You’re tasting a Pinot Noir and finding it pleasant enough. Then someone says the wine’s acidity suddenly lifts the wine just as the fruit fades. You return to the glass, looking for this effect, and there it is. The wine seems more lively.
Did the description help you discover something you had overlooked? Or did the suggestion lead you to experience something that wasn’t really there?
There is some reason to expect that latter. Research shows that expectations influence what we taste. Tell someone a wine is expensive and they often like it better. Is our susceptibility to suggestion making us taste the Pinot as more lively?
But the alternative explanation is equally plausible. Wine is a complicated sensory object and we cannot possibly attend to everything happening in a wine at once. We direct our attention to some features and not others. Maybe you just missed that lift in acidity because you were focused on aromas. The tasting note encouraged you to focus on other sensations like how the wine evolves in the mouth.
Of course, the problem of suggestion remains. We might allow the critic’s authority to substitute for our own judgment. Wine’s notorious status anxieties make this especially likely. Nobody wants to be the person who fails to appreciate a $300 Burgundy.
How do we distinguish perceptual discovery from a successful exercise in persuasion? I doubt there is a foolproof method. But there are ways to test a description against experience.
What reason is there to think you’re unusually susceptible to suggestion? If you’re a novice taster trying to learn how to taste, you might well be unduly influenced by the tasting note. There is nothing wrong with that. It is how you learn. But if you’re an experienced taster and confident in your judgment there may be no reason to think you’re excessively open to suggestion. This is especially true if you routinely find yourself disagreeing with tasting notes. If you have established your ability and inclination to make independent judgments, why think in this case you’re under the influence?
But there is a quite different way of thinking about this. If your goal is to enjoy the wine (rather than critique it) and the tasting note makes the wine taste better, isn’t that a welcome achievement. Who cares if you’re tasting something that isn’t there if you’re enjoying it?
I suspect many readers have some resistance to that. But why?
When we listen to Debussy’s La Mer (translated as The Sea) the title encourages us to hear the movement of waves in the music. We might experience the same musical passage differently if the composition were called Mountain Storm. Does that make our enjoyment of the oceanic interpretation fraudulent?
It seems to me there is a conflict between two values.
One is the value of pleasurable experience. The other is the value of being in genuine contact with something worthy of our attention. We want our pleasure to be earned, in some sense, by the object. Part of wine’s appeal is that it can surprise us, resist our expectations, and occasionally defeat our attempts to understand it. If our experience is wholly determined by suggestion, we lose that encounter with something that has its own character. Perhaps the fear of being fooled reflects a legitimate concern that we’re losing access to something we value about wine.
But this argument has a limitation. Even when suggestion is responsible for our pleasure, the experience needn’t be entirely divorced from the wine. The wine may possess enough sensory complexity to support several interpretations. A suggestive description might help us construct an enjoyable experience without that experience being the most accurate interpretation of the wine. Why must a wine have a single interpretation?
This suggests a distinction between being deceived and engaging in imaginative play. We willingly enter fictional worlds in novels, knowing they are inventions, because we find the experience rewarding. Could we approach wine in a similar spirit, allowing a tasting note to stimulate our imagination without demanding that every sensation correspond precisely to an objective property?
I suspect the answer is yes, provided we’re comfortable with the kind of activity we’re engaged in. Someone trying to evaluate a wine’s quality has good reasons to resist suggestion. Someone drinking a bottle over dinner might be perfectly happy to let a compelling description enhance the experience.
So perhaps the question is why do we insist that wine must deserve the pleasure it gives us?
That question forces us to examine what we want from aesthetic experience. Is pleasurable experience sufficient, or do we also want the satisfaction of having discovered something about the object?
