Why wine?

I have two major reasons:

Improve tasting skills

I knew at an earlier stage of life that the pure aesthetics (be it composition of classical music, creation of visual art, epicurean appreciation of food, or palate for wines) will be one of my ultimate life-long pursuits, and at some stage of my life amalgamated with my vocation / profession. Wine is absolutely one of the options I have. Though I’ll probably never be a great sommelier because I gradually lost some of my olfactory sensitivities due to a chronic defect since high school, tasting nice wines always enlightens me. Wine tasting lends us a peculiar lens through which we look at things: we learn to judge by not judging, that is, we will suspend judgement unconsciously through the fastidious approach to tasting -- just as we would never say minimalism is better than rococoism, or atonalistic music is superior to chromaticism, we would never directly compare a new world Syrah (or should I spell it as Shiraz?) to a Burgundy Pinot Noir. The more we know, the more we realize that how little we know. And this applies to wines too?

Learn about the feasibility of viticulture in China

As crazy as it may sound, I admired the way Henry Thoreau built his own cabin around Walden Pond while he reflected on his ultimate philosophical queries to life; when I get back to China after graduating from GSB, if I ever have the option, I’d like to spend a year or two in a vineyard practicing viticulture, witnessing the fruition of the very first batch, and brewing them into nectars and wines.