Category Archives: Wine Culture

More on the Benefits of Wine Knowledge

11 Tuesday Dec 2012

Posted by in Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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wine geeks I’m still musing about how knowledge—of wine, cheese, landscapes, whatever—can influence our perceptions. In a previous post I wondered whether philosopher Kent Bach is right to argue that novice tasters and knowledgeable tasters have essentially the same sensory experience:

They may be in no position to know anything about the grape(s), the region and the vineyard, the producer, and the vintage, they may have no basis for comparing this great wine with similar but merely very good wines, and they may be unable to articulate what particular aromas and flavours they are experiencing or have any notion of what experienced tasters mean by balance, structure, and elegance of a great wine. Even so, it is not obvious that this wine does not taste as wonderful to them as it does to the expert. They may not be equipped to enjoy the cognitive pleasures that accompany tasting it, but that’s not to say they aren’t fully equipped to experience the sensory pleasure inherent in attentively drinking it.

My objection to Bach is that his account doesn’t explain my own experience as a novice taster. It wasn’t that I lacked the conceptual categories or language to talk about the flavors more experienced tasters detected. I wasn’t experiencing the flavor notes at all until I gained more knowledge of what to expect from particular wines. Or at least that is the way it seemed phenomenologically.

But as Jonathan Cohen pointed out in his helpful comments on the previous post, there is substantial evidence that, with regard to vision, which has been studied more extensively than taste, knowledge of categories and linguistic descriptors has no effect on test subjects’ ability to discriminate differences between color swatches when shown side-by-side. And although taste and aroma perception may differ from color vision in this regard, there may be no good reason to think so.

Assuming the science on vision is correct and can be extended to flavor discrimination, what would account for my subjective perception that knowledge of categories and wine descriptors has improved my ability to taste? Offhand, I can think of two hypotheses that would explain it.

(1) Improved ability to discriminate flavors happened concurrently but independently of the acquisition of knowledge. I have in mind some form of training that doesn’t require conceptualization analogous to learning to ride a bicycle.

(2) The acquisition of wine knowledge encouraged me to focus on detectable features of the wine I hadn’t noticed before.

I suppose (1) is plausible although I don’t know what the mechanism for such learning would be. But (2) strikes me as plausible as well for the following reason.

The overwhelmingly dominant flavor in wine is, unsurprisingly, a kind of generic “grapeness”. That is what novice wine tasters taste predominately, along with alcohol, acidity, and the tactile sensations of tannin in red wine. The signal to the brain coming from the taste buds and olfactory sensors indicating “grapeness” must be quite strong. My hypothesis (which was suggested by Jonathan’s comment) is that learning to discern the full aroma and flavor spectrum of a wine involves suppressing the strength of that signal so that other flavors can be more easily noted.

In other words, novice tasters are overwhelmed by the dominant flavors and can learn to taste only by learning to ignore them.

That is the role of wine knowledge. The expectation that I should expect to detect vanilla in some oaked Cabernets gets me to focus on the boundaries of the generic “grapeness” where it appears to shade off into something else only vaguely sensed. That focus has the effect of suppressing the strength of the signal signifying “grapeness” and perhaps amplifying the signal from other flavors and aromas, patterns of suppression and amplification that get reinforced with practice.

Just a hypothesis without evidence. But it would explain how conceptualization shapes sensory experience without modifying the genetically determined detection thresholds that govern what we taste and smell.

Wine knowledge, then, while strictly speaking not necessary for learning to taste well, is enormously helpful and efficient as a skill-building mechanism. I’m not sure whether Bach would find this congenial to his view or not. But it seems to me, on this hypothesis, conceptual knowledge is directly impacting phenomenological sensory discrimination thus belying any hard and fast distinction between intellectual and sensory pleasure.

Wine Scores and Subjectivity

04 Tuesday Dec 2012

Posted by in Art and Wine, Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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wine scores Another day, another complaint about wine scores. At Wine Searcher, Joel Peterson, head winemaker at Ravenswood, in response to a question about the 100-point scoring system, relates a typical story about rating inconsistencies:

I have made wines under two labels and I’ve had them scored in the same periodical as much as five points apart. Same wines, different package. Like all judging of wine, it suffers from the wine that came before, the wine that came after, the time of day. All those things can affect a wine by as much as five points.

Such accounts give ammunition to those who think wine evaluation is so subjective it is little more than a scam to pull the wool over the eyes of consumers willing to pay top dollar for a big scoring wine.

Wine evaluation is not unique in being distorted by personal idiosyncrasies. The social psychology literature is full of research that shows our moral judgments are influenced by morally irrelevant considerations such as the TV show we’re watching or the aroma of freshly baked bread.

Our brains are not wired to produce objective judgments, especially when our interests are at stake. Apparently, there is an evolutionary advantage to having a brain that is influenced by emotions and contextual factors about which we are often unaware.

In fact, if you believe that wine quality is correlated with price or label then it would be irrational not to have one’s pleasure influenced by these factors. If we are motivated to maximize pleasure, and we get pleasure from knowing a wine is expensive, why not just enjoy that extra increment of pleasure that comes with the price. After all, you paid for it!

The problem is that the correlation of price and quality is too rough to be reliable and we expect a critic to spot those instances when the correlation fails. But isn’t being influenced by knowledge of the producer, the winemaker, or the vineyard a different matter? We don’t expect art critics to judge works of art without knowledge of the artist, her materials, or the context of production. Why demand that of wine critics?

Of course art critics are (thankfully) not inclined to give numerical scores when evaluating works of art. But that points to one of the downsides of the 100-point wine scoring system. It creates the impression that the judgment is objective—unbiased by the peculiarities of an individual. Numbers often leave that erroneous impression.

Why we should want such objectivity in wine criticism is a bit of a mystery. Would we be better off if the point scores were generated by an algorithm, perhaps instantiated in a computerized “tasting system”, that precisely measured various dimensions of the wine and spit out a score?

I think the answer is no. We want wine to move us if not emotionally at least sensuously. And thus what we want from a critic is his/her emotional or sensuous response. If you were to discover there are objective laws of “good wine” to which your palate did not correspond, would you give up your own preferences? I doubt it.

The problem with the episode Peterson recounts (and the data regarding moral judgment as well) is not that the judgments revealed subjective preferences. It is that the judgments reflected irrelevant considerations. We want the critic to be moved by wine, not labels, and we want the treatment of others to be governed by human need not TV programs or the smell of bread.

Thus, to make valid, useful judgments about wine is not to strive for objectivity (if that is understood to involve the absence of personal preference) but is instead to strive for a subjective judgment of the right sort—one that is about one’s perception of the wine, not something else. After all if we didn’t have preferences what would be the point of drinking wine?

Subjectivity of the right sort is an achievement. It requires that critics be aware of their prejudices and influences and strive to allow only those that are relevant to influence their judgment. To the extent wine scores assess wine quality rather than the phases of the moon or the reflected luminosity of the gaze of a  young lovely across the room, wine scores are not excessively subjective.

As Peterson points out they are just “one man’s opinion about what wine is.” What else would you want them to be?

No. The problem with wine scores lies elsewhere, in the very consistency for which wine critics strive.

But that will require another post that I will get around to eventually.

Does Wine Knowledge Make Wine Taste Better?

29 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by in Art and Wine, Food Science, Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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bordeaux-wine-region-map-770x536 Does knowledge improve your ability to enjoy wine? Obviously it does if you get enjoyment from knowing about wine regions and varieties. But do you actually taste wine differently having acquired that knowledge? Does it help you experience more flavors or textures in the wine than you might have without the knowledge? In other words, does knowledge improve taste sensations?

Some writers claim it does not. Philosopher Kent Bach writes:

Does discrimination require cultivation? Take the case of colours. If your colour vision is normal, you can, believe it or not, discriminate something on the order of ten million different colours, and without any special training. You can see the colour you’re looking at just by looking at it, and you can see that it looks a little different from very similar ones that are presented to you. You don’t have to do anything special—you just have to look…. So why should flavours, wine flavours in particular, be any different? Being able to describe a wine is a nice ability to have, but do you need it to taste the wine? Being able to explain what it is about a wine that you like is nice too, but you don’t need to do that to like the wine.

According to Bach, the only difference between a wine expert and a novice is the ability to describe and explain. As far as taste goes, the wine expert and the novice taste the same thing.

I think this is quite mistaken, in part, because it contradicts my own experience, which I suspect is no different than that of other wine lovers. When I first started drinking wine, I tasted a pleasing, generically “grapey taste” with some acidity and astringency, but that was about it. And I was puzzled when reading tasting notes that suggested I should be tasting ripe pears and peaches with hints of lychee nectar and orange zest lightly kissed by traces of clove. I just could not taste them. As I learned more about what to expect in a wine, I began to taste more of those characteristics of which I had been formerly unaware. It seems as if my knowledge of what to expect was helping me to taste flavors I could not taste before I had acquired the knowledge.

But of course my subjective ruminations on this matter might be mistaken. It would be nice to have an argument. And my argument is that Bach is wrong about color perception and thus we have no reason to accept his views on taste.

The issue is not our basic capacity to see color or taste/smell flavors. Our basic ability to detect light in a particular portion of the spectrum and the thresholds above which our taste and olfactory mechanisms are sensitive to certain chemicals are largely fixed by biology. Although we may be able to modify these to some degree, I doubt that our ability to improve discrimination is best explained by modifications of genetically-programmed thresholds. Rather, what is at issue is what we attend to and how that influences the mind’s ability to process information received by sense organs.

I doubt that my ability to discriminate fine gradations of color is as acute as that of painter or someone in the business of designing color schemes. This is because they have more knowledge of color and more experience at recognition than I do. Their knowledge and experience improves their powers of discrimination. It isn’t that I don’t have the capacity to see the colors; the problem is I don’t notice subtle gradations because I don’t know what to look for. It is a matter not of seeing but of noticing or attending.

Although it is easy to distinguish primary colors or colors that fall in the center of our color categories, most objects display colors that involve subtle mixtures that differ in hue, saturation, and intensity.

Being untrained in color perception I will see a red object as simply red, despite the fact it is red with subtle blue undertones. Unless the color in question is well along the blue side of the color wheel, I won’t see the influence of blue and thus may not notice a difference at all.  The problem is not that my visual system won’t register the influence of blue. Neither is the problem that I cannot name the color correctly. The problem is that I won’t recognize the red/blue swatch as differing from standard red without both knowledge and experience. If I don’t know to look for hints of blue I just won’t attend to them. Even if two color swatches, one red and one red with very subtle blue undertones, were side by side I may not detect a difference unless I know that one of the swatches contains some blue mixed into the color scheme.

Difficulties in color discrimination are compounded when tinting and shading are considered as well. Only knowledge and experience will allow me to distinguish red with blue undertones from red that has been shaded with black. Again the problem is not that I cannot see the color. The problem is that I may not notice a difference. It will not stand out without training.

And finally context plays a role as well. A green background will make an object appear more red, a blue background will make it appear more yellow, etc. Without knowledge such differences will go unnoticed. And I doubt that non-experts can distinguish subtle changes in saturation from changes in lightness without training either.

There is in fact empirical evidence that knowledge and linguistic competence influences color discrimination. Experiments by Özgen and Davies suggest that children improve their ability to discriminate color through training, especially when the training includes attention to category boundaries. In describing their hypothesis, they argue:

During this process, more attention to boundary regions than category centers will be required to work out where the boundaries are. This differential exposure should enhance discriminability for boundary regions relative to central regions and gradually produce acquired distinctiveness between adjacent categories and possibly acquired equivalence within categories. And, of course, as the number of categories and the location of category boundaries vary across languages (Berlin & Kay, 1969), so should the locations of heightened or reduced sensitivity vary.

In addition to supporting the claim that color perception is improved through training, this research supplies important clues to how taste discrimination can be improved. In learning to identify, for instance, the taste of clove in a wine, we don’t aim directly at clove. But first try to find a boundary where fruit flavors seem to shade off into something else we can’t quite identify—a boundary. In other words we try to discover a difference in what appeared before to be homogeneous. Once we are able to identify that difference as a vaguely “spicy” flavor we then exclude possibilities by ruling out pepper, thyme, cinnamon, etc., again by recognizing differences until we settle on clove.

No doubt our visual mechanisms are more sensitive and more powerful than our ability to discriminate taste and aroma. But I doubt that either are insulated from the influence of cognition and language.

Does this mean that to enjoy wine you must be able to cite all the Grand Crus of Burgundy. No. But if you enjoy wine you will enjoy it a lot more having gained some knowledge of grape varieties and, where appropriate, the influence of climate and geography on taste.

Wine Tasting the Guadalupe Valley, Mexico

28 Wednesday Nov 2012

Posted by in Contemporary Food Culture, Wine Culture, Wine Reviews

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guadalupe-valley The land of tequila is now making wine—good wine—and is fast becoming a must-visit destination for wine lovers looking for new regions to explore. I had the opportunity for a short visit earlier this month, which has whetted my appetite for a longer, more extensive exploration.

The prime winemaking region in Mexico is the Guadalupe Valley on the Baja Peninsula about 15 miles Northeast of Ensenada and 1 1/2 hours from San Diego (assuming you get lucky with a short wait at the border). The main roads are in good shape but many wineries are located on rutted, labyrinthine dirt roads far from the main drag, and street signs are virtually non-existent. Furthermore, many of the wineries require appointments. I recommend that travelers unfamiliar with the region hire a driver with the wine knowledge and contacts to give you a good, but uncomplicated, overview of the valley. (Our driver was Alain Preisser of Baja Wine And Sun tours. I highly recommend him. He speaks English, is a good driver, and knows the region well.)

adobe-guadalupe Any tour of the region should start with Adobe Guadalupe, a winery and bed-and-breakfast offering charming, well-appointed accommodations with lovely Moorish/Mexican architecture, an on-premises restaurant serving a competent, if over-priced dinner, and most importantly, delicious wines.

I found the 2011 rosé (called Uriel) and the earthy, mysterious Rafael, a Cabernet/Nebbiolo blend, to be the highlights although all of their wines are worth sampling.

The valley features at least two fabulous restaurants. The better-known is Laja. Housed in a charming adobe building with picture windows overlooking the valley,  Laja offers 4 or 8 course prix-fixe meals made from local ingredients, many grown  in their own garden. Laja This is Mexican “alta cocina” with touches of Mediterranean cooking—plenty of local olive oil, fresh fish, and vegetables—served with a Mexican heart. The grilled squid was the best dish of the trip. Do not expect tacos.

But despite Laja’s reputation, I must say it was topped by dinner at  Corazon de Tierra restaurant at the La Villa del Valle.  The six-course tasting menu was extraordinary, especially the Dashi Soup with Geoduck Clam Tempura and Mushrooms, and the perfectly cooked Ribeye served with an intriguing, smoked eggplant and squid ink puree. ribeye

“Alta cocina” with an Asian twist, Corazon makes its own wines and olive oil and features local ingredients, many grown on their property. The winery, Vene Cava, is unique and worth a tour for its sheer whimsy. It is constructed out of 3 upside down fishing boats nestled into a cave built on the side of a hill.Vene-cava

The wines are also enjoyable, especially the 2010 Tempranillo which had deep, rich flavor and a complex nose featuring chocolate and spice.

Although not quite on the level of the French Laundry or other top wine-country restaurants in the U.S., these two restaurants offer much better value. The dinner at Corazon was $55 per person plus wine, roughly 1/8th the cost of a meal at the quintessential Napa establishment.

Guadalupe Valley wineries are still in the experimental stage searching for what works best in their microclimates. They emphasize Bordeaux and Southern Rhone- style red blends with an occasional Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc. Italian varietals are also popular, but I was most impressed with the juicy and complex Tempranillos.

Many of the wines have a distinctive flavor best described as salted plum, a characteristic which the locals attribute to the water. Whatever its source, it is unique to the region and a distinctive, savory experience. L.A. Cetto and Monte Chenic are the large commercial producers in the region. But I found the smaller, boutique wineries more intriguing. For polished and refined offerings visit Vinisterra. Their Syrah/Mourvedre blend called Pedrigal had a huge mid-palate and a lovely finish, and their complex 2007 Tempranillo was the best of this varietal that I tasted.  Vinas de Garza makes several high-scoring red wines, especially the Amado 2007, an unusual, spicy blend of Cabernet, Tempranillo, Merlot, and Zinfandel. Their Chardonnay/Sauvignon Blanc blend was the most interesting wine of the trip. Called Rancho Morgocito Blanco, it was clean, crisp, and a bit salty with grapefruit, grass, and yoghurt on the nose and an exceedingly long and flavorful finish.

tres-mujares For a funky, down-to-earth experience visit Très Mujares, a low-tech winery run by three women who make rustic, yet beguiling wines, especially the Merlot which was lush and soft but with good acidity.

 

The quality wines we tasted were not cheap. Most of the reds will run at least $30 per bottle and some are considerably more. Most are not available at retail stores in the U.S.  One drawback to tasting wine in the Guadalupe Valley is that California allows only one bottle per person to come back across the border. I’m sure the Napa wineries were influential in getting that regulation passed. But I regretted not being able to stock up. Many of these wines are available online from this source.

It is obvious that Guadalupe Valley is attracting a lot of investment money as they strive to become a wine tourist destination.  The contrast between the upscale eateries and tasting rooms and the grinding poverty in the village is fascinating and disturbing. I was struck by the apparent absence of a middle class. It is to be hoped the wineries, when they become profitable, will plow some of that money into their community.

Despite the fine restaurants and the well-run wineries with helpful, knowledgeable staff, the Guadalupe Valley is not Napa. It is growing, the tourist infrastructure is improving, but it is still an emerging region that faces considerable challenges. All of which makes it an alluring destination for an unusual yet thoroughly tasty experience.

Civilization and the Smell of Sweaty Saddles

30 Tuesday Oct 2012

Posted by in Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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old-greece-10000929 Wine is really difficult to enjoy because its virtues demand opposing, incompatible mental states. Wine tastes good and produces the mild buzz that has a magical influence on conversation,  but experiencing these virtues simultaneously requires an iron will or the body mass of a defensive tackle.

I was reminded of the paradoxical nature of wine last weekend at dinner with friends. After pairing the appetizers with a refreshing bottle of Gruner Veltliner, we poured a smooth, balanced 2001 Planeta Syrah from Sicily. It was unusual enough to fascinate and tasty enough to crave so by the time we opened one of my favorites, an Antica Cabernet from Antinori’s Napa project, I was close to that tipping point where flavors merge into grapey in-distinction and texture acquires the glassy uniformity of water. About half-way through that bottle I might just as well have been drinking a $3 supermarket special. When my friend Glenn asked me to break down the wine, all I could do was mutter something about evanescent aromas and emerging fruit.

Enjoying wine to its fullest means balancing on the knife-edge of sufficient alcohol to stimulate the imagination without subverting the ability to discern subtle flavors and textures. The pleasures of being caught up in conversation can quickly send you over that edge.

Did you know that the fate of Western Civilization has long rested on striking that balance? The ancient Greeks got this whole mess rolling by launching symposia where the finest minds in Athens would swill wine cut with water and chat about the Good, the True, and the Beautiful while sampling the charms of young boys. Philosophy’s founder and moral conscience, Socrates, generated some of his most important ideas while under the influence of both.

In Plato’s dialogue, The Symposium, Socrates is depicted as a formidable drinker who disarms the arguments of opponents while outlasting them well into the wee hours. Apparently, Socrates’ key character trait was his ability to drink while maintaining his capacity for razor-sharp casuistry. Had Socrates not been able to hold his liquor who knows—he might have mistaken the seductive words of his fellow symposiasts for genuine wisdom, and we might now be electing poets to high office instead of the “practical men” bent on transforming earth into a scalding, toxic inferno.

At any rate, a love of wine belongs in a life well lived because such affection demands that we acquire the ability to drink while disciplining the alcoholic haze. For 2500 years we have missed the point of the Socratic virtues. Courage in the face of death and an uncompromising commitment to truth are all well and good. But they can be instantly subverted by a little sloppy drinking.

Houses of the holy where the Masters of the Universe learn their trade—schools of business, law schools and policy institutes, not to mention the Ivy League—should be adding wine tasting to their curricula. An obsession with notes of sweaty saddles, pencil shavings, and cigar box will do more for clear thinking than the mighty tomes squatting on library shelves.

Wine and Spirituality

16 Tuesday Oct 2012

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Dionysus,_God_of_Wine The spiritual dimension of wine has a long history. Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, was said to inhabit the soul with the power of ecstasy—the Ancient Greek word ekstasis meant standing outside the self via madness or artistic expression.The Romans called the same God Bacchus with similar associations.

The Judeo/Christian world tames the ecstasy yet still acknowledges the virtues of wine. Judaism has long included wine in its rituals for which it incorporates a specific blessing, and of course, for Christians, wine represents the blood of Christ and gets a number of mentions in the Bible.

Other alcoholic beverages have existed for as long or longer than wine, but none have its spiritual connotations.

Today, wine is just one among many alcoholic beverages consumed in great quantities. Yet it sustains its sacramental role—as status symbol, fashion statement, a sign of class, refinement, or sophistication, a source of intellectual delight, the object of a quest for a peak experience, or the focal point of social life—all contemporary renditions of “spiritual” some more debased than others.

Why does wine have this spiritual dimension? It isn’t because of the alcohol. Cheap whiskey doesn’t have it. It is not because it tastes good. Lots of beverages or foods taste good, but they lack wine’s power to move us.

Spirituality is about inward transformation. Dionysus was a gender-bending, shape-shifting God who entered the soul and transformed the identity of the one afflicted. Go with Dionysus and achieve ecstasy by escaping the confines of one’s identity; resist and be torn apart by conflicting passions, according to the myth.

Wine too is about transformation–the grapes in the vineyard, the wine in the barrel and bottle, the drink in the glass as its volatile chemicals release an aromatic kaleidoscope of fleeting, irresolute incense. In turn, the drinker is transformed by the wine. But not merely by the alcoholic loosening of inhibitions or the ersatz identity appropriated through wine’s symbolic association with status.

Instead, the wine lover, at least on rare occasion, is transformed by the openness to experience she undergoes when gripped by sensations whose very beauty compels her full attention. For unlike any other drink, wine has that ability to arrest our habitual heedlessness and distracted preoccupation and rivet our attention on something awe-inspiring yet utterly inconsequential, without aim or purpose, lacking in survival value,  monetary reward, or salutary advance in our assets.

When we are so transfixed by the sensory surface of the world, we stand outside that nexus of practical concerns and settling of accounts that makes up the self. Shorn of that identity we drink in the flavors seduced by the thought that there is goodness in the world—whole, unadulterated, without measure. This is part of the attraction of great art and music—a moment of ecstasy. So it is with wine.

No other beverage has the depth, complexity, and textural refinement to create that momentary mutation of the self.

Is Interpreting a Wine Like Interpreting a Work of Art?

25 Tuesday Sep 2012

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pollock Lavender Mist

Lavender Mist by Jackson Pollock

Philosophers who think wine and food cannot be works of art often argue that smell and taste, unlike vision and audition, fail to provide a representation of reality. Roger Scruton is one prominent skeptic. But his argument (in this anthology) ignores basic facts of wine tasting that even a novice taster would understand.

Scruton’s argument is based on three claims:

(1) Tastes and smells are free-floating qualities independent of the objects that cause them;

(2) The apprehensions of smells and tastes are non-conceptual. We can detect a taste or flavor, for instance chocolate, without conceptualizing it as chocolate. Thus, tastes and flavors are not representations of anything and therefore lack intrinsic meaning;

(3) And, as a result, descriptions of tastes and smells are excessively subjective and arbitrary because they are not constrained by reality.

The upshot is that valid interpretations, as we typically find in the art world, are impossible in the world of food and wine, according to Scruton. (I guess it must be obvious why Pollock’s paint drizzles is colled Lavender Mist)

I have argued in a previous post that (1) is false but (2) and (3) must be addressed as well.

Scruton defends (2) and (3) as follows:

When I see a table I also see it as a table (in the normal case). In describing my experience I am describing a visual world, in terms of concepts that are in some sense applied in the experience and not deduced from it. Now taste and smell are not like that….I might say of the ice-cream in my hand that it tastes of chocolate or that it can taste like chocolate, but not that I taste it as chocolate as though taste were in itself a form of judgment. The distinction here is reflected in the difference between the cogent accounts of paintings given by critics, and the far-fetched and whimsical descriptions of wines given by the likes of Robert Parker. Winespeak is in some way ungrounded.”

Apparently what Scruton has in mind is that chocolate ice cream causes me to have a chocolate-like sensation. But no judgment, understanding, or interpretation is required.  I just perceive chocolate without assembling various sensations into a rule-governed, conceptual representation of the object.  I doubt that this captures our understanding of chocolate ice cream. But I will leave that for another time. He surely misunderstands wine tasting and makes an utter mystery out of ordinary wine talk, which in clear cases is just as cogent as talk about tables or art.

The reason I see a table as a table (rather than an assortment of properties such as flat surface, rectangular surface, 4 supporting legs, walnut, etc.)  is because I’ve acquired the concept of “table” through a history of participation in a linguistic community in which the concept of “table” is consistently deployed. When I’ve mastered the norms of that community, I have the concept of “table”.

But the very same conceptual formation occurs in various contexts when tasting wine. When blind tasting, my ability to interpret a medium-body wine with apple, roasted pear, and pineapple flavors as a Chardonnay is through participation in a community of wine tasters with established norms regarding the appropriate concept to apply to that flavor profile. When evaluating wine non-blind, the ability to judge a Chardonnay as typical of or an ideal example of its provenance and vintage again requires assembling various sensations under a concept of what such a Chardonnay should taste like.

Granted, wine tasters begin to learn to apply a wine concept (of a varietal) by deducing it from assorted sensory experiences and background knowledge about wine varieties. But for experienced tasters, at least in clear cases, identifying a Chardonnay is no more difficult than identifying a table is for ordinary language users and is no less a judgment in which a concept is applied in the experience.

Judging a wine to be harmonious, balanced, or elegant involves  even more complex conceptual formations. These features are not simple sensations caused by chemical properties of the wine which are detected on the palate, but involve drawing off from considerable past experience a concept of what it means for various types of wines to be harmonious, balanced, or elegant.

It is in other words, tasting wine at this level is not mere detection of a property but an interpretation based on the possession of a concept.

There is an important difference between the concept of “table” and the concept of “chardonnay”. The possibilities of error and the existence of borderline cases are much greater when applying the concept of “Chardonnay”. Some un-oaked Chardonnays taste like a (poorly made) Sauvignon Blanc; others from very ripe fruit may have the weight of an Alsatian Pinot Gris.  Flavors often lack clarity and winemakers have the tools to manipulate grapes to mask their intrinsic qualities. But this has nothing to do with the inability of tastes and flavors to form the basis of conceptual content.

If we lived in a visual world consisting of perpetual, thick fog the error rate for applying visual concepts would skyrocket. But the concept of “table” would be no less a concept. Conceptual clarity is one thing, conceptual content quite another.

Aesthetic concepts used in judging wine such as complexity, balance, and elegance are no less cogent than concepts used in judging art

One central element in the appreciation of any work of art is that the work demands interpretation.  Works of art are about something and what they are about, their meaning, is often not directly perceivable in the work but must be the product of judgment, in which we apply a concept to the work in light of properties of the art object, or in light of evidence about what the artist was trying to accomplish.

We do the same with wine. There is nothing odd about a claim that I interpret a wine as elegant just as I might interpret the Mona Lisa as mysterious or Munch’s The Scream as a vision of modern angst.

The greater puzzle is why such mundane observations about wine escape the attention of philosophers.

At a Wine Tasting the Most Important Serving Might Be the Crackers

11 Tuesday Sep 2012

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flight of wines

Available through creative commons license

Did the Sauvignon Blanc in your glass, which was so refreshing in the past, make you pucker like a Victoria’s Secret model? Did the over-oaked Cabernet that reminded you of  licking a fence post taste just fine after a sip or two? Why did the wine that was so good at the winery taste so ordinary once you brought it home?

Flavors in wine can seem like flickering hallucinations—now you taste it, now you don’t. But sometimes it is not the wine that is changing. It’s our palates that are fooling us because of two related phenomena: adaptation and perceptual contrast.

Adaptation happens when sensitivity to a stimulus is decreased with additional tasting. The more you taste of something the less intense the flavor will seem. That’s why a wine that is out of balance at first might be fine after a few sips (or alternatively why a wine that is initially exciting might seem dull after awhile.) Adaptation sets in immediately. Even the tastiest dish will seem boring and flavorless after a few bites unless you have something on your plate to disrupt the adaptation. The same is true of wine.

Perceptual contrast occurs when a perceptual stimulus is influenced by a contrast with other stimuli. So if you have been tasting subtle, restrained wines, a high-alcohol fruit bomb will seem impressively intense and flavorful, although when tasted alone it may be ordinary. But if you’ve been tasting big, full-bodied wines, a subtle, lighter wine will seem disappointingly meager.

This is why the host of a wine tasting will insist on serving dry or light-bodied wines first before full bodied or sweet wines. But this convention by itself will not eliminate all adaptation or perceptual contrast effects. All components of a wine—balance, structure, acidity, alcohol, and flavor profile are subject to the distortions of adaptation and perceptual contrast, and no single sequence will give equal weight to each characteristic.

A recent experiment at UC Davis shows how this effect works with alcohol. 34 trained subjects tasted several series of Cabernets, some arranged from low to high alcohol, others from high to low alcohol, and others presented randomly.

Those who started with lower alcohols could detect the relative viscosity, more intense aromas and an “extraordinary perception of sweetness” in the higher-alcohol wines. Those who started with higher alcohols had a tougher time assessing alcohol levels, found lower-alcohol wines less smooth and tasted more herbaceous flavors, a trait often criticized in modern Cabernet.

For ordinary consumers, failure to minimize these misperceptions means a disappointing purchase; for professional wine tasters it can mean inconsistent, incoherent judgments. And although being aware of these effects can help moderate them, they are too powerful to be eliminated through awareness alone.

The only antidote is crackers (or other flavorless snacks) and water consumed whenever a wine with different characteristics from predecessors is tasted. (Time also matters if you wait long enough for your palate to cleanse itself.) Most wine tasting venues supply crackers and water, but they are too often ignored. Even among professionals at wine competitions where a judge may blind taste 100 wines, there is insufficient attention paid to palate cleansing, which threatens the objectivity of the results, especially when wines are haphazardly thrown together without much thought given to sequence.

Our senses evolved as a way of protecting the body from harm. They adapt to the ordinary in our environment in order to pay more attention to new, painful, or poisonous stimuli.

Those pesky survival strategies can make life difficult.

Wine: Is it Product or Art?

06 Monday Aug 2012

Posted by in Art and Wine, Wine Culture

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Winemaking_Bottling_Equipment_ Wine is inherently a commercial product; it takes great resources to create it. But in the right hands, winemaking is also a form of art, and it is important for the long term flourishing of winemaking that the artistic dimension is not thoroughly consumed by commercial considerations.

So I agree with Andrew Jeffords’ post on the Decanter website today. In commenting on English wine producers he writes :

“The point all of this out only to explain my dismay when receiving, last week, a 606-word press release from English Wine Producers in which the word ‘industry’ is mentioned no less than eight times…

Do England’s wine producers want to kill us all with boredom? Why do they want the precious, difficult creations they have struggled to bring into the world considered with no more respect that we would give to an extension lead from B&Q? Why do they want to assume for themselves all of the glamour and excitement once mustered by the assembled board of British Leyland?

I’ve never seen the word ‘industry’ yoked to ‘wine’ in France, Italy or Spain. No matter what the scale, grape-growing in continental Europe is considered profoundly agricultural, and the transformation of grapes to wine a culturally significant piece of craftsmanship which, at best, can approach the status of art.

If wine is considered nothing but product it will no longer attract wine lovers whose deep and abiding interest sustains the “industry”.

Intoxication

31 Tuesday Jul 2012

Posted by in Art and Wine, Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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Seilenos-Dionysus A bottle of Jack Daniels is intoxicating if you drink enough of it. The ambient music of Steve Roach is intoxicating as well. Clearly, they are not intoxicating in the same way.

The Jack Daniels will cause drunkenness; but the experience of drinking plays no role in the intoxication just as the experience of taking a sleeping pill has nothing to do with its effects. The effect is all that matters, and you will be just as intoxicated if you drink absentmindedly. Drunkenness is an experience, but it is an experience in which our attention is not directed at anything in particular.

By contrast, with music, the listening itself is crucial to the intoxication. The intoxication is not just an effect of the music; the experience itself, and the attention we give to it, is a necessary component. The hearing is itself intoxicating, and the experience is about something—namely the music.

Happily, wine is intoxicating in both respects. In sufficient quantities it causes the intoxication of drunkenness but the experience of tasting wine is itself intoxicating. The smells, flavors, and textures of wine can be moving and exhilarating just as the sounds of music can be when we direct our attention to them.

As Roger Scruton writes in his article “The Philosophy of Wine” (available in this anthology)

“The intoxication that I feel is not just caused by the wine: it is, to some extent at least, directed at the wine, and not just a cause of my relishing the wine, but in some sense a form of it. The intoxicating quality and the relishing are internally related, in that the one cannot be properly described without reference to the other….I have not swallowed the wine as I would a tasteless drug; I have taken it into myself, so that its flavour and my mood are inextricably bound together.”

Scruton’s analysis seems right up to a point but I doubt that aesthetic intoxication is wholly unrelated to the mild, alcoholic buzz induced by wine. The flush of exhilaration caused by the alcohol (in small quantities) seems to sharpen one’s anticipation, and lends itself to feelings of enchantment that may influence our perceptions and judgments. Even in contexts where I taste and evalluate many wines, and must spit and dump to remain sharp, enough alcohol is absorbed through mouth tissue and accidental swallowing to influence my mood. The attentional focus of relishing and savoring are important but I doubt that they are the whole story.

The intoxication of music may also depend on effects that go beyond savoring. Music influences our moods and expectations in ways that are likely to profoundly influence our judgments about the music.

Recent research has demonstrated the role of neruotransmitters in our enjoyment of music:

Our experience of the music we love stimulates the pleasure chemical dopamine in our brain, concludes a new study produced by a slew of scholars at McGill University. The researchers followed the brain patterns of test subjects with MRI imaging, and identified dopamine streaming into the striatum region of their forebrains “at peak emotional arousal during music listening.”

Not only that, but the scientists noticed that various parts of the striatum responded to the dopamine rush differently. The caudate was more involved during the expectation of some really nice musical excerpt, and the nucleus accumbens took the lead during “the experience of peak emotional responses to music.”

In other words, just the anticipation our favorite passage stimulates the production of dopamine.

I doubt that this kind of influence necessarily involves critical reflection, although the study does not explicitly address this point. It is also not  surprising that increased levels of dopamine are implicated in drunkenness.

Scruton wants to distinguish between intoxication I (drunkenness) and intoxication II (aesthetic appreciation) by insisting that relishing or savoring—a kind of critical inspection—is involved in the latter but not in the former. It is that moment of thoughtful reflection, and our ability to form a representation of the music or wine, that enables us to appreciate the finer points of wine or music.

But I doubt that the content of that critical inspection can be sharply distinguished from causal effects of the wine or music that may not be part of our representation of the wine or music.

It may be that the two forms of intoxication are more closely related than Scruton allows.

Dionysus would not be surprised.

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