On Burying Aesthetics

Over the past half-century, wine has become increasingly democratized as more and more people, some of limited means, make wine a part of their lives. This democratization was facilitated by an increasingly sophisticated science and technology of wine production that enables wineries to produce mass quantities of pleasant, quaffable wines at low cost and make them widely available.

These were positive developments that created the wine world we have today. However, they have a negative impact on the aesthetic appreciation of wine.

Contemporary discussions of wine quality tend to oscillate, unhelpfully, between subjectivism and objectivism. These positions align with the trend toward democratization and a science-based understanding of wine.

Proponents of wine democracy often argue that wine quality is thoroughly subjective. Individual differences among tasters preclude agreement on the nature or quality of what is being tasted. Some members of the media take that basic truth and draw a further consequence. They argue that genuine wine expertise is non-existent since even experts disagree in their assessments. This radical subjectivism is then promoted as a means of making wine more accessible to a public intimidated by the arcane language of the wine community. Why listen to experts if there is no such thing as wine expertise?

By contrast, a more science-based approach to wine points to objective, scientific analyses of chemical components in wine that influence taste and smell, thus demonstrating an objective foundation for wine tasting. The fact there are systematic connections between what, on average, we tend to taste and smell and specific chemical compounds in wine lends support to the claim that there is genuine wine expertise.

But chemical analyses cannot explain what makes a wine distinctive or aesthetically valuable. Scientific analysis makes no attempt to address emergent properties of the whole wine, such as elegance or finesse.

Thus, neither objectivism nor subjectivism can explain the attention wine lovers pay to the aesthetic value of wine. Both are content to treat wine as a commodity. For a subjectivist, there is no such thing as wine quality or aesthetic value. But neither does aesthetic value show up within objective, scientific analysis.  Since the terms of this debate leave no room for aesthetics, it isn’t surprising that the significance of wine as an aesthetic object often goes unrealized.