New ideas in wine are often dismissed as passing fads

As children, we were told repeatedly that we had to wait three hours after eating before swimming, for fear of congestion. No one ever proved it, but for years it was treated as a survival rule, until someone swam after eating without any problems and the rule became what it always was: a custom passed down without ever having been tested.

Many certainties in the wine industry operate in the same way. The fundamental question is how many ideas capable of challenging established beliefs will actually be taken seriously.

It's common to dismiss anything new as a passing fad, a niche phenomenon with no future, to avoid having to compare it with established knowledge. This isn't necessarily a negative judgment of those working in the wine industry, but rather an almost automatic reflex: the more novel an idea is, the more convenient it is to dismiss it.

Orange wines, natural wines, and non-alcoholic wines serve as examples. It was even claimed that they weren't "real wines," but rather "passing fads destined to disappear soon." However, articles have been written about them, bottles have been sold, and they continue to be a topic of conversation.

Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett argues that emotions are not innate, prefabricated responses like fear, joy, or anger, but rather constructs that the brain develops in each instance. She explains that the brain formulates hypotheses about what will happen, compares them with sensory input and past experience, and then constructs the emotion based on this comparison. Anil Seth describes a similar process in perception: continuous predictions by the brain, updated by sensory signals.

If even what feels like instinct is partly a construct, and therefore subject to revision, then the certainties of the industry could also be revised, even if they seem as solid as a physical law. It remains to be seen how many of those certainties would withstand serious scrutiny.