeks ago, and for those of you posting great wine stuff, from quotes to beautiful wine label designs to informative articles. I just wanted to take a moment and say what I hope to do with this space, and what I hope to offer for your attention.
My intention for this wine blog is to be all over the map, literally and figuratively. This will be a reflection both of my personality, as well as, I hope, the expansiveness of the topic at hand. I have never been someone who can focus on any one thing. So I will be quite unable to do a normal wine blog that is focused on one aspect, be it tasting, wine markets, a region, or anything of that sort. A good friend and colleague of mine was once trying to give me some gentle feedback on where he wanted to see me go with my career, and he said he admired how much and how broadly I read, but that I may have been holding myself back by being such an intellectual dilettante. Intellectual dilettante. That stuck with me. So I am. Expansive, not focused. A fox, not a hedgehog. In an age of hyperspecialization, I can see the forest. This is what I hope to bring to this blog. A combination of postings from blogs I follow, wine news, wine art, plus my own content in the form of sharing wine-related readings, and connecting wine topics to as much of the broader world of knowledge as I can. I want to explore the whole world, intellectually and experientially, and I want to use wine, that magical, transformative substance, as the springboard for doing just that.
In his introduction to a collection of his essays, Aldous Huxley wrote about the inventor of that art form, Montaigne. He said that what Montaigne was able to do with the essay was to indulge in free association, artistically controlled. “One damned thing after another - but in a sequence that in some almost miraculous way develops a central theme and relates it to the rest of human experience.” No one can ever accuse me of not aiming high, for this is what I intend. While Montaigne wrote about his self, and about every topic he took up through the lens of his self, I am going to do the same with wine as the lens. Every topic under the sun, through wine. No focus. No linearity. No predetermined progression. Just a worldview, a curious mind, and a passion for wine, love, philosophy, literature, history, The Good Life, and all the rest as well.
What can you expect from me at the least? An intellectual journey. Curiosity, inquiry, inquisitiveness, and wine. I am going to allow this wandering intellect and imagination of mine to follow my passion for wine wherever it leads me, and I invite you along with me. I want to see what happens when I use wine as a key to viewing the world, to see if there is wisdom in wine.
So now, I bid you a brief farewell. I’ve only begun this hobby but will be taking the week off to go hang out in the Rockies, with a respite from the internet and cell phones and the like. But I plan on coming back with some good stuff to share, some ideas, and some reviews of wine books, and engaging with my fellow wine lovers. Thanks again for following already this brand new blog of mine. See you soon.
Cheers,
Ron
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”In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations.
Jean-Paul Sarte (via myserendipities)
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”of all the things which wisdom provides to make us entirely happy, much the greatest is the possession of friendship.
epicurus (via nosex)
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Do Wine Professionals Get More Sensual Pleasure Out of Wine?
Hell no! Here’s why I think not.
There is more than one kind of pleasure that can be derived from drinking wine. There is sensual pleasure, the experience of smelling a tasting the wine itself, and there is also cognitive pleasure, the pleasure that comes from thinking about wine, discriminating, judging, and talking about the stuff.
Wine professionals and those who have become wine connoisseurs through passionate exploration and learning can definitely derive more total pleasure from the wine drinking experience because they develop a capacity for the cognitive pleasure side of things, much as a lover of literature can do after reading a great many classics. But this is total pleasure, and says nothing of the sensual pleasure itself.
It doesn’t take any special ability to enjoy a great wine. Just because you can’t name it, judge it, talk about it like a Robert Parker wannabe, and give it a number, that doesn’t mean you can’t smell and taste it in exactly the same way a wine critic does. In fact, I’ve read reports on brain imaging studies done on wine critics to see what’s going on with them while drinking wine and how they differ from the rest of us, neurologically. You know what the difference is? It’s the linguistic centers of the brain lighting up like a pinball machine that differ. Nothing else.
So if you want to improve your total enjoyment of drinking wine, you can do so by adding to your wine knowledge and vocabulary. But if you have no desire to indulge in this kind of cognitive activity while drinking, and simply want to enjoy that magical stuff, by all means, do so.
Sensually speaking, you aren’t missing a thing.
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”Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever.
Aristophanes (via teazersavage)
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Peter Bouckaert, the brewmaster at New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins, on his philosophy of beer and pleasure, putting it all into perspective.
