Drinking wine while sparing the collateral damage of use is enough to delight revelers and other sybarites. Just imagine, no hangovers or haggard eyes, let alone fetid breath, confused speech, engorged liver or cancer à la carte. Rather a healthy and carefree immersion that would exponentially maximize a sensual experience declined to infinity. Would you be ready to surf on these parallel universes of which the “metaglass” would be both the point of departure and arrival?
You will have to get used to it. We ourselves will be born one day “avatarized” in 3D. Artificial intelligence will then appear by far superficial as it will struggle to adapt to augmented reality. The senses of sight, smell, taste, hearing and touch as we know them today will feel like they have been demoted by their antiquity to a silent black-and-white film clocked at 16 frames per second. And, to close the picture of festivities, the successive increasingly virulent pandemics will get the better of all these small contact gestures that provide all of humanity with this skin-deep sensitivity that has now vanished forever.
folk figures
The bottle will no longer exist. Nor the wine it contains. Even less stains on your freshly ironed white tablecloth. Winegrowers will be relegated to the rank of folkloric figures, while placomusophiles, oenographers and other glass fetishists will slide to the rank of oddballs. Latest-generation ancestral genetic algorithms will direct you to your natural affinities, depending on the type, provenance or style of wine desired.
Your ancestors of Italian stock were fond of sangiovese? The selective window of options will open on the choices of the hour, whatever the price or the immersive atmosphere in which you would like to materialize your oenophantasmagoria. Is it time to overflow with festive friends seated on the terrace of a trattoria in Florence? Will appear, among a myriad of options, this classic Villa Antinori 2018 ($23.65 – 10251348 – (5) ★★★), which will delight the antipasto and this slice of pizza with its fresh, melted, fruity and elegant tannins. You go from the trattoria to the palazzo and rather go for a red that “tastes expensive”? Other choices will present themselves immediately, including this Tignanello or this other Ornellaia which will impress, at least virtually, the gallery. All this, without moving an iota!
With the “metaglass”, you no longer need to be an expert to grasp the complex mysteries of tasting. Your sensitivity thresholds already determined at birth will decipher the four elementary flavors to optimize the many possible interactions. While maximizing this notion of “pleasure” so dear to “first generation” humans. You will thus be grateful to Patrice Lescarret for his dry white Causse Marines 2019 ($25.60 – 860387 – (5) ★★★), which plays on those bitters you love so much while maintaining those balances where quince jelly, candied Meyer lemon, fennel seed and chard apple titillate sapidity and salinity for a long time . The real-time resets of the “metaglass” will then attempt to reproduce, in better, the experience lived, without however succeeding. Lescarret will have thwarted them not only by cunning (while laughing under his breath), but also by the singularity of his wine. We will have to wait for the “metaglass 2.0” version to see it coming.
And the wine columnist in this universe? Like the winegrower, the wine and its bottle, simply consigned to the dustbin of history. Like an old wine forgotten in the cellar. Its own augmented reality no longer weighs among all these exponentially active “meta-influencers” on the borders of multiplied egos. All you have to do is listen for it. plop! released by a real cork then to whistle a flute of the classic Champagne Pol Roger Brut ($65.50 – 51953 – (5) ★★★★), on this Friday, February 18, 2022, so as not to fall into… “meta depression”!