Kakao Brunchbook 6th Publishing Project Special Award Winner
The moment the cork is pulled, wine exhales time. The years that had been imprisoned in the bottle awaken upon meeting air, and with a single sip, the environment and memories surrounding the wine unfold together. It is not simply a beverage. Wine holds time, and records an era. We are now living in the era of wine. In 2020, the entire world came to a halt. People were locked indoors, and silence flowed through the streets. But even in that silence, wine consumption recorded its highest level ever. Korean liquor import value exceeded 1.1 billion USD marking an all-time high, and wine led the entire liquor market -- 330 million USD worth of wine crossed the ocean, and 73 million bottles of wine were poured into Korean glasses. The wine-time parallel: when you open a bottle of wine from a specific year, you are accessing that moment in time -- the weather of that growing season, the decisions the winemaker made, the state of the vineyard; the wine does not merely taste good or bad, it tells the story of its origin; the same Bordeaux from 2015 and 2018 will tell completely different stories; in this way wine is unlike any other consumable -- it is a time capsule that can be opened decades later to access a preserved moment; the author connects this to human memory and how we preserve our own experiences through writing and recording.
