Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon, Deputy General Manager and Cellar Master of Louis Roederer Champagnes:
"Thank you, dear Olivier, for offering us this ode to aesthetic wine, for sharing, intelligently and passionately, this crusade in search of good taste and authentic wine! A wonderful read!"
Audrey Braccini, Manager of the Belargus estate:
"Thank you, Olivier, for this work with undeniable cathartic virtue, a true therapy for blocked minds, a delightful and innovative way out of the impasse. To be read compulsively, in fragments, according to one’s thoughts, throughout the chapters or reflections."
Le Temps d’un vin – Editions l’Harmattan
Published on March 27, 2024
According to the French Academy’s second edition of the dictionary of the French language, a scholium is "a grammar or critical note to aid in understanding and explaining classical authors." By associating it with the epithet "oenophile," I chose to divert its use in favor of a subject dear to me, without altering its primary principle. These short phrases follow the rule of revealing only a stimulating snippet of thought and, I hope, possess the virtue of acknowledging the reader’s intelligence and the desire to build from this snippet an implicit thought.
These scholia are grouped by theme, without a fixed reading order, but arranged according to the time of the taster for whom wine is born in the glass. From tasting to the vigneron, passing through oenology and the vineyard, this backward journey offers the reader's sagacity new horizons of thought. The reader can follow it or choose alternative paths according to their desires. From this wandering reading emerges one single goal: to fight against what goes without saying, against what too quickly aligns with a comfortable but illusory, if not harmful, reality. Through a critique of modernity, conventions, traditions, and their eternal divides, this little book attempts, with the reader’s help, to build a different way of thinking about wine.
To achieve this goal, the path of thinking had to deviate from the traditional intellectual routes of the wine world, moving away to return better, in order to shed bold and refreshing light on the most firmly established concepts that, at the same time, cement and weaken the civilization of wine.
Born from multiple experiences, this book is neither a collection of anecdotes nor their summary in a synthetic formula. By choosing the scholium as an operative mode, I aimed to expose implicit mechanisms and hidden systems through short phrases, where anecdotes appear more as side effects. Finally, unlike aphorisms, scholia do not seek truth. A scholium is a personal gloss, a question about an established truth that deserves to be reexamined in light of past experiences.
By drawing on literature, from Saint-Simon to Walter Benjamin, including Baudelaire, painting from Giotto to Damien Hirst via Duchamp, the criticism of Albert Thibaudet, the philosophy of René Girard, and the sociology of Norbert Elias, I tried to unlearn in order to reformulate, not without naïveté, the most elementary but also the most foundational questions and reflections about our wine culture.
Olivier Borneuf
Illustrations by Violeta Mayoral Desvignes
Born in Madrid, with a floral name, Violeta has taken root in the vineyard, alongside a vigneron who gave her the beautiful name "Desvignes." You can’t make this up. An architect by training and profession, Violeta draws to escape and let the line, too often constrained by a profession burdened by standards, flow freely.
You can order the book from all good bookstores and online retailers: Amazon, Fnac, Decitre, Eyrolles, Gibert, the BNF, Leclerc, etc.