Know.

"For the Love of Wine and Wisdom" 
Andrea Frost

My experience with Sir Roger Scruton started—as most philosophical journeys do— with a question. Broadly speaking, my question was about wine and life, and as a professional wine writer, I had researched, traveled, and tasted widely in search of an answer. Despite years of effort, my question still lingered. But by that stage, it was accompanied by a bloodless desire to have it answered.

Roger’s interest in wine was only part of his appeal. I was equally drawn to his belief in the importance of literature to philosophy, not only as its influence on expression but as a way to address the human condition. Much contemporary philosophy, he wrote, “ceased to address itself to living creatures.” I had a similar predicament with wine criticism; to understand wine objectively one was asked to remove the subject, but with the subject also went the meaning. In both cases, it seemed to me, something was missing.

And yet here was a philosopher on the other side of the world who wrote beautifully and made space for this realm, to say nothing of his way of teaching—a mixture of symposium-style lectures over dinner at the Reform Club in London and, if you were fortunate enough to be supervised by him, tutorials at Albany in Piccadilly. Crucially, Roger was the only person who not only understood my question but also seemed to know what to do about it. I still can’t think of a less practical thing to do, but several years after discovering his work I left a life in Melbourne and moved to London to seek the answer to my question.

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