Time Over Wine (Part One)
It is a universal truth not often acknowledged that it takes time to make great wine.
INTRODUCTION
“Good things take time; great things take a little longer.” – a K-Mart print on canvas
It takes time to make wine. Time is one of the most important yet often overlooked ingredients in the production of wine. From the casual consumer to the wannabe dilettante, and even for the most earnest connoisseur, time as a factor in the production of wine gets little attention. Perhaps, this is due to the ever-present nature of time; abiding and always running in the background of our daily lives. Tick. Tock. Disguised, undiscovered, unheeded or, for that matter, even considered, but for an occasional marking glance.
Most wine critics take next to no time at all assessing a wine. Judging it in mere moments - whether in wine shows or at home (but especially at shows) - before jotting down initial thoughts only.† Thoughts, which tend to comprise of the jargon of routine and overripe language, unconsciously suspended in culturally derivative, customary and habitually (even industrially) learned and cannonical descriptors, before hastily moving on to the next one and the next one and the next one… because, of course, time is of the essence.
These imperious moments of judgement tend to be nothing more than distraction that frequently mislead us away from the true signs of inherent quality (or a lack thereof), which can only ever emerge from spending time in (and with) the glass. For example, at the dinner table, where a wine within the company and contextual pleasure of people at leisure is given an ample amount of time to unfurl and unfold and evolve in the bottle or glass; to breathe, to be, moreover, to become.
By contrast, a producer – either a vigneron or winegrower – must take their time to make wine. To plan, to act, to think, to react, and to ponder, whether it be about the whims of the weather, the market, or the ever dynamic socio-cultural facets of wine, each and every season, year in, year out, and for a year at least (though, for the great ones, typically much more). The sheer will of nature and of physics demands it.
To dismiss time in the consumption, let alone judgement, of wine – or anything else for that matter – is to disregard the amount of real work that preceded it. Both in the assemblage and discernment of wine, time must not only be noticed but revered, because it is a universal truth not often acknowledged that it takes time to make great wine.
MEMENTO MORI; MINDING TIME
“Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, into the future…” – The Steve Miller Band
Physics defines time as the continued progression of events from the past to the present and into the future. Time is a component quantity of various measurements consisting of minutes, hours, days, months, years, and so on, used to sequence and compare the duration of events or the intervals between them. Physicists call this proper (or clock) time. Comprehending the experiential flow of time, that is, its fundamental conceptual nature – or metaphysics – is more complicated.
Some physicists align with the psychological notion of subjective time being related to an individual’s information-processing rate; the average information-processing capacity of the human mind is approximately 120-bits-per-second (bps). Hence, the faster or indeed slower one processes information can affect their subjective experience of time, meaning time may feel as if it’s speeding up or slowing down depending on the current rate of their information-processing. Thus, it is not extreme to suggest that our experience of time is not so much determined by clock time, but rather the way in which we process the events we encounter.[1]
Philosopher Martin Heidegger posited some time ago that time is not merely a linear continuum in which objective moments or events occur in sequential succession. Rather, it is the individual recognition that time is fundamentally intertwined with our own being and existence, for which he uses the German term Dasein (literally, “being there”). For Heidegger, time is always personal and subjective and cannot be reduced to a simple set of objective measurements. Time should be grasped in and of itself as the psychological unity of the past, present, and future – what Heidegger refers to as the “temporal ecstasies”.[2]
The past is the foundation that shapes and orientates our personal understanding of (Dasein) being-in-the-world. The future is more than merely something we move towards, like some distant horizon. It is active anticipation for what comes next, a type of prospective projection towards tomorrow, which will, ultimately, culminate in our inevitable demise. Yet, it is in the unavoidable acceptance of our own will to death that we discover the potential to make us feel most alive now – in the present – and thus strive (via a persistent resistance to entropy) to become our most actualised and authentic self. As G.K. Chesterton once observed, “any dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”[3]
The present, then, is not some amorphous sequence of now moments that we merely inhabit minute by minute without agency. Rather, in light of our own will to death and the way in which we motion towards the future, the present is something each of us can mindfully seize upon; comprehend, apprehend, and resolutely and decisively make our own with purposeful action.
HUMAN ACTION
“(H)uman actions paint the chart of time.” – James Montgomery
It is a simple and undeniable fact that humans act. Even to deny this fact you first must act. People have personal desires, goals, needs and wants. We each strive to satisfy such objectives using various means to achieve their ends. Sober economists use the term praxeology (from Ancient Greek praxis (‘deed’ or ‘action’) and –logia (‘study of’)) to describe the science of human action. Defined simply, human action is purposeful behaviour.[4]
Using this axiom of action, praxeology deduces the behaviour of the whole from the known parts. Historian, sociologist and economist, Ludwig von Mises wrote: “the man perfectly content with the state of his affairs would have no incentive to change things. He would have neither wishes nor desires; he would be perfectly happy. He would not act; he would simply live free from care… [As such] praxeology says that the goal of an action is to remove a certain felt uneasiness.”[5]
Acting is how we make changes to the world. Action proceeds after evaluation of what is most important, most desirable or most valuable to an individual in a given moment, say, the evident pleasure of enjoying a glass of wine with dinner. Again, Mises writes: “Different individuals value the same things in a different way, and valuations change with the same individual with changing conditions.”[6]
Furthermore, people may choose to act together or in concert, but the choice of action is always individual. The group, the crowd, the collective itself does not act. Like a school of fish or a murmuration of starlings, it is only ever individual entities acting interdependently with one another. There is no mastermind, no conductor, and no centralised planner. The coordination and cooperation we witness at scale within such complex systems is purely organic and emergent. Economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek referred to this phenomenon as the extended order of human cooperation; that is, “an information-gathering process, able to call up, and put to use, widely dispersed information that no central planning agency, let alone any individual, could know as a whole, possess or control.”[7] Extended order is, in effect, the phenomenon of a distributed and decentralised process that organises society or civilisation as we know it.
Because of this fundamental fact that humans act, either independently or interdependently – which, in and of itself, occurs over time – the act of minding time, i.e. of being cognisant of its flow, presently and persistently, is thus fundamentally intertwined with the quality of our own being and existence. This is encapsulated in the myriad of daily ways in which we choose to purposefully act upon the things we preference, value or desire most over time.
To put it differently, our way of being-in-the-world (Dasein) – of being authentic and present, alive; resolutely and decisively – is dynamically subordinate to an awareness of our own personal, purposeful behaviour. Such action, then, becomes intentional and most apparent in the present, as we choose the way in which to act moment to moment, with respect to the inexorable trade-offs we must constantly make with our future-self, according to our ever changing value preferences; wants, needs and desires over time.
TIME PREFERENCE
“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.” – Ancient maxim
That time is assumed to have some inherent value is grounded in the empiric observation of some that, for the living individual, time is scarce. Thus, people have limited time, and so time is a necessary factor for all of human action.[8] Time preference is the degree to which someone values the present relative to the future. It is a generic measure of the time horizon we operate on and affects the choices we make. For example, money, as a technology for trading, saving, and investing is heavily intertwined with our time preference.[9]
Time preference is dynamic and constantly in flux, often oscillating between high and low in a given situation, but since we must choose between various ends at any given time, we must always maintain a positive time preference in order to achieve the chosen end sooner rather than later. Time preference is always subjective, and oftentimes situationally dependent, but never zero. And it is extremely flexible between individuals. As Mises states (above), a zero-time preference would occur only in a world in which everyone was completely satisfied at every moment of time and therefore has no need or motivation to act.[10]
People with (relatively) high time preferences are more present orientated; they value consuming something sooner rather than later. They favour instant gratification and are less inclined to save and invest for the future. On the other hand, people with (relatively) low time preferences are more future orientated. They are more inclined to delay consumption and defer gratification, preferring to save and invest sooner, in order to generate greater rewards and possible returns at some other time in the future.
By way of simple illustration, an ardent wine enthusiast could open and drink a particular bottle of wine now and experience it with all its youthful energy and primary perfumed fruit (thereby demonstrating a high time preference) or they could delay opening it and drink it at some other time in the future. Presumably, because they believe that the wine may be more mature, more developed, and may express more complexity (thereby demonstrating a low time preference).
Interestingly, the extent to which a society’s time preference is high or low will determine the overall quality of their environment. Economists, Chu, Lai, and Liao note that an individual’s degree of time preference will be influenced by the particular quality of their surrounding environment. A cleaner environment, they note, makes us healthier and reduces mortality. This, in-turn, increases incentives to conserve the quality of the environment through reduced consumption, thus mitigating the production of things, like fast moving consumer goods (including cheap, industrialised wine, which has more in common with the manufacture of ball bearings than it does with fermented grape juice) and discourages mindless overconsumption. Because time is relatively less scarce in cleaner, safer and healthier environments it allows for time to be allocated more mindfully and more deliberately by acting individuals within such environments, say on a vineyard, farm, in a community or society at large.[11]
Case in point, in the book, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilisations, author David R. Montgomery explores the compelling idea that humans limit the life expectancy of their civilisation (and by extension the lifespan of themselves) through the sustained degradation of the Earth’s soils over time. “The state of the land,” Montgomery writes, “the state of the soil, directly affects the health and resilience of societies…
“Soil of all things, brought down ancient societies that abused their land and paid the ultimate price, leaving a legacy of degraded, worn-out fields and impoverished descendants… What matters, is how people treat the land through their cultural, economic, and social systems.”[12]
Compare this with an excerpt from The Fiat Standard by economist Saifedean Ammous:
“As an individual’s time preference rises and they start to discount the future more heavily, they are less likely to value the maintenance of a healthy future state for their natural environment and soil. Consider the effect this would have on farmers: the higher a farmer’s time preference, the more they will discount the future health of their soil, and the more likely they are to care about maximising their short-term profits.”[13]
The importance of cultivating and maintaining a low time preference for the sustainable development of society and civilisation cannot be understated. As the two excerpts above briefly illustrate, a low time preference approach to managing land prioritises the long-term health of the soil over the obsessive short-term strip mining that an inflationary economic system demands (more on this in Part Two)[14]. Indeed, we can understand the way of human civilisation as the gradual process of lowering time preference.
BUILDING BEYOND TIME
“Man, not the earth makes civilisation.” – Will & Ariel Durant
As discussed above, personal value preferences are what initiates individual action and time preference rises or falls with individual action based on what, in particular, one values most over time. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the overall quality of a civilisation is a direct reflection of the inherent quality of values, ethics and standards and, thus, by extension, the general level of time preference held (either high or low) by individuals within a given community or society over time.
Economists David Howden and Joakim Kampe draw a direct relationship with the concept of time preference, savings and the advance of civilisation. Here, civilisation is defined in terms of a greater availability of want-satisfying goods or a greater amount of leisure time in order to contemplate certain concerns in life beyond the superficial need for survival in the physical world:[15]
“The key concept in the development of civilisation is savings, which makes investment and production possible. The amount of savings and investment is determined by time preference, where lower time preferences result in an increasing amount of savings and production, which in turn lowers time preferences further. This self-reinforcing spiral of increasing civilisation and increasingly higher standards of living is called the process of civilisation.”[16]
Historian and economist, Hans Herman-Hoppe agrees, contending that a low time-preference is necessary for the continued advance of civilisation because it allows for the development of long-term planning, savings and investment, which are basic requirements to guide economic activity, in addition to building greater scales of social organisation, cooperation, and cohesion; all of which are key characteristics of a sufficiently cultivated, complex and cosmopolitan civilisation.[17]
Furthermore, historian Fernand Braudel wrote extensively about how culture represents a civilisation’s development of thought and way of life in every sense of the term, including, but not limited to literature, art, religion, meaning, belief and ideology, and many other technological and intellectual developments besides.[18] When individual time preference is low, humans flourish and more people are able to specialise based on what each person is particularly knowledgeable, skilful or good at crafting, creating, working, producing or servicing, thereby increasing the diversity and total output of goods and services, as per Hayek’s phenomenon of extended order (see above). In turn, this frees up more time for a society to pursue a higher standard of living via constant technological advancement, which provides even more diverse opportunities for individuals to directly contribute productively to their communities.
Hence, in light of the expansion of means available to achieve physical satisfaction and through increasing free time to consider more altruistic desires or abstract, technical, philosophical or epistemological concepts, it is the very existence and sustainable preservation of civilisation over time that provides the ability for an individual to become aware of their very own being-in-the-world. That is, conscious of their own Dasein. Indeed, this is precisely how one is able to pursue self-actualisation, to borrow a term from the very top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
CONCLUSION
“Wine, so said the Greeks, is a civilised drink.” - Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat
Economic progress occurs as people act both independently and interdependently over time. Individuals driven by subjective motivations and dynamic value preferences create, improve, and iterate on new products and services, utilising time-saving technologies (including money) to contribute and drive change in the world. This leads to the gradual emergence of a complex extended order comprised (at its most basic level) of the simplicity of human action and cooperation causing an overall increase in civilisational development and advancement. As individual time preferences fall the tyranny of time scarcity is mitigated. With it the surrounding environment improves, leading to a higher quality of life (and life expectancy) in the community.
Given sufficient flow of time, a civilisation may arise, and out of which, a unique culture could be cultivated consisting of numerous customs, rituals, and social norms that define various groups of people. These elements – including the cultivation, creation and even the commentary of wine – play a dynamic role in shaping our unique way of being-in-the-world, irrespective of whether we realise it, believe it or not. Each element serves as the driving force behind our civilised lives, offering a myriad of rich and enjoyable experiences we are fortunate enough to get to cherish and enjoy; particularly, whenever and where ever we may indulge in the wonderful world of wine.
Indeed, to state, what, by now, must be obvious, the primary act of wine-growing itself would not be possible without people cultivating some sort of relatively low time preference, beholden as we are to the physical reality and flow of temporal nature.
The appreciation and recognition of time, then, is fundamental to the production, consumption, and ultimate enjoyment of wine, which, I argue, is inextricably linked to time preference and the process of civilisation. As individuals, our actions are driven by our desires and goals and the value we place on the present relative to the future, which influences the individual and personal choices we make each day. Beyond a deliberate awareness of time’s inexorable flow, cultivating a mindful comprehension of the concept of time preference can reinforce the significance of time in shaping what we value most, thus affecting the character of the choices we make. This, in-turn, directly affects the general quality of our overall environment and societal progress.
In other words, understanding time as a subjective and interconnected aspect of your own being-in-the-world allows you to seize the present with mindful intention every day. Cultivating a low time preference enables you to invest more time in yourself, your family, and your community, for your future and theirs, thus contributing to more realistic and achievable sustainable development objectives at more appropriately local scales resulting in an increasingly higher quality of life for all.
Rather than ignore or overlook time’s incessant tick, like an overwrought Captain Hook, by being mindful of the value of time and recognising the significance of its scarcity, we can choose to act, every day, with persistent and enthusiastic purpose. We can build beyond our own time, and fortify our civilisations existing advances, while generating a higher quality of life for each and everyone of us; individually, cooperatively and collectively.
In short, be mindful of time to pursue a quality life and a life of quality, whether it be in relation to wine or anything else equally important.
- -
Unfortunately, the importance of time as a critical factor in the production and consumption of contemporary wine is all too often neglected, rejected or ignored due - in disproportionately large part - to the high time preference taint of such a startlingly simple yet commonly overlooked technical detail in each of our daily lives; money by decree, which will be discussed in Part Two.
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I would like to express sincere gratefulness and gratitude to those who lent their scarce time to reading and reviewing initial drafts of this essay. You know who you are; thank you… and thank you for taking the time to read.
† Home, of course, can provide the wine critic a little more luxury of time, but, even then, the scarcity of time will still have its way as the pressure of life outside the glass tends to exert itself in one way or another.
[1] R.P. Gruber, L.F. Wagner, et. al., Subjective vs. Proper (Clock) Time in Studies on the Structure of Time (2000).
[2] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927).
[3] G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (1925).
[4] Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, The Scholars Edition, (1998).
[5] Mises, Human Action (1998).
[6] Ibid.
[7] Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988); h/t; Aneesh Karve, Complexity… and the computational limits of central planning (2022).
[8] Eric Voskuil, Cryptoeconomics (2021).
[9] Without money, delaying consumption and saving would be more difficult, because the goods could lose their value over time; see Saifedean Ammous, The Fiat Standard (2021). More on this soon.
[10] Mises, ‘Human Action’ (1998).
[11] Chu, Hsun and Lai, A Note on Environment-dependent Time Preferences (2012).
[12] David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilisations (2008).
[13] Saifedean Ammous, The Fiat Standard (2021).
[14] See The Grapes of Wrath Grow Heavy’ by Daniel J. Honan.
[15] D. Howden and J. Kampe, Time Preference and the Process of Civilisation (2016).
[16] Ibid (emphasis mine).
[17] Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed (2001).
[18] Fernand Braudel, Civilisation and Capitalism Vol. 3 (1992).