Mixtures that are sometimes whimsical, unexpected and even calculated make up the symphonic plurality of the everyday life’s innards. It’s in this blend where the unlikelihood pits against the likelihood . The sense of things is revealed through peculiar forms of association.

The human world is a relational, interconnected world. It’s just a mixture. The wealth of knowledge and human feelings lies in the ability to mix things. The act of feeling and knowing is a mixture itself. The relatively limited ability of our analyzers, of our senses concerning the unsung universe of human subjectivity bears this out. No analyzer can be ruled out of cultural plan of its biological substrate.

Culture turns uniqueness into diversity. By the hand of culture, human beings moves from what’s happening to what he makes happen. From sensation to creativity. Hearing is not exactly listening to. Looking is not seeing. Taste’s “four dimensional” space (bitter, salty, sweet and acid) stretches into the infinity of taste. Impressions on the gustative papilla and their smelling inspiration accrue in the relational exchange that different stimuli trigger.

New codes are stamped. The mixture of taste, smells, colors, textures makes human beings wallow in the pleasantry of flavor. Between taste and flavor distance is marked a culturaland sensorial blend. Tasting is a human ability. A cocktail can be the proposal. Some people say the bad taste of the speakeasy drinks that used to get around the Prohibition Act in the U.S. made way for accompanying flavors that were supposed to make the intake of the banned liquor much nicer. Others simply tried to conceal the spirituous content among non-banned licorices in an effort to diminish exposure and beat the rap.

The fact of the matter is that long before all this came to pass mixing was a summoning practice. We moved from suspiciousness to certainty as we recovered an axiom that’s penciled in as one of the first ones ever written about what a cocktail is all about and that was published in a New York newspaper back in 1806: “A cocktail is a stimulant drink made up of any kind of liquor, sugar, water and something bitter in it.”

Popular wisdom –long before the established knowledgecame up with the cocktail. A non-alienating hallucinating drink. Hallucination that’s born in the senses and soars out ofthem until they are rooted out. Taste is a whole lot more than fl avor. It’s a cultural re-elaboration. The cocktail fl irts with taste; it tempts it and eggs it on. At the end of the day, it compromises it with the tasting of all senses that come together into this pleasure trip.

The versatility of taste can only be compared to craftsmanship, the artistic creativeness of those who distill nectars good enough to make us drink schooners of happiness. Everything that’s rendered in wellbeing is reasonably necessary. At least desirable. Cocktailing is a sensorial architecture for the deployment of fl avors that tag along with pleasure down the road of welfare toward happiness.

Moreover, even psychological speculation has chimedin to try to unravel the contribution to spiritual development that a “subjective cocktailing” proposes: acid taste to foster activity and do away with wariness; bitter taste to defeat sadness and relate to happiness; sweet taste to win over fear and make refl ection prevail; spicy taste to beef up the willingness; salty taste to foster prudence. And to make all this work better, the moderate use of all these elements is a combination that, beyond a matter of taste, is a fl avor maker.