26 Wednesday Sep 2018
Tasting notes often attribute emotions or personality characteristics to wine. Is there a foundation for such talk or is it just nonsense? In my Three Quarks Daily column, I use recent developments in psychology to show there is in fact a foundation for describing wines as aggressive, brooding, fierce or dignified.
29 Wednesday Aug 2018
Posted in 3 Quarks Daily Column, General Aesthetics
As you know if you’ve been reading this blog I’ve long been interested in the expressive potential of music and wine, especially regarding the expression of emotion. Because everyone knows that music is especially good at expressing emotion, explaining how it does so appears to be the more straightforward task since many people would deny that wine could express emotion at all. If we’re going to make progress on the wine/emotion question we will have solve the music/emotion question first.
It turns out that it is not so easy to explain how music expresses emotion. Philosophers have not come to any agreement about the issue. But I think I’ve found the key to both music and wine and their expressive possibilities. In my 3 Quarks column this month I show how the psychological concept of vitality forms answers the question of how music expresses emotion. I will tackle wine and emotion next month if and when I get it sorted out.
01 Wednesday Aug 2018
Posted in 3 Quarks Daily Column, General Aesthetics
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My Three Quarks column this month is not about wine exactly, but it is about beauty and some wines are beautiful. So it sort of is about wine.
I argue that the classical conception of beauty as harmony and symmetry has been misleading us for centuries. What does that say about harmonious wines?
25 Wednesday Apr 2018
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In my Three Quarks column this month I explain why the beauty of wine inspires love and madness.
26 Monday Mar 2018
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In my 3 Quarks column this month I argue that our obsession with smooth textures limits the expressiveness of wine.
26 Monday Feb 2018
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The explosion of interest in the aesthetics of food and beverages over the past several decades inevitably raises the question whether certain culinary preparations or wines can be considered works of art. I consider how we should distinguish a craft from an art in the context of wine and food in my Three Quarks Daily column this month.
29 Monday Jan 2018
Posted in 3 Quarks Daily Column
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In my Three Quarks essay this month, I sort out the debate about natural wines and seek a definition of “natural” that is not insulting to conventional winemakers.
01 Monday Jan 2018
Is wine really alive or is this often repeated claim a metaphor? I explore the life of wine in my Three Quarks Daily column this month.
04 Monday Dec 2017
Increasingly I think we can understand wine only if we think of it as a living organism. In my 3 Quarks Essay this month I explain why wine has Thing Power. What’s “thing-power” you ask? You will have to read the essay.
08 Wednesday Nov 2017
My recent visit to Alinea, the temple of modernist cuisine in the U.S., prompted some thoughts about whether molecular gastronomy is maintaining it’s radical edge. I ponder the issue in my essay this month at Three Quarks Daily.
