Category Archives: Philosophy of Food and Wine

Burnham and Skilleas, Wine and Aesthetic Experience

29 Wednesday May 2019

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ecstatic wine drinkerIn trying to nail down a conception of aesthetic experience appropriate to wine appreciation, it might make sense to begin with the view of Burnham and Skilleas in their book  The Aesthetics of Wine. It is the most comprehensive treatment of the topic available. However, I think it is fundamentally misguided since it appears to exclude from the realm of aesthetic experience the kinds of everyday interactions with wine that I think are central.

Burnham and Skilleas usefully refer to various tasting practices as distinct projects. Analytic tasters trying to identify a wine in a blind tasting, a wine critic describing a wine to her readers, or a sommelier trying to pair a wine with a particular dish are each involved in different projects because they have different aims that require quite different competencies. Most importantly according to Burnham and Skilleas, they are focused on different aspects of the wine and thus each project has a different intentional object. However, they argue that none of them are necessarily having an aesthetic experience. This is curious because it seems apparent that many tasting projects involve some degree of aesthetic appreciation.

Aesthetic experience for Burnham and Skilleas is a function of engaging in an aesthetic project and this involves acquiring the competencies to recognize distinctly aesthetic properties such as elegance, harmony, complexity and intensity. And one does so by participating in a variety of practices—choosing the proper glass, deciding on a tasting order, decanting, etc.—which highlights those aesthetic properties. Their point is that tasters separately interested in identifying a wine, describing it, evaluating its typicity or pairing it with food need not attend to these aesthetic properties, going so far as to assert that tasters engaged in these projects with wine from the same bottle are tasting different wines.

The absurdity of this latter point is an indicator that something has gone wrong. In fact I would dispute their main claim that the project of identifying the origin of a wine, describing it, judging its typicity or pairing it with food need not focus on aesthetic properties. For instance, it’s perfectly appropriate when blind tasting a medium body, high acid wine with distinct earth notes to argue it’s likely Chianti rather than Brunello di Montalcino because it lacks elegance or complexity. Anyone describing a notably complex wine who doesn’t mention or imply that it’s complex is simply not accurately describing the wine. Food pairings will also sometimes depend on features such as complexity or intensity.

My point is that the apprehension of aesthetic properties can be part of a wide variety of different tasting activities. Thus, it makes little sense to isolate an aesthetic project in a way that excludes this variety.

Furthermore, their way of defining aesthetic experience in terms of a project rules out the everydayness of wine which I have argued is crucial to understanding wine aesthetics.

They are quite explicit that a necessary condition of aesthetic experience is having a variety of the competencies that define an aesthetic project including the capacity to describe and evaluate a wine using the vocabulary and tasting skills possessed by professional wine tasters. This rules out casual yet attentive drinkers from having an aesthetic experience and implies that a whole range of everyday experiences that one might think are aesthetic are not. The kinds of experiences that wine lovers often refer to as an “aha” experience—that moment at which one recognizes the consummate beauty of wine and its potential for further engagement—are deemed “proto-aesthetic” because the people who have such experiences often lack the fully developed competencies of professional wine tasters or connoisseurs.

However, it isn’t at all obvious that basic aesthetic properties such as intensity or elegance cannot be recognized by people who may lack the vocabulary or developed competencies of the connoisseur. After all, people who report on their “aha” experience are not simply claiming to enjoy the wine—they find it thrilling, awe-inspiring, etc. Clearly they are tasting something out of the ordinary beyond mere liking. Burnham and Skilleas are right that the apprehension of aesthetic  properties are not simple perceptions but involve holistic judgments about relations among properties of the wine. But elegance or intensity are not so difficult to discern that attentive drinkers with modest levels of experience must miss them. After all, music lovers can be deeply moved by a piece of music without the capability of following the score or articulating genre characteristics. No doubt having such competencies enhances the aesthetic experience but their absence doesn’t preclude the experience from being aesthetic.

This idea of an aesthetic project that requires various competencies and practices is useful for articulating the structured, reflective nature of wine appreciation. Burnham and Skilleas deploy it successfully to show that the casual dismissal of wine as a serious aesthetic object is misguided.

But we can’t use this notion of a project to define aesthetic experience because it orphans too many apparently aesthetic experiences.

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Zeroing in on Wine as an Aesthetic Experience

22 Wednesday May 2019

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wine aestheticsThere are many things that people do with wine. We drink it to get drunk, drink it distractedly at a social gathering because everyone else is doing so or because it generally contributes to the atmosphere of good cheer. We can drink wine to impress someone with the weight of our bank account. We use wine to quench thirst on a hot day, provide warming sensations on a cold evening, or wash down food. I mention these together because they all share a common feature—you can engage in these activities without paying attention to the wine. While these activities may be part of a larger, holistic aesthetic experience, to the extent they don’t involve paying attention to the wine, they are not aesthetic experiences of the wine. They don’t have the wine as an intentional object.

By contrast we can engage in a variety of activities that do involve paying attention to the wine. They generally fall under four categories—description, identification, evaluation, and appreciation.

A WSET student sitting for an exam must describe a wine (or several wines) in order to pass the exam. If she is tasting blind and must draw inferences about the origins of the wine, she is engaged in identification. If she is required to assess the quality level of the wines she is engaged in evaluation. A winemaker tasting a barrel sample to see if it’s developing volatile acidity or a wine merchant deciding which wine to stock are also engaged in evaluation, as is a taster assessing whether a Riesling from Mosel is typical of that region. What is peculiar about these activities is that although they require focused attention on the wine they don’t depend on the taster having an aesthetic experience. These activities are not necessarily incompatible with having an aesthetic experience but they can be competently performed without the experience being aesthetic.

Appreciation however is another matter. When a wine tasting activity involves the appreciation of a wine, it is always at least a candidate for an aesthetic experience. This is why describing, identifying or evaluating a wine is compatible with appreciation. We can describe, identify, or evaluate a wine while appreciating it as well. But appreciation is distinct from these activities. Appreciation is of course the most widely practiced wine tasting activity. It is what most wine lovers do when they drink wine with friends, enjoy a wine with dinner or attend a wine tasting.

The puzzle is to nail down what it is that makes appreciation an aesthetic experience. How does it differ from identifying, describing or evaluating a wine when these are not part of an aesthetic experience?

The “Everydayness” of Wine and Aesthetic Experience

20 Monday May 2019

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people drinking wineIn giving an account of the aesthetic value of wine, the most important factor to keep in mind is that wine is an everyday affair. It is consumed by people in the course of their daily lives, and wine’s peculiar value and allure is that it infuses everyday life with an aura of mystery and consummate beauty. Wine is a “useless” passion that has a mysterious ability to gather people and create community. It serves no other purpose than to command us to slow down,  take time, focus on the moment, and recognize that some things in life have intrinsic value. But it does so in situ where we live and play. Wine transforms the commonplace, providing a glimpse of the sacred in the profane. Wine’s appeal must be understood within that frame.

Thus wine differs from the fine arts at least as traditionally conceived. In Western culture, we have demanded that the fine arts occupying a contemplative space outside the spaces of everyday life—the museum, gallery, or concert hall–in order to properly frame the work. (A rock concert venue isn’t a contemplative space but it is analogous to one—a separate, staged performance designed to properly frame music that aims at impact and fervor rather than contemplation) With the emergence of forms of mechanical reproduction this traditional idea of an autonomous, contemplative space is fast eroding allowing fine art (and just about everything else as well) to invade the everyday.

But wine, even very fine wine, is seldom encountered in such autonomous, contemplative spaces. It is usually encountered in the course of life, in spaces and times where other activities are ongoing. Formal tastings exist but are the exception. It’s rare to taste wine in a context where casual conversation is discouraged.

Of course, the “everydayness” of wine will vary depending on the kind of wine tasting activity in which one is engaged. Enjoying a glass after work or with dinner; with family and friends at social gatherings; or visiting a winery on the weekend—these are fully embedded in a commonplace context. For wine professionals and connoisseurs, even focused, analytic tasting may be an everyday affair. Pulling a special bottle out of your cellar to celebrate a special occasion or to have a rare and remarkable experience is less routine. In these cases the experience begins to acquire some of the exclusiveness and autonomy of art appreciation. But even in these cases the venue and companions are likely to be familiar and the occasion a multifaceted affair where some other activity accompanies the wine tasting.

In order to make sense of wine appreciation we need a conception of aesthetic experience that can accommodate wine as an everyday object. Conceptions of aesthetic experience drawn from the fine arts may not be appropriate.

Wine Scores are Not the Problem

09 Thursday May 2019

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wine evaluation 3Polemics against wine scores are a perennial crowd pleaser sort of like your favorite supermarket Chardonnay that gets nods of approval from any crowd you serve it to. But I’m still waiting to find an argument that is persuasive largely because wine scores tend to be an all purpose whipping boy for some problem or deficiency that is only tangentially related to the actual practice of scoring.  The recent article by Ian Cauble in The Robb Report is no exception but it’s worth going through the argument to see where it misses the mark.

The argument is as follows:

(1) An elegant, classically proportioned Cabernet gets a middling score from an influential critic.

(2) The middling score reflected the fact that the critic prefers riper, more powerful wines.

(3) The middling score will cause the classic wine to be overlooked by consumers because the critic has clout.

(4) Winemakers chase scores by making over-ripe wines that critics like thus misleading consumers about what they should be drinking.

(5) Therefore, classically proportioned wines are endangered by the practice of scoring wine.

Therefore we should stop scoring wines.

What is wrong with this argument? Well, first of all, an argument that essentially asserts that “we should stop scoring wines because a wine I like received a low score” is a bit like saying “if I can’t win I’ll take my ball and go home”. But let’s look beyond the narcissism for the sake of the argument.

The more general problem is that there is nothing inherent in the practice of giving scores that demands that ripeness  be valued over elegance. The problem (if it is a problem) is the critic’s taste in wine not the fact he/she gave it a score. If critics prefer more elegant wines (as for instance Jancis Robinson does) then they can give the more elegant wines a higher score.

Secondly, it’s worth mentioning that lots of people like ripe, powerful wines. It is a very popular wine style. The argument assumes that consumers like these wines only because critics tell them they should. But where is the evidence for this? It is not only less informed, casual consumers that like them. After all serious connoisseurs are among the customers of Napa cult wines. We might lament the taste preferences of the general public (I do) but that is not the fault of the score.

Thirdly, in the absence of a score, the critic would have had to rely solely on a verbal description to communicate his/her assessment. Would this low scoring wine have received a better assessment if it were entirely verbal. Not if the critic is honest and accurate. Why does “thin, tart and lacks expression” put the wine in a better light than the number? The score does obviate the need for a consumer to read and interpret a complex verbal description. Perhaps there is an implicit claim here that consumers would be better informed if they had to read the tasting note rather than rely on a score. That is undoubtedly true but I still don’t see how that would put the elegant Cabernet in a better light. Furthermore, I doubt that in the absence of a score, consumers would be more inclined to read and interpret the tasting note. As a professor I can tell you, reading and interpreting are neither enjoyable nor easy for most people.

Although it isn’t explicitly stated, perhaps the argument assumes that riper, more powerful wines tend to stand out in a tasting flight more readily than less powerful, more elegant wines. I hear this claim quite often. Its truth is hard to assess but it isn’t obviously true. If most wines in a flight were ripe and powerful, the spare elegant wine might stand out.  Furthermore, assuming professional critics care about their accuracy, I would think they would consciously guard against this bias by giving elegant wines more attention and consideration.

Nothing in this argument clearly points to the practice of scoring wines as the problem. One might argue the problem is the herd mentality of powerful critics beholden to a wine style that is beginning to lose its luster. Or perhaps the problem is winemakers who lack integrity and try to make a popular wine rather than the wine they want to make. Eliminating scores won’t solve either problem.

Wine scores are not going away. Both consumers and people in the trade find them to be useful. Of course they don’t begin to capture the virtues of a wine. But no one claims they do. Even Robert Parker insists that people should read the tasting note if they want to understand the quality of a wine. The score is just a convenient reference point for contextualizing the quality level of a wine.

The real problem is that wine scores are widely misunderstood. They are not measures of intrinsic quality. They are not the sum total of precisely calculated categories of quality. The only thing they could possibly measure is a subjective preference on the part of the critic at the time the wine was tasted compared to other wines in the critic’s experience. That is important information but it isn’t the word of God.

The Pleasures of the Table and Living a Good Life

02 Thursday May 2019

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food and friendsEpicurus, the Roman philosopher who lent his name to the pursuit of the pleasures of food, was not merely a philosopher who also loved food. He thought food was the key to the good life.

“The beginning and root of all good is the pleasure of the stomach; even wisdom and culture must be referred to this”. (Epicurus, Fragments)

That is a rather striking sentence coming from a philosopher—we tend to be a less than hedonistic tribe. Epicurus seems to have thought that everything worth valuing in human life, especially wisdom, is ultimately traceable to food. This view is unique in the annals of philosophy, and is not widely held among ordinary folk either, aside from the tribe affectionately known as “foodies”.

In one sense, of course, the connection between food and a good life is obvious. Without nutrition we could not survive to pursue other goods. But Epicurus did not focus on nutrition only. It was the pleasure of food (and modest amounts of wine) and its role in social exchange that seems to have prompted his encomia to the delights of the table. Unfortunately, the only surviving writings we have are fragments so his reasoning cannot be reliably elaborated.

So what is uniquely virtuous about a life centered around food. No doubt the pleasures of the table are satisfying and they grease the wheels of social commerce. But the same could be said of lots of other human activities—sports, music, art, religion, sex and romance, etc. What is so distinctive about food and wine?

Of all the pleasures we pursue, food is the one that is constant in its satisfaction since we must eat several times during a day. These satisfactions are temporary—we get hungry soon after being satiated. But that impermanence is a good thing, since the pangs of hunger are a reason to once again seek pleasure. There are very few other activities in life in which the imperative to seek satisfaction and thus to experience pleasure is so constant. (Sex may be in second place—but not three times a day!)

Thus, food is a unique and singularly anchoring sort of pleasure. Because the attractions of food are so persistent (not to mention the difficulties in securing and preparing it), they shape our lives in a variety of ways and have implications for all aspects of life, especially social life. Eating is a center around which our social lives revolve, and feeding ourselves and others well (and for many people drinking well) is an essential part of socializing well. The pangs of hunger are not only a reason to seek pleasure; they are a reason to seek friendship.

The pleasure of food and wine is not an afterthought—a bonus over and above the nutrition that food supplies. It is both a symbol of love and friendship and the substance of them as well. Ignoring the pleasures of the table is a kind of disrespect—a deliberate disregard for the offer of friendship. The practice of feeding others well is a kind of excellence that reverberates throughout the rest of life.

This is the wisdom to which Epicurus alludes and foodies embody. It is as plausible a conception of the good as any other.

Soulful Wines and the Failure of Recognition

25 Thursday Apr 2019

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soulful winesBeing preoccupied (or perhaps obsessed is a better word) by philosophical puzzles is my occupational hazard. As I noted last week, wine importer Terry Theise’s wonderful writing on wine presents many philosophical puzzles. Great wine induces reverie, he says, which is a necessary mental state for appreciating fine wine. “Elusive, incandescent moments of meaning” are the main attraction of wine according to Theise, and wine’s personality traits offer “soulful moments” that speak to our deepest commitments and values.

It’s not that I disagree with Theise on any of this. I quite agree with him. The puzzle is how fermented grape juice manages to accomplish these expressive acts. How does wine move the mind and heart?

I think the initial experience that brings about these “incandescent moments of meaning” is a failure of recognition. Here is what I mean by that.

When experienced wine tasters taste wine, in the typical case, we use habits built up over many years, our background knowledge regarding varietals, regions, and winemaking methods, and our capacity for retrieving explicit  memories to bring order to and make sense out of what we taste and smell. As we bring all of that to bear on an analysis of the wine in front  of us, we have to deploy conceptual categories that enable us to organize that experience. Aroma descriptors, judgments about balance, intensity or length, etc. are not merely sensations but also invoke concepts. We report that the wine is tart, bold or lush. We might say it’s a good example of Marsannay or the Sonoma Coast or alternatively mention that as a Pinot Noir it is out of balance and showing too much alcohol. These are all ways of conceptualizing the wine and they involve bringing recognition skills to the tasting experience.

We use these recognition skills to “wrestle the wine to the ground” as Theise says by passing our sensations of the wine through a battery of analytic categories.

The tasting experiences that Theise extolls by contrast are tasting experiences where recognition fails. He might know that the wine he’s tasting is a Riesling from a particular producer in the Mosel and from a particular vintage, but that recognition doesn’t bring closure. There is something about the wine that escapes the conceptual categories because none of those analytical categories are capable of capturing these sensations. In other words there appears to be no way to assimilate these sensations to previous experience in a way that feels complete with no residue. He’s confronted with a unique individual for which there are no ready-made ways of understanding it.

He writes: “When a fragrance is evocative yet indistinct—when it doesn’t specify its cognate (such as lemons or peaches or salami or whatever)—it seems to bypass the analytical faculty and go straight to your imagination and from there you climb about the fugue state directly to your soul…”

That is a failure of recognition.

At that point, what does the mind do? Some people, most people perhaps, might just say “wow” and leave it at that. But that would be to miss an opportunity. Because that failure of recognition is at the very heart of creativity. For someone like Theise in his pursuit of beauty, when recognition fails he switches to a kind of interrogative attention that sends the mind cascading through a series of possibilities. That sense of je ne sais quoi poses a problem—the mind must create the connection or category that will make sense of the experience and solve the problem.

How we sort through that series of possibilities will be my next obsession after I finish this bottle of Mourvèdre.

Updating Biodynamics

22 Monday Apr 2019

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biodynamic vineyardBiodynamics is a method of farming that treats the entire farm as a living organism. Developed by philosopher Rudolf Steiner in 1924, it is now being employed by many vineyards throughout the world in an attempt to improve vineyard health and produce better wines. To call your wines “biodynamic”, certification by the Demeter organization is required. It is controversial because many of the farming practices employed by biodynamics are of questionable scientific validity.

For instance, Steiner claimed there are  lunar and astrological influences on soil and plant development and so the timing of when to plant, maintain and harvest your crop is based on both the phase of the moon and the zodiacal constellation the moon is passing through. The timing also depends on whether the crop is the root, leaf, flower, or fruit of the plant. Phases of the moon are also supposed to influence how a wine tastes.

Katia Nussbaum of the San Polino Estate in Montalcino posted a lengthy thought piece on Jancis Robinson’s site about (among other things) biodynamic farming and the need to reconceptualize it for the 21st Century. After a discussion of Darwin, social Darwinism, the microbiome, and new biological models that attribute a level of consciousness to plants, she writes:

Steiner had ideas that pre-dated the organic movement, but elucidated them using the analytical tools and culture of his times and environment. He wrote in the absence of highly powered microscopes and understanding of quantum physics and string theory. He worked through categories and essential truths, through notions of dichotomy, such as the male and female, through astrology and metaphor.

My questions are these:

Why must biodynamic theory fossilise and stick to the original readings of Steiner and his theories of the cosmos?

Can we not use his original intuition and translate it into a modern language to make it more useful to ourselves and our understanding of how vines work and interreact with their environment, to gain a better understanding of how to produce healthier grapes and better wine?

The article is worth a read and Ms. Nussbaum’s plea for an updated biodynamics is welcome.

However, I suspect most winemakers and farmers who employ biodynamics are already on board with her suggestions.

As Craig Camp of Oregon’s Trune Vineyards has often asserted:

The Demeter standard for wines states, “Observation of the Biodynamic calendar is encouraged.” It does not demand only “calendar-specific work days or that “farmers are only permitted to execute vineyard work…on very specific days.” The statements above [ed. in this article not Nussbaum’s] are false and following the biodynamic calendar is not required for Demeter Certification. …If you can’t prune or pick on the ideal day due to weather and practical considerations you know that all of the other work you’ve done will still make exceptional wine.

Two considerations lead me to think biodynamics is being continually updated:

1. As a group winemakers are notably empirical. They make lots of observations and change their practices when something isn’t working. And they have a sustained interest in the science of viticulture.

2. Biodynamics can be time consuming and expensive to implement, especially during the initial conversion of a conventional farm to biodynamics. No one has time and money to waste engaging in practices that don’t make a difference.

Grape farming and winemaking are of course “slow arts”. It often takes years to see the results of an experiment. But as time goes on the question of what works and what doesn’t will be sorted out even in the absence of a grand theory to replace Steiner’s more fanciful notions.

Terry Theise and the Soul of Wine

18 Thursday Apr 2019

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person thinkingI think the best books I’ve read about wine are the two by wine importer Terry Theise. Reading Between the Wines is a thoroughly enjoyable account of his life in wine and a passionate defense of artisanality. But it’s his most recent book What Makes a Wine Worth Drinking: In Praise of the Sublime that really gets my philosophical juices flowing.

Long celebrated for his portfolio of mostly German and Austrian wines as well as grower Champagne, in these two books he articulates a sophisticated philosophy of wine and introduces a badly needed corrective to our fatally crabbed and often vulgar approach to wine.

But like any work of philosophy, this book raises profound questions. Here a few quotes that I think raise the most important questions we need to answer.

Great wine can induce reverie; I imagine most of us would concur. But the cultivation of reverie is also the best approach to understanding fine wine.

What is it about us and what is it about wine that induces a dream-like state? There is something about certain perceptions that move the mind, that set the mind in motion, and take us to another plane. What is it about taste that enables reverie and why does wine’s capacity to induce reverie help us understand fine wine?

If wine had turned out to be merely sensual I think for me its joys would have been transitory. I’d have done the “wine thing” for a certain number of years and gone on to something else. What continued to drive me, and what drives many of us, is curiosity, pleasure in surprise, and those elusive, incandescent moments of meaning—the sense that some truth, normally obscure, was being revealed.

How can a beverage reveal truths? What kind of truth is this and how would we know we have it?

About particular wines there are certain questions we should pose according to Theise:

Is it charming, imperious, hyperactive, pensive? What sort of texture does it offer? Is it crisp or creamy, nubby or sumptuous? Is it contemplative, energetic, clever, profound? I feel it terribly sad that such language is often debased as inauthentic because it tells us much more about a wine than the prevailing geek-speak.

How could a beverage have personality characteristics? What licenses such a judgment? And why is important that we attribute personality characteristics to wine?

Some wines such as a wine called Souches Meres…are so haunting and stirring that they bypass our entire analytical faculty and fill us with image and feeling.

How does wine stimulate the imagination? We know that painting and literature provoke thought and mental imagery. But wine doesn’t really depict anything; it does not form an image. How is taste connected to the imagination?

My own palate, such as it is, does well at interpreting how a wine behaves, the kind of temperament it seems to have, the shape and torque of its motion and ways its various acts are organized—”acts” in the sense of dramatic arcs such as exposition, development, denouement.

Wine does change as it moves on the palate. But how can those changes acquire a narrative arc. It seems we come back to the same question—how does wine stimulate the imagination and why is it important that it does so?

When a fragrance is evocative yet indistinct—when it doesn’t specify its cognate (such as lemons or peaches or salami or whatever)—it seems to bypass the analytical faculty and go straight to your imagination and from there you climb about the fugue state directly to your soul…

In terms of wine we seem to infer the presence of soul when a wine is redolent, when it has atmospheres of nonwine things, when it echoes, peals, plays overtones. And again in terms of wine qua wine we usually sense the presence of soul in wines with a lot of tertiary elements—that is, things other than the clear flavors of grapes. That’s natural; soul is usually more inferential than literal….

Drinking a very old wine can be a soulful experience—and at least for me—it is almost always an experience of love, gratefulness, and sadness. Soul indeed seems in some way to adhere to sadness. Not that it is sad, but it rides on the back of sadness like a little kid on his Dad’s shoulders….

Wine, I find, can offer soulful moments …but it is also a vector to mystical (or peak) experience.

So we arrive at the ultimate question. For Theise wine has the kind of meaning we reserve for the most profound works of art, speaking to our deepest values and most profound commitments.

There are really three general questions that must be answered:

Why does wine move the mind and the heart? And how does it do so; what are the mechanisms through which wine moves us? Which leads me to a third question: Why do so few people in the wine world acknowledge wine’s power to move us? Are these dimensions discussed in the Master of Wine program or in WSET classes? At UC Davis in the oenology program? The answer to that would be no. Why not?

I have some thoughts on these matters. To be continued.

Does Great Wine Mix with Great Friends?

15 Monday Apr 2019

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wine and friendsIt is an article of faith in the wine community that wine is meant to be served with food and should always be shared among friends. It is certainly true that wine enhances most meals and brings life and conviviality to social occasions. But I’m not sure all wines are destined for the communal table. I’ve been reading through Terry Theise’s recent book What Makes a Wine Worth Drinking: In Praise of the Sublime, and I find lots to agree with in this quote:

One evening I served a wine to several guests and wished I hadn’t. Not because they were unworthy of that wine—they were more worthy than I was if it came to that—but because the wine was so noble and galvanic I wanted to be led away into its reverie. But a host has obligations, not least among them not to be vacant and pre-occupied.  (Sometimes I wonder if great wine is inimical to socializing,  but follow  that idea where it takes you and you risk sounding misanthropic.)

Really great wines provoke thought and stimulate the imagination. They demand concentration over an extended time and flourish within silence. Too much commotion means you miss much of what such a wine has to offer. When I’m opening a special bottle at home, I want the bustle of me getting dinner on the table to be out of the way. Of course sharing a great wine with family or friends is also a consummate pleasure but especially so in a small group of like-minded devotees who will not be offended by me being “vacant and pre-occupied”.

Last night I had the pleasure of sharing several gorgeous wines with my tasting group of about 20 friends at a restaurant. It was a glorious evening, the wines were extraordinary, and the conversation delightful. The job of hosting the event was widely shared but I’m still expected to describe and comment on the wines. With only a few minutes to ponder a tasting pour and come up with comments I felt like at the end of the evening I needed to apologize to each wine for being too brusque and ungracious. So much beauty was lost in the press of time management and social obligation. They each deserved more of my attention.

This is of course a problem with no solution. The point of a tasting group is to share the experience. It is much worse to be unfair to friends than to be unfair to a wine. But there was nevertheless something sacrificed that should not go unheeded.

The Greek word for human is anthropos and misein means “to hate”, so to be misanthropic is to hate humans. The Greek word for wine is “oinos”. Is “misoinoic” a word? Perhaps it should be.