FEEL THE WINE; NO REALLY FEEL IT

Wine museums get jiggy

           I don’t put much stock in symbolism.  To me, a cigar is a cigar and when I mean something else I’ll say so.  So it’s with mixed emotion that I’ve watched the wine museum - traditionally a dusty collection of old tools and barrels described in antique type on yellowed index cards – evolve into the theatrical, interactive “wine experience.” 

            The National Wine Centre in Adelaide, Australia, is a cathedral of soaring wood buttresses (symbolizing barrel staves) reinforced with weathered zinc (symbolizing stainless vats) and a wall of soils from different wine regions (symbolizing a wall).  Go through the light-and-sound show depicting weather, and past the mass of intricately woven vine cuttings to the room where famous winemakers and chefs hover holographically in front of you and answer food and wine questions.  Push a button to dispense smells of different grape varieties and wine faults.  Make virtual wine at a screen that lets you choose harvest dates, hot or cold fermentation, oak or steel, and then rewards you with a gold medal or a gagging sound.

            At the Riedel glass factory in Kufstein, Austria, I watch men blow lumps of orange lava into wine glasses.  They flail molten snakes around like they weren’t 1000 degrees, and then draw them into perfectly straight stems.  Each glass is marched hot and dangling from a stick to an oven, where it spends four hours on a conveyer belt cooling at 400 degrees.  On the belt are also a bunch of tinfoil packets, which turn out to be the workers’ lunches. 

            I ascend from the factory floor to Sinnfonie, a trip - in the full ‘60s sense of the word - through the five senses.  From the visual room - twinkling lights on woven vines and then the jarring image of a razor blade embedded in a finger tip - I continue to the smell room, where a giant nose huffs up steam from the floor.  Glowing Plexiglas hands beckon me to a dark bridge which I cross clutching handrails that change from knobby leather to fur.  I wonder if my mind is being seeded with subconscious suggestions to buy Riedel glass. 

            At the Loisium, in Langenlois, Austria, we’re herded through a “magic gate to the underworld” into an elevator.  “You are grapes,” explains the guide, “You are going to be crushed.”  The doors close and we are shaken, not stirred, then spit into a dark room with water swirling just below steel grating underfoot.  We, the grapes, are fermenting, our “bubbly liquid gushing up in heated foam.”  Colored lights play on jets of water from a central fountain while music pulses and the floor shudders.  We’re encouraged to “see the wine god rising out of the swirls.” Crazy, man.  

            Next, the caves and a “mythical earlier age, where the orbit of the planets will awaken memories of bygone myths. The wine god and the grape goat will come on stage as symbols of fertility, of both curse and blessing of this intoxicating delight which often ends in ecstasy.” Barring ecstasy, we’re invited to scratch our initials into the walls of the cave, by way of honoring the local soil, loess.  Or we can recreate the rhythms of time by rolling a big stone ball around.

            Loisium is not just a temple, but a working winery.  It’s also something of a reality show, with cameras trained on the crew 24/7.  I watch for a few minutes, trying to guess who will be voted off the vineyard.  Floating balloons mark my Orphean ascent to the real world.  I sense that I’m not on the right drugs to appreciate all this.

            “Emotiography” is how Swiss firm Steiner, Samen, Schweiz - creators of both Sinnfonie and Loisium - describe their work.  Their installation at the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden, whose name alone would stir emotion in the traumatically toilet-trained, explores the dividing line between man and beast, symbolized by a mesh fence and a “dark, mysterious cult room,” featuring “three pools, filled with the primeval liquids: water, blood and sperm.”  Whose is not clear.

            I wish I had caught their show “Alles Gut wird Güsel.”  Installed at the refuse incinerator in Lucerne, it is described on their website simply as “Show, all about Garbage.”  I’m sure it reaches down to our primeval feelings about the matter.