Celine, another French writer of the same period as Sartre (and also one I have struggled with) said that, deep down, the only two realizations of our deepest character were War and Famine. And again, I began to feel incredibly uneasy about all of this. Now Hanni's approach may not be like the double-bluff game of answering questions on behalf of yourself to a computer but, like Vinome, the outcome is the same: your personality determines your wine choices. I've been psychometrically tested – apparently with inconclusive results (I had to resit and I'm not sure the outcome was any more revelatory, unless I really have no personality) – and every fibre in my being loathes it.
This appears more along the psychometric line, where a series of options and choices unlock your "sensory sensitivity". The other approach was Tim Hanni MW's "My Vinotype". My DNA chooses my wines? What if I don't like it: is it my own fault? Am I not being true to myself? Was I having a bad day? Am I broken? Wine appreciation can be esoteric enough without bringing a further layer of neurotic concern to the business of your Friday evening Chardonnay choice. This, clearly, might make a lot of people very happy at the prospect of not having to wonder why they like Albariño, but I recoiled in abject horror with thoughts of Brave New World, the Matrix and Minority Report running through my head. The first is Vinome, which uses your own DNA to help select the wines you are most likely to enjoy. Recently, I've noticed two novel approaches to guide our wine buying choices.
Our Appetite For Alcohol Goes Back to Apes In any case, it seems that a few people in the wine world have adopted his outlook to the process of buying and enjoying wine. This misanthropy was presumably why he wrote such deliberately awkward prose. French Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre famously said: "L'enfer, c'est les autres" ("hell is other people").