EIDOS → OINOS

Nobody stands in front of a Rothko and gives it 92 points.

Wine, curiously, has accepted this sort of thing for years. A number out of a hundred, a shelf-talker, a verdict delivered before dinner has even begun.

Which is rather reductive for something made by particular people, in a particular place, during one unrepeatable year.

Wine has authorship. It has geography, memory and fashion. It has schools of thought and changes of taste. It has people working within tradition and others determined to irritate it. Occasionally, it even has something to say.

Eidos — εἶδος — is form: the idea beneath the surface, the means by which something becomes intelligible.

Oinos — οἶνος — is wine. The Greeks were admirably less theoretical about that one.

@eidoscollective began with art and culture, and with a habit that has proved difficult to shake: look closely, understand the context, learn who made the thing and why — and resist deciding what you think until you have actually encountered it.

It turns out to be a useful way of approaching wine too.

A bottle of Chenin from Savennières is not simply Chenin from Savennières. There is a landscape behind it, a vintage, a cellar, a set of decisions, several generations of received wisdom — and, quite possibly, a winemaker quietly disagreeing with all of them.

OINOS follows those threads.

Past the glass, into the places, people, histories and ideas that gave the wine its form.

From EIDOS to OINOS.

The subject changed. The curiosity didn’t.