Good Nose

Good nose, hints of raspberry, soft bouquet with a long finish.

Wine is an interesting phenomenon, and wine buffs even more so: their eloquence in describing the precise nature of a wine, its character and feeling, is often rather amusing.

I don’t drink white wine very often, but did recently with my parents. I noted that the wine tasted of elderflower, which provoked some interesting discussion.

My mother was bemused, thinking that her son had become Oz Clarke. What could that possibly mean? Two things were central to this:

• I was talking rubbish.
• Was I suggesting that simply on the grounds of the briefest of sips I could ascertain that elderflowers were in close proximity to the grapes that produced the wine?

I responded to this with a comment on the nature of the language that one uses about wine. I suggested that drinking wine is a delicate and subtle experience, and one that transcends many of the normal means of talking about the flavours and sensory stimulation that comes from drinking. But is does taste of something, and the elderflower taste that I felt was an imperfect, but helpful, way of talking about it. When understood like this, I don’t think I was talking rubbish.

Also, the suggestion that in order to use that sort of language about elderflowers and the wine there must have been elderflowers in close proximity to it at some significant point in its lifetime, also misses the point. I was not suggesting anything of the sort, but was noting that this particular wine tasted something like elderflowers – I was making no comment on the wine’s history, or no hypothesis regarding its relation to the elderflower of which is tasted.

I wonder if this is rather like God.

Some people think that talking about God is pure rubbish: misleading lies that serve only people’s own self-interest. I don’t deny that this is often the case, yet think the history of Christian theology and the worshipful traditions of the Church have something rather positive to contribute to our living of life.

I wonder if religious language is rather like the words and concepts that we use to talk about wine. They are not the wine, but an imperfect and wholly inadequate attempt to understand the wine, for they are all that we have. And so it is with God: people tell stories about God to provide some narrative unpacking of God’s nature; people talk about God ‘saying’ and ‘doing’ things, though God surely has no voice or hands in any literal sense. This language and these symbols are all that we have in trying to make sense of the deepest levels of our experience, of that which we accept to be true without condition, and of that which inspires, motivates and transforms us.

So what about the Church?

The tradition of the Church in which I am most comfortable is fairly high Anglicanism. It takes these concerns rather seriously, and attempts to address them through the sounds of beautiful music, the smell of incense, the sight of one another and the priest, the touch of a hand being shaken, and the taste of bread and wine. Boring, dull ritualism, some say. Again, no doubt that this can be the case. But I wonder if this focus on the sensory engagement of one’s self with the mysteries of divinity might provide some excellent opportunities to pick up some of the elderflowers in the wine, or the Godness of the divine.