To taste with the eyes and to contemplate with the taste buds: a fusion of the senses… It is often said that the dishes have the tastes of their scents. What about the tastes of shapes and colors? Can we illustrate a wine and its organoleptic qualities with a visual composition and vice versa? In other words, can we imagine a painting from the tasting of a wine, and imagine a wine from the contemplation of a canvas? 

C’est là l’ambition, le défi Vinpressionniste à travers cette collection qui vous est proposée. Chaque vin et chaque oeuvre sont sélectionnés et associés dans la recherche d’une harmonie des couleurs, des saveurs, de la transmission émotionnelle sur les plans organoleptiques, gustatifs, olfactifs, et visuels. 

“Vinpressionnism” is a conceptual organoleptic bridge between a visual art and a taste, olfactory and visual art. A definition, a vision, a new approach: we are perhaps here in a study of universality through impressionism and wine. Somewhere between pleasure and fascination, it is a vision of taste that is offered to you.

Emotion at the center of the subject

When it comes to art, all currents and all disciplines combined, emotion is at the center of the subject. And who has never heard a passionate sommelier describe the emotions of a quality wine?
Like the paintings of masters, the wine is therefore a real artistic creation: work on color, texture, structure, shine, reflections, clarity, sense of evolution, emotion in the mouth of course ... So many aspects on which the winemaker focuses with fervor to deliver each vintage with its part of surprises that Mother Nature reserves for us with kindness or jest...
These emotions are diverse, and wine can be described in a multitude of adjectives, often with a poetic or even esoteric dimension.
From here we realize more deeply the particular links that we can feel between wine and paint. The latter which so often staged this first with all the symbolism it carries from one age and from one civilization to another. Symbolic whose representation has evolved over time.

Let’s read a few lines on this subject of Olivier Soulier, who nicely formulated an approach to the subject:

The history of wine is closely linked to the history of civilizations.

The grape appears 65 million years ago, and the wine probably in 9000 BC. The cultivation of the vine is contemporary with sedentarization, like that of wheat and rice, unlike spices and salt which will be the great engines of travels, conquests and discoveries. Mythology already sums up all the keys to the symbolism of wine.

L’histoire symbolique du vin

Wine is associated with so many gods and myths. The Sumerian goddess Gesthin associates wine with the mother, the source of life. The tree of life and the vine are therefore closely linked.

In Egypt, Osiris who reigns over the world of the dead is also God of wine. After life, wine becomes closely linked with death: life, drunkenness, death.

Among the Greeks, the symbol is still spread, Dionysus, God of the vine and wine is also the God of madness. The Greeks will learn to manage this madness-truth wine by rules of knowing how to drink: or how to reconcile in vino veritas and philosophical discussions...

Among the Romans, he becomes Bacchus, between festivals, debauchery and orgy.

All the symbols are already there, fertility, death, and in between, pleasure, truth, philosophy, madness. Since the dawn of time, wine has delighted our being, source of life, it exalts the passions of men, and softens its sorrows.

The legend of Saint Dionysus

Saint Dionysus, finding a piece of wood on his way, picks it up and shelters it in a bird's bone, which he then inserts in a lion's bone, to finally put everything in a donkey's bone. Arrived at Naxos, a Greek island, he plants everything, and the first vine begins to grow.
This is why wine drinkers begin by chirping like birds, then grow as strong as lions, and end up as stupid as donkeys.

In Genesis, Noah shows us that to access the truth of wine, we must have gone through the flood, but also integrated all our interior animals, images of our impulses and our emotions. His children who have not done this work will see it as drunkenness, madness and shamelessness.

” … ceci est mon sang “

Christ in the Last Supper says: “This is my body, this is my blood”. He makes it the symbol of his blood (blood is the summary of the psyche). He thus offers us true knowledge (“I am the way, the truth and the life” John 14,6).
Wine remains intimately linked with the other symbol of sedentarization and civilization: bread, made from wheat. Wine then inspired many authors who only illustrated all these ideas already present: Homer, Aristophanes, Thasos, Athénée, then Ronsard, Rabelais, Molière, Dumas, Baudelaire, will wonderfully illustrate all the nuances of wine and drunkenness.
Mystics will speak of religious trance as drunkenness without drinking.

The current which naturally imposed itself in this connection of wine to painting, is Impressionism, this movement of the XIXth century, as the name "Vinpressionniste" indicates.
Perhaps because it is this pivotal century in many aspects (cultural, philosophical, economic, political ...) with their repercussions on painting, which opened the most perspectives in the unconscious search for the compromise between pure aesthetics that one could qualify classical, and initiatory abstraction in the search for truths.
Each creation therefore bringing together a work-wine and a work-painting will therefore constitute an object of symbolic and emotional study.