25 Wednesday Sep 2019
It’s fashionable to criticize wine critics for a variety of sins: they’re biased, their scores don’t mean anything, and their jargon is unintelligible according to the critics of critics. Shouldn’t we just drink what we like? Who cares what critics think?
In my Three Quarks column this month, I defend wine criticism by showing how wine criticism contributes to wine appreciation.
28 Wednesday Aug 2019
Posted in 3 Quarks Daily Column, Philosophy
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Why do we value successful art works, symphonies, and good bottles of wine? One answer is that they give us an experience that lesser works or merely useful objects cannot provide—an aesthetic experience. But what is an aesthetic experience and how does it differ from an ordinary experience? This is an especially difficult issue with regard to wine. We drink wine for many reasons and in many contexts. Only sometimes does it produce an aesthetic experience. I try to show what is distinctive about aesthetic experience in this month’s Three Quarks Daily post.
31 Wednesday Jul 2019
For wine enthusiasts, artisanal wine is about continuous variation and the singularities that emerge from those variations. Wine enthusiasts devote most of their attention to tracking variation and assessing it. Differences between regions, varietals, vineyards, winemaking styles, weather and climate variation, soil variation, and bottle variation are of primary aesthetic interest. Life, vitality, is also fundamentally about variation. This shared connection between life and wine is the key to understanding wine’s expressiveness. The art of winemaking is basically the art of expressing vitality. I make the case in my column at Three Quarks Daily.
03 Wednesday Jul 2019
Much of my writing about wine is devoted to understanding wine as an aesthetic object and wine tasting as an aesthetic experience. But what, exactly, is an aesthetic experience in the context of wine appreciation? I begin to answer that question in my Three Quarks Daily column this month.
08 Wednesday May 2019
In the never ending battle against boring, homogeneous wines, it looks like the good guys are winning—we live in a world of unprecedented diversity in our wine choices. But it hasn’t always been that way. I tell the story of how diversity and variation won the day in my Three Quarks Daily column this month.
10 Wednesday Apr 2019
The wine world thrives on variation. If the thousands of bottles on wine shop shelves all taste the same, there is no justification for the vast number of brands and their price differentials. Yet the modern wine world is built on processes that can dampen variation and increase homogeneity. If these processes were to gain power and prominence the culture of wine would be under threat. In my Three Quarks Daily column this month I look at some of the historical forces that have contributed to increased homogeneity.
13 Wednesday Mar 2019
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To what degree do wine critics influence wine quality? This is a complicated question but in my 3 Quarks essay this month I begin to try answer it by assessing the influence of Robert Parker. He rousted wine quality from its dogmatic slumber but at what cost?
13 Wednesday Feb 2019
Posted in 3 Quarks Daily Column, Food History, Wine Culture
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Although we create new varietals, discover new wine regions, and develop new technologies and methods. these innovations produce minor deviations from a core concept that sometimes seems immune to radical change. There are, after all, only so many ways to ferment grape juice. Red and white still wine, sparkling wine, and fortified wine have been around for centuries and are still the main wine styles on offer. Every wine we drink is a modification of those major themes.
Nevertheless, sometimes wine styles change, often massively. In a community so bound by tradition how does that change take place? One example of a massive change in taste took place in the U.S. in the decades following WWII, where in the course of about twenty years American wine consumers changed their preference from sweet wine to dry. How did such a revolution in taste occur in such a relatively short period of time?
See my Three Quarks Daily column “The Borrowed and the New: American Wine and French Tradition” for the answer.
16 Wednesday Jan 2019
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There is more to making wine than the winemaker and her grapes. In my Three Quarks column this month I argue that, in addition to support personnel, conventions and traditions carry the heavy load.
19 Wednesday Dec 2018
Although wine is a beverage that brings enjoyment because of its flavor and alcohol, for many people wine is much more than that. Many winemakers and wine growers give up lucrative careers to take on the uncertainties of making wine, and wine lovers devote countless hours to studying its every nuance and permutation.
Why? What makes wine an object of love?
I try to answer that in my latest essay at Three Quarks Daily.
