Does every middle-aged person get as nostalgic and faintly melancholy as I do during the short season of college graduations? Though grateful for my life and rather amazed at the constant good luck that has accompanied my half-blind stumble through adulthood, I can’t help but indulge in the most far-fetched what-ifs as I look at photos of those begowned 22-year-old optimists and read transcripts of the stirring speeches that lead them through “commencement.”

What better situation than to be plump with the ideas of mind-opening classes, recently bonded to friends for life, guided by teachers who became mentors, brimming with plans to alter the course of history?

Ah, but there’s all that debt. And anxiety about a job. And the cynical clamor, rising to feverish over the past few years, that a liberal arts curriculum is little more than an enormously wasteful and irrelevant distraction from the abrasive contours of the “real world.”

I enjoyed a terrific liberal arts education. After college, though, the bottom sort of fell out. I moved from job to job, impatient and dissatisfied, wondering how to put it all together, how to align cause and effect and unify mind with body. I’d been a good student, so why wasn’t I just automatically a good worker?

I came to see that not only had I been prepared more to think than to do, I had in fact been taught that there is a distinction between thinking and doing, when I’m now pretty certain there isn’t. It is not any one experience that re-educated me in this regard, nor a particularly meaningful book nor wise teacher nor inspiring friend. No, the envoy of this crucial message was wine.

Wine is the greatest advocate I know for the central, lasting value of a liberal arts education. It eloquently refutes the notion, much favored among some business-friendly and software-besotted education “reformers,” that STEM (science/technology/engineering/mathematics) is somehow a superior field of study to the “soft” humanities (literature, languages, social sciences, etc.).

Wine would disappear without equal parts theory and practice. Its existence depends upon and influences chemistry, engineering, cuisine, history, agriculture, languages, dance, media studies, religion, meteorology, marketing, writing, geology, finance, philosophy, archaeology, psychology, law, medicine, poetry, carpentry, economics, sustainability, management, environmental science. To begin with.

What other field of study, what professional path, what way to make a difference links so many seemingly disparate disciplines? How many different people, with different strengths, could a community formed around wine involve? Every time I taste a wine I love, I start designing in my mind a curriculum that attempts to encompass all the strands of existence that wine calls into play.

Which choices brought the wine into the world? What is the history of its home? Of its homesteaders? Of its physiology, its effects on commerce, ecology? Who benefits from it, who hurts? What is its future?

A university could be founded on a single wine. Heck, a fully functioning preschool could, too, but for the experiential aspect necessary to enjoy and assess the final product. A diligent student emerging from such an educational environment would measure well on any legitimate assessment platform, and be suited to perform competently at a job in any sector. Most importantly, that alumna would likely also be a contented, engaged, grateful, socially useful member of every group with which she engaged. (It’s my view that people whose professional or personal lives regularly depend upon the weather are saner than those who sequester themselves from it.)

In fact, wine restores to prominence the perspective of Classical philosophy, which arose from the natural harmony among what we now call sciences and arts. Before any debates about specialization, a common core curriculum, standards and assessment, or “restoring competitiveness,” there was one steady stream of effort toward comprehending humans’ pivotal responsibility as the link between the material and the spiritual, the temporal and the eternal.

A great education begins with wonderment that the world exists, and that we exist in the world. From there, questions follow: How are we connected to all that surrounds us? Is what we observe through our senses the total of what is? What is our role here? What, whom, when do we serve? Can we change anything? We will die soon; what to do? What do we pass on?

Wine does not answer these questions with finality, but it intensifies their resonance and increases the value of our asking.

How is it possible to taste things in a wine that are not in grapes, or soil or vines? How can one wine soften one’s mood while another hardens it? How can we bear to drink wine at all when so many millions of people don’t have daily access to safe drinking water? Why are so many women in winemaking families in charge of business administration and marketing? Is a German winery that developed during the Nazi era, or a South African one that grew under Apartheid, worth supporting? How did wine come to substantiate the blood of Jesus Christ? Why does France have one-tenth the number of native grape varietals that Italy has? What new building materials could be used to construct efficient modern wineries that produce traditional wines? What is a traditional wine? What is a tradition?

The deeper questions usually hide just beneath the surface. To the many – far too many – people who avoid the deeper questions, aw-shucksing that wine is “just fermented grape juice,” I’ve grown impatient with your low expectations, your materialist surrender. Next time I admire a sunset, tell me all I’m looking at is a ball of flaming gas 93 million miles away as the earth rotates.

So, Class of 2015, you’ve just been through a lot. You have made friends, you have worked hard, you have slacked off, you have learned much. You may have even gotten drunk once or twice. You could have gone to a different college – mine – and learned more, and gotten drunk a little less but a little better.

But water under the bridge. Now that you have some science, history, communications and arts skills under your belt, you’re ready for a real education.

Wine is mystery, of the most practical sort. You can use wine’s mystery to meet people, travel, do research, investigate the past, plan for the future, enjoy the present. You could even earn a living exploring that mystery. Wine is basically graduate school, without the depression. There’s still probably some debt involved, but in the long run it’s an easier debt to justify.

Once you leave this leafy campus, everyone’s going to give you advice about the “real world,” but the real world is wine.

Wine fuses one’s particular field of interest to the highest aspirations we all share. Wine (of the right sort; we cover what that is in the first semester) is opposed to conformity. Wine will keep you young, wild, free. Wine will also make you serious. And wine will always keep you learning.

Joe Appel works at Rosemont Market. He can be reached at:

soulofwine.appel@gmail.com

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