(VinePair) - To enjoy buying and drinking wine means we have to willfully succumb to certain fictions. We pretend, for instance, that we know what the juice inside the bottle will taste like. We do so based on visual clues from the words and art we see on the label, or if we previously tasted another bottle of that same wine. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth: Tasting wine is much knottier than that.

Heraclitus famously said that no man has ever stepped in the same river twice; he could just as easily have said that no one has ever tasted the same wine twice. Wine is a living thing, elusive and mysterious. It changes not only from vintage to vintage and from bottle to bottle, but even from minute to minute, according to arcane alchemy involving some of the most complex chemicals in the world interacting with untrustworthy human sense receptors.