Cork Frame: Visualizing the Colours of Wine

Twelve years ago, whenever I wanted to buy a bottle of wine, I had a ceiling of six euros regarding its price. From one hand it was the era after the 2009 government-debt crisis: no money to bye mandatory items, let alone wine. From the other hand, wine is a luxury one has to invest to, in order to see its value. We are pleasure-seeking creatures and wine has a place in that domain.

So, to please a girl I have met, I wanted to have a good wine along with the dinner I was preparing. In my old neighborhood, there was an impresive cava store. I had never being to a cava before! So, I asked the owner to provide "a good bottle of wine". "What is your price range? We have wines ranging from twenty to three thousand euros ...", he said. I was shocked! Who on earth has the money to buy a three thousand euros bottle of wine? Told him that twenty euros was what I could afford and based on the plates I was preparing he suggested some bottles. I chose one by the description he provided. As far as I can recall, the dinner was a success.

That girl was (still is!) a lover of beautiful things and wine was one of them. It was a question for me the way she was able to distinguish the different flavours in every bottle of wine. Till we went to a one-day wine seminar, provided by a chemist and a wine-expert. It is more or less common knowledge that our tongue, has sensors for sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami. The vast majority of our perception regarding food and beverages relies in our odour! So, in that seminar, they provided ten vials, filled with different smelling substances and asked each participant to identify them. The majority of the participants (me included) was able to detect two to three substances correctly. My girlfriend identified ... eight! Since that day, I call her a gas chromatographer (a chemical apparatus used to isolate the different substances from a liquid mixture without decomposition).

Odour is an undervalued sense. "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" of Patrick Süskind is the most famous novel dedicated to it. Athrur Clark in "The Deep Range" (an excellent SciFi book) makes a captivating notion of the odour's efficiency to bring back memories in a way no other sense is able to.

So, after twelve years and several hundeds bottles of wine, I decided to create an artifact representing the Colours of Wine, a testimony about the pleasure of drinking and sharing wine! Each cork that you see in the above picture is from a bottle that we shared. Creating that frame is more difficult than it looks: the lack of the top bar reduces structural robustness that must be accommodated for in another way, plus other tiny nuances. The good thing is that the result is what was initialy desired.

Three things stand out from my wine initiation. The first is that If one does have not first-hand experience in something, there is not enough information to judge it. The second is that we, humans, are very different, that's why we have to be tolerant with each other! The third is that an encounter with someone may change you in unexpected ways.

There is more to this artifact than what meets the eye! It is a living canvas: imagine all the images that may be created using that 28 by 58 cork grid! But this has other technical challenges which are outside the scope of this post 😄