Hello friends
What happens when a wine writer who loves to write whimsical fiction is asked to write for a serious wine writing competition instead?
Not much is the answer.
Three months ago I submitted my response to the Jancis Robinson wine writing competition 2026.
For those in the know, Jancis is a big deal in the world of wine, and her competition sees entries from all over the planet, from war-torn countries such as Ukraine, to desolate regions such as the Arctic Circle.
The brief this year was to write about an unusual wine pairing, a subject I absolutely love. I preach that wine is a form of art, and so I wonder often at the reasons why we tend to only pair it with food. Why not music? Why not a famous painting? Why not a piece of writing? (Something I have done for a number of you on Substack already).
In my response, I decided to go a bit more… Out there. I paired wine with the Taoist concept of Wu-Wei, using the teaching of Wu-Wei as a vehicle to explore how both wine and words are in essence, essence-less.
Spoiler alert: My entry did not even get shortlisted. I think it was a bit too experimental. The other entries I read were beautifully written, but much more direct. Something I shall consider ignoring for next year’s entry as well.
As a result of not even placing, I have instead opted to share it here with you lovely people. Exploring both the piece of writing, and its influences through my Substack mission lens.
Joy in the process | Creativity as a skill | Wonder as a feeling.
So, let’s get into it!
The Wu-Wei of Wine
‘How are you perceiving me?‘ said the text to the reader.
With your eyes you see me, left to right, one by one - sip by sip, you absorb me until understanding dawns. As the words and sentence structures macerate in your consciousness, they reveal themselves to you as meaning. Then you take that dawning understanding, fermented and bottled within your unique life context, and you pair it with your catalogue of experiences.
Words of self-help pair with positive change.
Fiction pairs with empathy.
Poetry pairs with awe.
And yet words are only second-hand artefacts of reality. So what of wine?
Wine is sudden, it arrives, not left to right, not drip by tiny drip, but with immediacy. Flavours flood your mouth as fast as experience can be experienced. It is effortless to taste wine; you simply apply it to your senses. That is it.
Wine education brings proficiency in tasting, but don’t worry, you have been preparing for this your whole life. You intuitively understand flavour, and even if you don’t consciously, your tongue will fill you in on the details. Acidity will squeeze your eyes tight. Flavours of apple will remind you of childhood. Tannin will make you lick your teeth.
The wine will reveal itself in your mind as meaning. Then you take that understanding, fermented and bottled within your unique life context, and you pair it with?
Food? Is that it?
A perfectly adequate pairing for sure, and yet wine invokes so much more. Why not pair it with your very existence, as you might with the words you consume on a daily basis?
Is there more to find?
Level 1 - Environment | Domaine Bernard Baudry | 2023 Chinon - Les Granges
You are in your allotment, a Loire Cabernet Franc resting slightly chilled in your shed. Your hands have the smell of dried earth baked under your nails, clay and ceramic. Raindrops settle on your brow, a fresh counter to the intense warmth dug from the earth. Retreating from the weather, your coat hem brushes the tomato plants, releasing their spicy, verdant aroma.
Sheltered now, you unfold a camping chair. As it pops into shape, a clatter of sand pings off the wooden floor. Salt lashes the tongue as the memory of a sea breeze from your last beach trip swims across your mind’s eye. A pail of raspberries, redcurrants, blackberries and strawberries rests in the corner. A little juice runs at the bottom, releasing sweet fromage frais aromas.
As the rain comes down harder, the pitter-patter is punctuated by the pop of a cork, the glug of wine being poured. The aromas mingle with your dusty hands. The first sip lands, but by now, you have already tasted it.
Wu-wei is a Taoist concept that roughly translates to ‘effortless action.’ English lacks a direct equivalent; its meaning is best felt through the gravity it exerts on experience.
Fortunately, this exact illustration of the flimsiness of words to describe Wu-Wei is wine’s greatest strength.
Words try to describe something that is already a memory, a flavour in the mind, half forgotten, formless, pushed and pulled by conceptualisation, and neatly stored in the filing cabinet of a sentence. Whereas a sound, when it arises, is automatically heard. A flavour, when it appears, is automatically tasted; a sensation, when it erupts, is automatically felt. So why not pair wine with...
Level 2 - Feelings | 2021 Villa Maria Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc
Ramshackle stairs creak, danger, trepidation. A shower of beads hung in the doorway stroke my hair. Eyes ablaze with lights, filling up with excitement. A second-story beach bar, Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, Costa Rica.
Two sides of the room open to the world, wind on my face. Nostalgia for my old dreams. Tropical trees sing to my heart, the song is the sound of aspirations being realised. Stormy electricity in the air, raising goose-pimples. The ordered wine arrives with an umbrella and ice, served in a coconut shell.
Electricity in the grapes, fresh from New Zealand. Zing - grapefruit & petrichor. Zap - lightning arcs over the jungle. A rush of energy courses through my body, prickling at my skin. This feels SO good.
Waves wash on the nearby beach. Wine rushes through a straw. Tropical rain starts to clatter upon the tin roof, and acidity clatters against my teeth. Gusts brush through trees, carrying memories of botanical gardens. Wind swirls the wine’s aromas into the shape of the jungle. Sensory whirlpools capture my brain and body. Sounds, shapes, smells, tastes, and feelings suck me deep into the present moment. Bringing me home.
Embracing the rawness of your senses enlivens you. Paradoxically, words, the very tools used to communicate wine lore, are in themselves merely concepts.
Words and sentences are like a fisherman’s net held up in front of an island on the horizon; the tiny squares serve to break up the view of the landmass into little measurable chunks. That’s a tree, that’s a cliff. That’s a tannin. But experience is not like that. It is flowing and impermanent, it has no shape and contains no essence. It has no borders, and neither does wine. It flows literally and metaphysically, simultaneously with experience. Wu-wei.
Level 3 - Communion | Domaine Marcel Deiss - Grasberg 2022
Flowing, unctuous, glinting, exciting.
What a night.
Tumultuous tinklings, speaker bound but room wide, pumped deep into our mysterious heart-filled caverns.
Nothing and everything mingles in the dance.
My sister raises her glittering beacon unto the sky, light pours like liquid golden honey, oozing down between the cracks of the beat. Feet slowly subsumed.
Warmth rumbling and tumbling up the limestone mountain of our fractured terroir, opposing gravity. Childhoods spent apart.
A million grapes in a glass. They all had separate lives, their own scars. Some are not even familial, just outcasts in a field.
How could we possibly resist the borders of our upbringings?
The honey connects us. Atoms. Thoughts. Experiences. Falling like drops of rain, united in the ocean.
Mind stills. Petals spring, boundingly, bountifully forth.
Waves splash about, a skin above the connective tissue of the deep.
Music brings communion
Wine teaches
... - …
Joy In The Process
I hope that upon reading this you can feel how much fun I was having. This combined three of my favourite things. Wine, metaphysics and linguistic philosophy, and writing.
I knew early on that I wanted to deconstruct what wine writing even is. In my day-job I write articles and emails about wine almost daily, and it gets tiring when every entry reads like the one before. Familiar descriptors, the same focus on winemaking and flavour. It’s interesting, don’t get me wrong, but as I stated in the piece. Wine for me is so much more than a description. It is experience in one of its more raw and alive forms. In that sense, I simply wanted to show that wine is a feeling, and not a description. And boy did I have fun doing so.
The three wine descriptions were a complete experiment in how far I could take words and bring them to a place where they still felt coherant, but also made little sense.
Oh and by the way, the three wines (in order as written) are also delicious. I would recommend trying them!
Creativity As a Skill
A part of practicing creativity is the ability to let go of expectations. As much as I would like to have done well in this wine writing competition, I also didn’t let that be a determinate for what I should write. And true, that does mean the final product will not be to everyones taste, but that is wonderful. This world is beautiful because of its diversity.
I don’t suggest that writing or doing any art for commercial gain is a bad thing. We all have to drink from the font of capitalism. But do consider also that some of the most memorable art in our lives has also been commercially successful. Pink Floyd’s - Dark Side of the Moon. Spongebob Squarepants. (Yes, I said it). Hamilton the musical.
So, make sure to flex your creative muscles sometimes, you never know what people will fall in love with.
Try these excercises next time you want to explore your creativity more:
Cliché, but actually dance like no one is watching. Let yourself really go wild and enjoy having a body.
Spend five minutes talking in a funny voice during a conversation and don’t explain it.
Take a feeling and try and describe it in either one drawn line, or five linked words.
In this piece I literally tried to do that third idea. I took the feeling of having a wine and spotify night with my sister, and I tried to translate the absolute onslaught of feelings those evenings bring up. From happiness, to nostalgia, difficult memories and happy ones, shared love and a zest for life. All of it was channelled into that paragraph. It doesn’t matter if it was successful. It matters that I touched that part of my soul, and gave it the chance to be free.
Wonder As a Feeling
There are few things in life that have filled me with as much wonder as studying Taoism and Buddhism.
I was an atheist for most of my life, and I would still consider my beliefs to broadly so. The great thing about these two spiritualities and philsophies is that they don’t require you to have faith. They instead ask - “Well, hey there Graeme, why not read what we have to say, and then give it a go yourself. If it doesn’t do it for you, thats cool.”
I remember the first time I read the Tao Te Ching vividly.
Much like my aims for this piece, it was a book that washed over me. Meaning in the text wasn’t always clear, but it felt like something, and the more I read the more the feeling grew into a sense of wonder. Wonder at nature, wonder at our ability to have awareness, wonder at the world.
To combine this with two of my other passions was such a burst of energy. And so I would advocate that —if you too have things in your life that truly fill you up— do not shy away from portraying that in your work!
People will tell you art comes from suffering. I beg to differ. Art comes from feeling, and wonder, like suffering, is just as valid a muse. Never let it slide.
Thank you for reading this far. If you have enjoyed what I shared, please do comment below and let me know what this piece and its subsequent breakdown did for you.
Embracing the Messy Reality
Writing while balancing a 45-hour corporate workweek is an exercise in dedication. I am sure you have all felt that too.
But this is the messy reality of writing for the passion. I don’t want to just give you a polished final product; I want you in the engine room with me, grease on our hands, figuring out how this creative pursuit works.
Support the Unseen Work
Building a universe takes time, wine, music, and a lot of late nights staring at digital whiteboards. If you value this kind of upfront transparency and want to back the messy, unglamorous process of independent storytelling, consider stepping into the Cartographer’s Guild. Your paid subscription directly funds the hours required to wrestle this writing, and my other stories into their truest form.
Join the cartographers’ guild and help this adventure continue.
Alternatively, drop something in the Ko-Fi. It all goes towards eventually turning this complex speculation into a finished product. All with your help. I will be updating this shop in due course with products related both to The Strings of Us and the wider Atlas I am building here, so stay tuned.
Thank you for being here for the bumps in the road. I have so much more to share, and I cannot wait to serve you with whimsy, talks on creativity, and playful silliness.
Love 💖🐇🦕
I really enjoyed this! As you know I have been enjoying your story wine pairings (maybe too much 😂) but this makes me appreciate it even more. The idea that wine is more than just a description of flavors and more than words combined can portray is fascinating. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many is a sip of wine?
You really made me wish I could drink wine and taste all of the beautiful experiences you've described. Alas, I will experience them only second hand through your writing because I simply cannot bring myself to like wine 😂