What Does Your “Guilty Pleasure” Wine Say About Taste?

This essay by Kyle Munkittrick entitled “Taste Values Craft” got me thinking about what it means to have good taste because he begins with a point very well-taken: Having good taste is knowing when something is well made. It may not have deep meaning. It may not be a work of art. But if the craft is good, it’s worthy of praise. We can certainly apply that to wine. A well made wine is worth drinking even if it doesn’t get the highest scores. A person of good taste knows that and can recognize a well-crafted wine. But then Munkittrick muddies the waters but in an interesting way. He uses the well known example of film critic Roger Ebert’s review of what, by the standards of filmmaking, would count as a poorly made film—The Mummy. Ebert wrote:

There is hardly a thing I can say in its favor, except that I was cheered by nearly every minute of it. I cannot argue for the script, the direction, the acting or even the mummy, but I can say that I was not bored and sometimes I was unreasonably pleased. There is a little immaturity stuck away in the crannies of even the most judicious of us, and we should treasure it.

Ebert’s comment  has the appearance of a guilty pleasure, not a judgment about the craft of film  making.

That’s where the conceptual trouble starts—because a guilty pleasure is precisely the case where preference refuses to behave. I like it. I can’t justify it. But I’m smiling anyway.  So what are we supposed to learn from that smile?

Munkittrick thinks it tells us something of real value, an expression of real taste. He writes:

Ebert’s delight is hard to articulate because it’s based on tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge, which great taste is built on, must often be first-hand experience or observation-based rather than written. It is difficult, if not nearly impossible, to articulate. Thus, Ebert had two options: 1) a pedantic and ultimately futile drill-down into why, precisely, The Mummy is actually quite good (e.g. shots like this one) 2) to share, as he did, his visceral child-like delight as a proxy for that tacit knowledge and as an expression of his taste. Ebert, trusting his skill as a writer to convey his delight, chose the latter. In doing so, he invites those who’ve not yet developed their taste to begin their journey

Munkittrick wants the smile to mean that the pleasure we take in a poorly made film or wine is telling us something that our conscious mind can’t interpret and can’t articulate. Pleasure, on this view, is a kind of proto-judgment. The object of our guilty pleasure is really good; we just don’t know it yet.

But here’s the problem. If pleasure is by itself a valid verdict, then we’ve replaced “taste values craft” with “taste values liking.” And the entire purpose of invoking craft—of claiming taste can be trained, argued for, and shared—evaporates. A wine world built on that principle would be unbearable. Every conversation would end the way internet conversations end: “I like it, therefore it’s good; you don’t, therefore you’re wrong.”

The Ebert passage is instructive because it’s actually doing two things at once. First, it stages the guilty-pleasure confession: I can’t defend it by the usual standards. Second, it hints that the movie might be good at being what it is: a well-timed entertainment machine. Ebert’s “good trash” (the phrase matters) is not a surrender to preference. It’s an implicit claim about craft relative to aims: not “great art,” but “competent, effective fun.”

Wine has an even clearer version of this distinction because we constantly encounter bottles that are “good at what they are” without being profound. A cold, well-made Picpoul on a hot afternoon. A crunchy Beaujolais that does one thing—bright fruit, low tannin, high drinkability—and does it cleanly. A simple Cava that hits the marks: brisk, not sweet, not tired, bubbles intact, no weird oxidative funk masquerading as personality. None of these are existential confrontations. They’re not the Guernica of beverages. But craft is craft. They’re worthy of praise.

Now contrast that with the wine version of The Mummy: the bottle you love even though, by your own lights, it’s clumsy. Maybe it’s an over-oaked supermarket Chardonnay that tastes like liquid crème brûlée. Maybe it’s a high-alcohol “fruit bomb” that makes you wince on the second glass but somehow feels like a warm blanket on the first. You know the critiques: sweetness of oak, lack of balance, blunt structure, fatigue after a few sips. And yet—there you are, cheered by nearly every minute of it.

What should “good taste” do with that? The immature answer is to convert pleasure into authority: “I love it, therefore it’s well made.” The snobbish answer is to deny the pleasure: “I can’t possibly like that, therefore I don’t.” Neither position is admirable. The mature position—one that saves Munkittrick’s craft thesis without going down the “pleasure is always right” rabbit hole—is to treat pleasure as a hypothesis, not a conclusion.

Pleasure is the ping on the sonar. It says: pay attention. But the work of taste is what happens next. You ask what, concretely, the wine is doing: Is it balanced? Does it have clarity? Is the oak integrated or merely loud? And you also ask what the wine is trying to be. Some wines aim at refreshment. Some aim at seduction. Some aim at severity, at the dignity of restraint. Craft is partly the skill of recognizing when those aims are realized.

This is where the guilty pleasure becomes valuable rather than embarrassing. It forces a discipline of honesty. You can say: I enjoy this, and I also know it’s not especially well made. Or: I enjoy this because, within its modest aims, it’s made with real competence. Or: I enjoy this for reasons that aren’t aesthetic at all—nostalgia, context, the fact that it reminded you of your uncle’s dinner table and therefore like a whole lost world. All of those are legitimate human truths. Only one of them is a judgment about craft.

Munkittrick is right that taste involves recognizing what is well made. Where he flirts with confusion is in letting delight do too much of the evaluative lifting. Preference can initiate attention, but it cannot be the final court of appeal—unless we want “taste” to mean nothing more than “vibes, but with confidence.”