Tasting Vino with Vico: Full–Bodied Discourse

Abstract

The experience of tasting wine and our earnest attempt to make sense of it draws the body back into discourse, recalling the sensorial and corporeal roots of language creation unearthed by Giambattista Vico in The New Science. Vico’s narrative strategy will help us to understand the necessity and utility of the bodily metaphors pervading wine discourse. Rather than being mere artifice or ornament, out of a poverty of speech; furthermore, they fulfill the need to express new and uncharted dimensions of reality. Our examination of the sense of taste and its intimately related senses of smell and touch reveals gaps in Vico’s story of how language springs from the body. His narrative traces the birth and development of language drawn from only two of our senses: sight and hearing. In other words, the corporeal origins of language creation in theWestern intellectual tradition uncovered by Vico are limited to only two aspects of the body; the others remain buried. Finally, we will consider how cultivating the hidden and hedonic senses of taste, smell, and touch can open up new