Category Archives: Philosophy of Food and Wine

Tasteless Philosophy

19 Thursday Apr 2018

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tastelessDespite their preoccupation with the analysis of sensory experience, philosophers have ignored taste, smell, and touch, focusing instead on vision as the most important sense.

German philosopher Hans Jonas’s “The Nobility of Sight” is a prominent example. Only vision, he argued, gives us eternal, universal truths, which have been philosophy’s concern throughout most of its history. Vision puts us in mind of the eternal because time is not essential to it. When we view a landscape we see the visual field displayed all at once, in no time. An object can be visually identified immediately without a sequence of appearances over time, in contrast to sound, touch, or taste that need time to reveal the character of their objects. Visual objects also have stability. We can view an object, look away, and then return to the very same object as if nothing has changed unlike the fleeting, ever-changing objects of taste, smell, and sound.

Furthermore, Jonas argues, with vision we can see objects with accuracy if we maintain our distance from them. With touch, smell, and taste  we must be intimate with the object thus increasing the chances that personal bias might influence our understanding of it.

Despite their illustrious pedigree, these are very bad arguments. We learn nothing of the eternal through vision, or any other sensory mechanism, and vision without the opportunity for subsequent confirmation, in time, would be the source of constant error. Furthermore, our sense of the stability of objects is as dependent on the sense of touch as on vision. The stability of our visual field depends on the body’s orientation is space, which is maintained, in part, by our tactile contact with solid objects.

As to the alleged objectifying distance of vision, science shows that vision involves intimate contact with physical objects–swarms of photons. We are just as capable of misinterpreting those photons as we are the signals from taste buds. Psychological research has demonstrated the unreliability of eye-witness testimony and perceptual judgments are hardly immune to subjective bias. Objects are often seen at a distance or under conditions otherwise unsuitable for reliable identification.

At best, vision’s distance and the illusion of simultaneity allow us to spin metaphors about the eternal and universal. But misleading metaphors are bad metaphors.

However, there is an important contrast between vision and the other senses. Through vision we do gain a sense of an horizon, an area beyond our present space. This is surely important for the development of our imagination in our evolutionary history.

By contrast, touch , taste, and smell root us in the here and now. Objects must be spatially and temporally present for them to effect these sensory modalities. But why should experience rooted in the here and now be uninteresting to philosophy?

If taste is philosophically uninteresting, perhaps it is because philosophers lack taste.

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The Problems With Wine Scores Episode 489

18 Wednesday Apr 2018

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wine scoresStats wizard David Morrison has a compelling argument that scores between wine critics cannot be compared except in the rare case in which two critics use the same objective scoring scheme. I actually think the situation is worse than David suggests, but more on that in a moment.

His reasoning is as follows.

I have finally concluded that there are two fundamentally different sorts of wine-quality scores in use: (1) what we might call an objective score, based on explicitly assigning points to a series of pre-defined wine characteristics, and then summing them to get the wine score; and (2) subjective (but expert) scores, where the overall score comes from whatever characteristics the scorer wants to express.

David is not referring to the way the scores are expressed via a 100 pt. scale vs a 20 pt. scale. Rather he is referring to the underlying method by which the scores are created.  With objective scoring there is only one scoring scheme so a disagreement among critics would be a genuine disagreement about wine quality. But when critics choose their own idiosyncratic scoring system a disagreement about scores may reflect a different scoring method or different interpretation of the method  rather than a difference in wine quality.

The same scores could mean different qualities (because the scoring schemes are different), and different scores could mean the same quality (because the scoring schemes are different). How on earth are we to know? We can’t!

I think David is exactly right about subjective scores. But I also think what he calls objective scores are also subject to varying interpretations. For example, suppose we develop an objective scoring scheme based on the following pre-defined characteristics with a numerical scale for each characteristic.

We will assess wines for intensity, complexity, balance, length, typicity, and mouthfeel. We will assess every wine using a numerical scale from 0-9 and sum the results producing a score at the end.  These characteristics don’t begin to capture wine quality but adding a more complicated scheme will only increase the problem I want to identify.

The problem is, in this scheme, all the criteria are assigned equal weight—intensity counts the same as balance, etc. But why assume each criterion is of equal value especially across all wines and all varietals? Pinot Noir will not have the length of most Cabernets. A shorter finish may not damage Pinot Noir in the way it would disappoint in the Cab.  A wine even slightly out of balance will suffer in quality despite making up for that deficit in its intensity and complexity. Typicity is important for some purposes but to give it equal weight in every case would disadvantage wines designed to be atypical.  A young, old-school Barolo will have mouth ripping tannins undermining mouthfeel so we would be forced to discount mouthfeel or make a guess about how it will develop.

For a meaningful objective scoring scheme we would have to find some objective way of weighting the various criteria but that would have to be specific to varietal, region, and style since these all require different values.

Even if we were to manage to develop such a scheme, the most important factor in wine quality at least according some critics—the degree to which a wine expresses the distinctive features of the vineyard—is not and could not be in the picture. There is no objective measure of such a quality.

The whole idea of an objective scoring system is hopeless.

So why do I use scores in my reviews you might ask? Because they are useful in assessing how much a critic enjoyed the wine. But they mean nothing more than that. They are a subjective measure of the degree of quality I found in a wine when compared to other wines I’ve tasted. Nothing more, but nothing less. This information is meaningful to the degree you find a particular critic’s palate trustworthy.

A wine score is an invitation to try the wine, not a data point in a competition.

Can Wine Express Melancholy?

16 Monday Apr 2018

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Picasso’s Melancholy Woman

In my conversation with Tyler Thomas, winemaker for Dierberg and Star Lane Vineyards, part of which I posted last week, he said that he didn’t think winemaking was an art because wine is incapable of expressing emotions such as melancholy.

The purpose of wine is to bring pleasure. It’s not art because it’s limited in expression. It’s not supposed to express melancholy. It’s about pleasure and about the property. If you don’t like the wine you won’t ask where it came from.

At the time I didn’t raise objections to his comment since I was more interested in discovering his views on a variety of other issues. But I found the comment curious because, it seems to me, melancholy is one of the more salient emotions expressed by some wines—in particular aged wines that show considerable development but still have some vitality to them. So I want to explore this question of how such wines can express melancholy.

Melancholy is a peculiar and complex emotion. Although often associated with sadness and depression, melancholy is a distinct emotion and mood. it lacks the resignation of depression and is reflective and contemplative, unlike sadness which tends to be an immediate, felt response to a perceived loss. Melancholy has negative and positive aspects; a bit of longing with a touch of sadness but also feelings of pleasure or inspiration which are a central element of the emotion. Often caused by particular memories or thoughts, melancholy involves taking some pleasure in what we love or hope for, so it is tinged with sweetness. For instance if melancholy is caused by the memory of a lost love from the past, melancholy might involve a tinge of sadness at the loss but will be accompanied by pleasurable thoughts of being with that person as well. Melancholy is not always, in fact perhaps not typically, experienced as a negative emotion. Sometimes we attempt to prolong melancholy by seeking a quiet place where the feeling can be indulged. As Victor Hugo said, “melancholy is the happiness of being sad.”

We often feel melancholy (or at least a weakened version of it) in response to works of art, literature or film. The fictional characters and events become the object of our experience of melancholy. But melancholy can be a mood as well as an emotion. Moods are feelings that do not have an object. They come over us, seemingly without reason and can affect our entire personality. The mood of melancholy can arise when in a desolate landscape or on a fog-shrouded lake. In the arts the experience of a melancholy mood (as opposed to the emotion) is most often  found in music. From Elgar’s “Nimrod” from his Enigma Variations to Avro Pärt’s De Profundis to the ambient soundscapes of Bing and Ruth’s Tomorrow was the Golden Age, music of almost every genre is capable of expressing the contemplative, somber mood with moments of vitality that characterize melancholy.

How does wine express melancholy? The answer can be found in the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi.

Wabi  which originally means “poverty”  refers to the roughness of everyday things that have been in use for a long time. As an aesthetic it involves finding beauty in the asymmetry and imperfection of disintegration. Sabi typically means” loneliness” and in the aesthetic context refers to a state of contemplative solitude in persons, and spare simplicity in objects. Wabi-Sabi as an aesthetic principle is an affirmation of imperfection, austerity and melancholy. It’s the beauty of weathered, scarred, ephemeral objects which become more exquisite the closer them come to their non-existence. A broken, earthenware cup, a branch of autumn leaves, a weather-beaten door, if they exhibit a kind of grace, in a context that highlights their evocativeness are wabi-sabi. Melancholy, that peculiar mix of sadness and delight, is the primary mood or emotion evoked by wabi-sabi.

It should be obvious that aged wine, as it begins its downward trajectory while still maintaining elegance and vitality, can be an example of wabi-sabi and is properly attended to in the mood of melancholy. Given the ephemeral nature of wine, we are witnessing the loss of something valuable that exhibits its own unique “patina”. Since each bottle of wine ages differently, its flavors and textures reflect its unique nature and history as the wine responds to the conditions under which it was bottled and stored. With many aged wines, it is likely you may never taste that cuvee again as the bottles from a particular vintage are consumed over time. Thus, an aged wine expresses the passage of time, the quality of impermanence which is associated with the sadness, longing, and inspiration of melancholy. The appreciation of aged wine induces reflection on the lives of the people who made the wine who have left behind this fragment from their past. It invites both memory and imagination but also reflection on the impermanence of cultural achievements and their celebration–the ravages of time as both something to celebrate and fear.

The fact that wines must give pleasure in order for us to appreciate them is no obstacle to wine expressing melancholy since the experience of pleasure, albeit mixed with sadness, is an important element in melancholy. Aged wines, like the objects of wabi-sabi lack the bright, juicy, freshness and power of young wines. They are appreciated precisely because time has exposed some hidden dimension of the wine in which we take pleasure.

Thus, it seems to me wine can express melancholy. If we decline to experience it as we consume the wine that may be testimony to our shallowness or inattention, not any inherent limitation on wines’ expressive potential.

How Do You Know a Wine is of Great Quality?

03 Tuesday Apr 2018

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two dancersForget the scores, aroma notes, hype and price points. How do you know a wine is of great quality?

If you want to get to know it better.

You feel drawn to it and want to learn more. A great wine has hidden dimensions that don’t reveal themselves all at once. You have to settle in with such a wine, taste it over time, try to develop a sensitivity to its unique charms. In that sense a great wine is like a great person. .

Such wines have a supple, yielding character as if you can enter into a sympathetic relationship with the wine. Its movement becomes my movement, directing my attention so I become open to its influence. Like two dancers reacting to each other’s every move.

Wines that give you that sense of hidden depths and sympathetic vibration, that draw you in to their world, are the one’s you will remember and come back to again and again. There is something inexhaustible about them.

There really is no other criterion for a great wine. It’s a wine that moves you.

We Shouldn’t Sacrifice Creativity for Ideology

21 Wednesday Mar 2018

Posted by in Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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imaginationMeg Houston Maker at her website Terroir Review has an interesting proposal for how to classify wines, one that I think is in the right direction but has a serious flaw. She argues:

If we think of wine as principally an agricultural product — grown somewhere, made somewhere, and, to use Matt Kramer’s term, expressing “somewhereness” — we must consider not only where the grapes are grown but also how they become transformed into wine. Process matters.

This is absolutely correct. The production process as much as the climate and geology of the vineyard determines what ends up in the bottle. This is crucial information for the consumer to know and is sometimes more useful than knowing the AVA in which the grapes were grown, which may have so much diversity as to be meaningless.

Using the French system of classifying cheese as a model she suggests 4 classifications based on the production process:

Farmstead — The wine is made on the winemaker’s own property using fruit grown on that land. No purchased fruit is allowed. The winemaker uses minimal inputs and interventions in the cellar and omits all additives that modulate the wine’s properties. Production is limited to the size of the estate and production facility.

Artisanal — The wine is likewise made on the winemaker’s property but using locally sourced fruit, possibly mixed with fruit grown on the property itself. Again, the winemaker uses minimal inputs and interventions in the cellar, omitting additives. Production is limited by the size and capacity of the production facility.

Cooperative — The wine is made using fruit pooled from a group of winegrowers, in a facility owned by one of them or by the collective. The grower-makers have stylistic as well as commercial sympathies. Production is limited by the size of the collective, the yield of each grower, and the capacity of the shared production facility.

Industrial — The wine is made using fruit grown anywhere allowed by appellation laws. Winemaking is industrial, and there are no restrictions on cellar manipulations beyond the legal requirements for wine production. Production is principally limited by commercial exigencies rather than raw material availability or capacity.

I have no problem with these classifications but I think at least one more category is needed.

In my travels I come across some winemakers who source fruit locally from a single vineyard and emphasize the quality and distinctiveness of the fruit they use. These are small production, small lot operations that give every barrel the attention that artisanal winemakers give their lots. Yet they are not averse to using additives and processes that “modulate the wine’s properties”. With some lots they may use commercial yeast to help with a high alcohol fermentation, with others, enzymes to extract color to help modulate tannin development, or micro-oxidation to adjust mouthfeel, etc. With other lots they may not even use sulfur to protect the wine if they’re curious about what the results would be.

According to this classification they would be considered industrial wines because they go well beyond minimal cellar inputs. But these are utterly unlike industrial wines. Commercial exigencies play little role in their decisions. The cellar manipulations are used not to save money but to produce a wine according to their vision. Mad experimenters striving to produce distinctive wines, every vintage is an opportunity to push the envelope to make a more interesting wine than in previous vintages. They often hold wines back from release for several years until the wine shows sufficient development, a practice that is anything but financially beneficial. Rather than destroying terroir by striving for homogeneity and consistency, they’re seeking to discover the full range of expression of which the vineyard is capable.

I’m not sure what to call such wines. “Art Wines” comes to mind but I think even Farmstead and Artisanal wines can be works of art so that won’t do. I think I would just classify them as “Winemaker’s Wines” because their guiding star is the winemaker’s imagination.

I know this category  works against the prevailing ideology that only minimal intervention wines are worthy. But I think what wine culture should be striving for is more differentiation, more distinction, more ways for wine to be. Sometimes that distinctiveness will be a product of the vineyard. Terroir is real and a crucial element of wine aesthetics. But sometimes distinctiveness will be product of the winemaker’s imagination. Why should we be forced to choose between them; why not both?

And we certainly don’t want a classification system that forces wine to be less than what it can be. That’s the problem with the old French model of strictly limiting what winemakers can do.

At any rate, I’m on board with a classification system that takes production process into consideration. But we should make room for the full range of processes that produce distinctive wines.

The Magic of Wine Production

19 Monday Mar 2018

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magicWinemaking involves a series of activities generated by an idea of what the finished product will be like. That idea first appears in the winemaker’s imagination as the grapes are tasted in the vineyard at harvest. But as any winemaker will tell you, surprise is in the future and that original idea will have to be modified as the wine makes its way through the production process. Wine is a living thing with a “mind” of its own.

Like artists, winemakers spend much of their time manipulating stuff—crushing grapes, punching down must, racking juice, cleaning barrels, maintaining and repairing machines. It’s  physical activity that forces changes to that imaginary “wine” shaping a product that is still a dream . And just like a work of art in process, as the wine unfolds it will suggest the meaning it will have to anyone receptive to its potential. It’s not the idea but the making that unlocks potential by making it available to be perceived for both the winemaker/artist and her audience. The work liberates the object from the creator making meanings that outstrip the original idea as if the meaning somehow makes itself as the creator constructs the work.

There is an excess of meaning here that seems to have no origin.

Mundane, mechanical labor creating something of extraordinary beauty—21st Century alchemy.

Art Wines May Not Be The Most Expensive Wines

07 Wednesday Mar 2018

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From the Archives:

I defend the view that wines can be works of art. But certainly not all wines. Most wines in fact are just commodities. So which ones count as works of art? One might naturally suppose that Bordeaux Premier Crus or Napa cult cabernets might be prime candidates for vinous works of art. But I think not, for reasons that Matt Kramer captures in an old issue of the Wine Spectator. (Behind a paywall)

Expensive wines, I wrote, rarely surprise. They are known quantities, from known places and producers. Not least, the vast majority are made within relatively narrow taste parameters. Typically that means oak (a little or a lot) and reliance on a relative handful of well-known and much-pursued grape varieties (you know which ones) from equally well-known and much pursued locations (ditto). These wines are in a word predictable.

The most expensive wines are predictable because their producers have a long list of customers who want to know what they are buying when they fork out hundreds if not thousands of dollars for a bottle. What they want least is experimentation. Thus, such winemakers strive for consistency from year to  year.

But art, at least as we have conceived it for the past 150 years, thrives on experimentation and innovation. Artists solve problems in their medium, challenge conventions, and pose new questions. We expect a work of art to be original, an expression of an artist’s imagination that helps us see something in a new way. Thus, works of art that are excessively bound to conventions or designed to cater only to existing taste will fail as works or art regardless of how pleasing they may be to the eye. Similarly a rock band that repeatedly makes roughly the same album will be dismissed by critics regardless of their sales figures.

If a wine is to qualify as art it therefore cannot be excessively predictable or merely a “crowd pleaser” regardless of how exclusive or well-heeled the crowd. And thus the most expensive wines may fall short as works of art.

This is not to say that genuine art must eschew all conventions or ignore existing standards of taste. If a work is to be understood it must make some concession to the past and to existing standards. And this leaves some wiggle room for artists and winemakers to innovate within the constraints imposed by the need for their audience to grasp their point. The mere fact that a work is popular does not efface its artistic merit. But if the “taste parameters” are too narrow we have a Kinkade not a Van Gogh.

Wines with an established reputation, if they are to be works of art, must find a middle way between predictability and innovation. It is achievable but not easily so.

Wines with a less established reputation and devoted to innovation might more readily achieve the status of an art, and that is a good thing for wine lovers of modest means.

 

Hemingway Really Understood Wine

28 Wednesday Feb 2018

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hemingway_lgHemingway was a notorious drunk who also did a bit of writing. He captures the appeal of wine as well as anyone:

“Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing.+ —Ernest Hemingway from Death in the Afternoon”

This is the key to why wine’s popularity has persisted for millennia. Its appreciation at the highest levels requires a supremely cultivated, refined sensibility although its charms will enhance any social gathering and can be enjoyed by almost anyone. Yet it is fundamentally a product of nature, not because it begins as a crop but because its aesthetic properties are so shaped by climate, weather, and soil that it never loses its relationship to “the wild”, to factors beyond human control.

If we should ever learn to make wine in a laboratory according to a recipe, it would lose much of its charm.

With climate change already shaping human habitats, human existence increasingly looks like a struggle between wild, uncontrollable nature and the dream of absolute dominion. That struggle is materialized in your glass of wine. Of course by “nature” we can no longer mean untouched by human hands. There is no such nature at least on this planet. But there is the part of nature that, however influenced by human projects, escapes our drive for dominion. Ask any winemaker—wine is one of those wild things.

As nature disappears under the onslaught of technology,  it becomes visible again only via cultural practices that symbolize the obduracy of nature, something that offers resistance to human intervention without being outside its orbit.

Wine serves as that kind of symbol, and its duality, sophisticated refinement and savage unpredictability, is in part what makes it fascinating.

Hemingway also said “I drink to make other people more interesting.” He understood people as well.

Are Fine Wine and Creative Cooking Arts or Crafts?

26 Monday Feb 2018

Posted by in 3 Quarks Daily Column, General Aesthetics, Philosophy of Food and Wine

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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.