Does Wine Knowledge Increase Pleasure?

In World of Fine Wine Tim James wonders whether all that knowledge we gather, as we study books on winemaking or attend tasting classes, enhances drinking pleasure. After all, most people enjoy wine without ever cracking a book or consulting a somm.

He takes a circuitous route to an answer, first pondering his enjoyment of music despite lacking an ear for it, and musing about his own field of literary studies, in which some approaches to literary analysis kill whatever joy might be found in the pages of Joyce or Hemingway.

The story has a happy ending:

At some point, or in some process, I feel I “got” wine, whether it was through standing on the bridge over the Mosel at Bernkastel and looking, amazed, at the cliffs of Riesling, or letting the hot red soil trickle through my fingers in a Chenin vineyard in the Swartland, or listening to the great English importer Roy Richards talk about “proper wine.” It all helped me achieve, or develop, the equivalent of what poet and jazz lover Philip Larkin calls an ear for music.

And he quotes Larkin approvingly:

He must hold on to the principle that the only reason for praising a work is that it pleases, and the way to develop his critical sense is to be more acutely aware of whether he is being pleased or not.”

No doubt paying more attention to how much pleasure  you feel has some value, but with wine we typically don’t have to spend much time pondering whether we are pleased or not. We know after a few minutes. And it isn’t clear that he has answered his own question. Does wine knowledge help you analyze your own pleasure? Perhaps it helps you explain it and there is intellectual pleasure in understanding something. But that isn’t quite the same as taking pleasure in the wine itself.

I gained considerable pleasure reading the authors musing about pleasure but I think he (and we, typically) over-complicate the issue.

I won’t bore you with the details but a paper about art criticism written many years ago  by the philosopher Arnold Isenberg (entitled Critical Communication, 1949) has long seemed to me to get this question right. He argued that the central function of art criticism is perceptual guidance. Good writing about art directs our attention to properties of a work that we might not have noticed had we not encountered the criticism.

I think wine writing and wine knowledge work the same way. Wine knowledge helps us taste dimensions of the wine we might not have noticed or passed over without understanding  their significance. Wine information provides us with directions for perceiving.

Now it is true that you can enjoy something without  paying much attention to it. But enjoyment without attention is likely to be less intense. Pleasure is partly dependent on attention. A pleasurable experience is a lot more so if our senses are alert to what we’re experiencing and primed to see it as significant.

Knowledge enhances pleasure because it gives us more things to notice and more reasons to think what we notice is meaningful.

This is not to say that knowledge is always beneficial. Facts that are not directing your attention can be useless and distracting.

The only wine knowledge worth having is the kind that sends you back to the glass.