Epistenology: Wine as Experience

Abstract

Abstract: Epistenology is a new paradigm for the enjoyment of wine, based on a philosophical approach which is radically relational. This model suggests a profound shift: from the knowledge about wine to a knowing with it. Through wine, epistenology tries to show how knowledge and appreciation are always participative and intimate actions that make the reality as we perceive it. This is not a subjective position but rather a deeply relational one. Here, wine is approached as an encounter, and epistenology proposes precisely an ecology of attention — as caring, listening, and making — with wine.

Would we ever define an experienced interhuman relationship as objective? A relationship can be real or not real, banal or profound, complicated or superficial, but it definitely cannot be objective. Wine is not a knowledge to be objectified but an encounter to be experienced. It is not about the acquisition of data and information according to an established grammar and syntax but about the creation of images and trajectories.

Approaching wine in this way requires a progressive exposition, and, in this particular case, it asks for the abandonment of classical and familiar standards of the aesthetics of taste, demanding, in contrast, a constant and intimate adhesion to the fluxes of time, that is, to the events that continuously arise and that create an encounter. I call this approach to exposition haptic taste, in opposition to a different attitude, which I call instead optic taste. “Haptic” originally meant a special kind of touch. Haptic perception engages with the fluidity of the materials of life and acknowledges the relational nature of knowledge, going beyond subject-object dualism and moving toward the “participant knowledge” model.

The article was written specifically for the journal “Russia’s Directions”.

For citation: Perullo, N. (2025). Epistenology: Wine as Experience. Russia’s Directions. Vol. 3. No. 4. P. 58–85.

Translated from English by Ella Zhesko.

Additional Info

Submitted: March 11th, 2025

Reviewed: March 27th, 2025

Copyright: © Auhtors, 2025

Distribution: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)