Category Archives: Philosophy of Food and Wine

An Artisan Code of Ethics

15 Thursday Aug 2019

Posted by in Philosophy of Food and Wine, The Ethics of Eating, Wine Culture

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artisanal coffeeAt Aesthetics for Birds, Matt Strohl posted an interesting analysis of artisanship ethics using coffee as his example. It applies to wine as well.

At issue is the question “Is the customer always right?” Should high-end coffee shops with specialty roasts make milk available for people who want it? Should they sell bags of ground coffee if their customers want it?

His answer is no, a perspective he derives from the “The Ethics of Being an Artisan” a code written by John Piquet, the owner of Caffé D’Bolla in Salt Lake City.

The relevant fact behind the code is that coffee, as soon as it is ground, quickly loses its aromatics and within minutes becomes a shadow of its former self. That fact supports a set of obligations that Strohl summarizes as follows:

  • A seller that presents itself as artisanal/high-end incurs ethical
    obligations that other sellers don’t.
  • Artisanal sellers have an obligation to sell products in the best condition
    possible, even when their customers request otherwise.
  • When customers request products in sub-optimal condition, it is the
    obligation of the seller to educate the customer about standards of
    quality and disabuse them of whatever misconceptions they have.
  • If they still want a product in a sub-optimal condition, they didn’t want
    an artisanal product in the first place and they are at the wrong store.

It is in the nature of artisanship and the promise conveyed by that label that generates the obligation.

The key is that the barista is trusted to play the role of educator in a way that no one would ever expect of a barista at an airport Starbucks.

Furthermore, Strohl points out that very high quality coffee beans are rare and difficult to produce. They should not be wasted. The barista and roaster owe it to the farmer not to ruin his beans.

In the end it all comes down to the limits of subjectivity, which is a hard truth to sell in our culture.

When we proclaim that “the customer is always right,” we imagine ourselves as reliable optimizing agents who just need enough choices to live our best lives. We treat our existing subjective preferences as reliable guides to living well. But of course we all know very well that most of our subjective preferences were formed through a combination of random chance and corporate manipulation and that it takes openness and work to bring them into alignment with what would actually be best for us. Someone who balks at light roast coffee at first but is open to being educated may later turn into a passionate Third Wave coffee enthusiast and be better off for it. This sort of personal growth is encouraged by businesses like D’Bolla and stunted by places that just aim to pander to the customer’s existing preferences.

This strikes me as exactly right. If subjective preferences are arbitrary and held unreflectively they are not worthy of special respect.

What would it mean for artisan wineries to adopt a similar code?

To start with, wineries can hold back their product until it’s ready to drink. The best producers routinely do this but some wineries need product to sell and push it onto the market before its time.

Wineries sell a product that can be adulterated by the consumer. Although most customers won’t pour their expensive Pinot Noir into a glass of Coke, they will open the bottle before it’s properly aged. They may store it under sub-optimal conditions. They might serve it with foods that destroy the wine’s nuances. They may not allow the wine time to breathe. They might consume it while too drunk or too distracted to appreciate it.

According to this code of ethics, artisan wineries have an obligation to their product and their customers to educate them regarding how their product should be consumed. Many wineries do a good job with this but many treat their wine as so many widgets to be hustled out the door. When a winery takes care to optimize their release dates and educate their customers that is a good indication that their wines are of high quality whether you like them or not.

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Breaking the Wine Rules

05 Monday Aug 2019

Posted by in Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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breaking rulesThere is an unwritten rule about blogging; if you want your post to be read take someone to the woodshed, be critical, or ream ‘em a new one. That will attract attention.

But I’m going to break the rules here and just agree wholeheartedly with Jamie Goode’s post about rule following. After pointing out that people accustomed to following grammatical rules that make no practical sense—rules against split infinitives, proper use of data as a plural noun, etc.—have a hard time accepting their routine violation, he claims the same could be said of wine:

The same seems to be true with wine. When people have been through wine exams, or train as winemakers, they have a fixed notion of what wine should be. This is seen most clearly when it comes to discussions on natural wines, and their supposed faultiness.

He goes on to insist that in a finished wine, minor flaws, a bit of VA, brett, or oxidation can be a virtue.

We are all different and we are all free to own our own preferences. But we should be cautious before we dismiss or criticize wines that fall outside of our normal parameters for what is ‘correct’, recognizing that we humans have a tendency to become staunch defenders of rules that we have learned.

I couldn’t agree more. If the culture of wine is going to grow and if wine is to reach its aesthetic potential there have to rule breakers and people who are willing to expand the boundaries of what counts as “normal”. As Jamie writes “beauty is not the absence of flaws”. I’ve been making a similar case about beauty (here, here and here.)

But here is where the analogy with grammatical rules breaks down. People violate arbitrary, impractical grammatical rules because it’s tedious and time consuming to follow them when they yield no gain in communicative clarity. Wine rules are not broken because they are tedious but because striving for singularity and distinctiveness demands it.

Wine as the Art of Life

31 Wednesday Jul 2019

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

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chardonnay grapesFor 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.

Are Natural Wines Terroir-Driven?

29 Monday Jul 2019

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natural wine 2One of the justifications for natural wine that you sometimes hear is that wines that are made without sulfur, filtering or other winery interventions reveal features of the vineyard site and local weather more readily than conventional wines. I don’t think this is quite true and this is not the best way to understand natural wine.

Even though natural winemakers start their fermentations using native vineyard yeasts, the dominant yeasts that complete the fermentation are not necessarily from the vineyard. The hardier yeasts that populate the winery and winery equipment can often take over the fermentation, especially as alcohols creep up and kill off the wild yeasts; they may be a different strain from the yeasts in the vineyard and can sometimes profoundly impact the flavors and textures of the wine.

Furthermore, in the absence of sulfur or filtering, bacteria blooms and oxidation can cause unusual flavors and aromas to develop. These flavors and aromas are often interesting and delicious but they are not coming from the vineyard. In fact the distinctive character of the vineyard or vintage may be more difficult to discern when masked by the strong aromas coming from bacteriological activity.

Thus natural wines don’t necessarily reflect the distinctive character of a vineyard—what they do reflect is the distinctive character of the total environment in which the wine is made. In the absence of intervention by the winemaker, ambient yeast and bacteria populations, ambient temperatures, availability to oxygen, etc. have some influence on the flavor of the wine.

This is not to say that vineyard site doesn’t matter. The quality of the grapes always matters. But what makes a natural wine distinctive may or may not be vineyard specific. Instead of capturing forces at work in the vineyard, natural wines capture a wider variety of causal factors in the environment that emerge as a result of the winemaker’s hands off approach.

If you have a great vineyard that produces wines of distinction, it’s an open question whether that distinctiveness can be captured by natural wine production. Only experimentation and a tolerance for risk will reveal the answer.

Can the Food and Wine Pairing Rules

25 Thursday Jul 2019

Posted by in Philosophy of Food and Wine

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wine-food-pairingIncreasingly, I’m coming to agree with Anna Lee Iijama writing in Wine Enthusiast:

In a whirlwind of increasingly global food and beverage options, however, the landscape of pairing possibilities—and potential pitfalls—can be nerve wracking.

My suggestion? Stop following the rules.

Traditional wine/food pairings are fine but our wine and food options have expanded so much that the traditional rules like “what grows together goes together” are far too limited.

It’s more fun and more practical to allow happy accidents to happen by experimenting with adventurous pairings. Granted, occasionally, you might miss badly. But as long as you avoid serving very sweet food with a very dry wine, a pairing is unlikely to be disastrous. If a pairing is not working you can always treat the wine and the food as separate and enjoy each as if they were unrelated.

Most pairings occupy the vast middle ground of mediocrity—not soul stirring but not too bad either. The joys of finding an unlikely match far outweigh the risk of a bad experience.

And there is nothing wrong with a few less rules to follow.

On Defining Natural wine

24 Wednesday Jul 2019

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amphoraMy Twitter feed has been lit up for several days since Oliver Styles posted his rant against the Wine Spectator’s James Molesworth—the topic of course was natural wine. Is there any other topic of controversy in the wine world these days? I posted about the Styles piece on Monday so I won’t revisit that. But, as is usually the case with debates about natural wine, the controversy comes back to charges that natural wine is so ill defined or poorly conceived as a wine category that the term is meaningless.

Tom Wark got right to the point:

Natural wine: sulphur or no? Can a commercial yeast overtake the fermentation or no? Fermenting to dryness manipulation? Is pruning manipulation? Is planting a cover crop manipulation? What about spraying fermented cow sh*t? Give a definition & then we can talk “meaning”.

This charge that natural wine is poorly defined has been around since the early days of the natural wine movement. I think the charge was true years ago but no longer. But before saying more about how natural wine is defined we need some clarity about definitions.

The demand that definitions be precise and create clear conceptual categories in natural languages is misplaced. Words are defined according to how they’re used and that seldom creates clear conceptual distinctions. Is a bean bag “chair” a chair? Yes, because we sit in them but they don’t satisfy any other condition for being a chair—no flat surface, back, or legs. Yet, we sit on rocks but don’t refer to them as chairs. We just have a habit of calling bean bags “chairs” because in the context in which we encounter them it’s useful to do so. Is a golf cart an automobile? Well, an automobile mechanic might work on it but don’t try to get a license for it. There are clear cases of “chairs” and clear cases of “automobiles” but also ambiguous cases like bean bags and golf carts that fit one category for certain purposes but not others. Yet no one would claim the word “chair” or “automobile” is meaningless.

I’m making two points here. (1) Words are defined by how they’re used and to know the meaning of a word you have to look at the practice in which the word is embedded. And (2) even after gaining a good working definition of a term there will always be ambiguous cases where we don’t quite know what to say about whether a usage is proper or not.

Both points apply in the case of natural wine. You can’t discover what counts as “natural wine” by looking at the definition of “natural” in some other context. You have to look at the practice of making natural wine to determine how the term is used in that context. And even after seeing the practice whole there will be ambiguous cases that we can’t quite categorize. This is not peculiar to the word “natural”. It is how language works.

When we look at how natural winemaking has evolved there are two components to a definition. In the vineyard, largely for reasons having to do with ecology as well as human health, no chemical pesticides are allowed. If leaf pulling, pruning, planting cover crops, etc. have no ill effects on human health, vineyard health, or ecology there is no reason to forbid them. If it turns out that spraying fermented cowshit is harmful then we would expect natural winemakers to stop the practice. In the absence of such evidence why would this be an issue?

In the winery, Alice Feiring’s definition is helpful:

The category of natural wine is a somewhat slippery slope except predicated by the tenets of nothing added nothing taken away, a touch of sulfur as needed if needed.

No filtering or fining, no cultivated yeast, no enzymes, no acidification. These are strict criteria and relatively clear. But even with these criteria there is ambiguity. What is meant by “as needed, if needed”? There are many points in the winemaking process in which sulfur can be added “if needed”. That could add up to quite a lot of sulfur. But in talking to natural winemakers it seems to me something like 20-25 ppm is now a rough standard, and is usually applied at bottling to prevent storage or refermentation issues. And when we say “nothing added” does that include oxygen? That of course would be absurd. Pump overs introduce oxygen but they are needed to release carbon dioxide. No one thinks adding oxygen by moving the cap is an unnecessary intervention.

As to the issue of yeast, it is a well established fact that yeast strains in the winery and on winery equipment can take over the fermentation from vineyard yeast. That winery yeast colonizing the fermentation could be a cultivated yeast strain introduced years ago by previous occupants of the winery. But since that yeast is now part of the winery ecology, why would that be problematic? The point of natural winemaking is to allow the wine to develop according to its own trajectory, to allow the internal structure of the wine and it’s environment to determine how it will develop. The distinctive features of the winery are part of that environment; not an intervention.

Again, when you look closely at the practice of natural winemaking and what it’s point is, these apparent conceptual issues get resolved. It’s not about some abstract meaning of “natural”—its about what winemakers who practice natural winemaking do.

Which brings me to my final point. Winemaking is a process, a series of changes that the grapes and the wine undergoes. When we define natural wine we are defining a kind of production process. Like all artisanal winemaking, it is a process that involves interactions with a changing environment that profoundly influences the wine. Winemaking is about constantly reacting to those changes. Thus, winemaking is not a set of rules. There is no recipe for artisanal winemaking because the wine and the environment are changing in unpredictable ways. It seems to me what defines natural winemaking is not a set of rigid criteria but a commitment to minimal intervention. When there is a problem, the least intervention to solve it is the right one. But of course what counts as minimal intervention will change from vintage to vintage, from vineyard to vineyard, from region to region. Neither the problems nor the solutions are universal or even generalizable.

So how can we know if a wine is authentically natural? You have to look at the producer’s practice over several vintages, and know the challenges, problems, and her solutions to those problems in order to judge whether interventions are minimal. That is a complicated matter but wine is complicated.

What is the point of natural wine? The point is that there are expressive possibilities inherent in grapes—a potential that is not solely the result of human intervention, an inherited constitution. Natural winemaking is an attempt to isolate that potential and respect it.

You may or may not like these wines. They can be peculiar. But there is nothing incoherent or meaningless about respecting the inherited constitution of something.

Eric Asimov is On a Roll

18 Thursday Jul 2019

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wine criticism 2New York Times wine columnist Eric Asimov has been rolling out the advice lately for how wine reviewing ought to change. In a series of articles and interviews he provides an alternative vision of what wine criticism could be. His views are fresh and very much needed.

In his column entitled “It’s Time to Re-think Wine Criticism” he argues that the standard wine reviews offered by major wine publications do little to educate consumers. He questions the value of reviewing single bottles, which he thinks gives the impression that wine quality is random. He advocates instead for more focus on wine types and styles and evaluations of producers and their approaches rather than individual bottles that would give consumers general knowledge they can use to develop their own preferences. He also argues that critics taste too many wines at a sitting, lose crucial context by tasting blind, and by tasting individual bottles provide only a snapshot of a product that is continually changing.

In an interview in Meininger’s Wine Business Daily, Asimov endorses the idea that wine criticism is about discovery:

[Interviewer] What about the role of the critic as somebody who discovers things worth trying, who says, “I found a wine you should know about”?

I think that’s a more important role for a critic than simply reviewing bottles. Critics can expose you to wines that you never considered or never heard of. They can get you to look at wines in a new and different way.

And then he adds.

One of the things that I am working against is this expectation that a wine writer’s job is to recommend a bottle that people will be able to find at their convenience. And you know, I can understand the frustration [of readers not being able to find that bottle], but I also think there’s educational value in knowing what is made in this world, what is available in this world and how different people are thinking about wine. [emphasis added]

I’ve been making these points for several years. Does Asimov read this blog?

Finally, in 15 Helpful Words for Talking About Wine he advocates replacing precise, analytic fruit descriptors with a vocabulary better suited to giving an overall impression of the wine. After all, as he rightly points out, most people experience wine as a holistic entity rather than a vehicle for individual properties. The descriptors he promotes include energetic, tense, plush, lean, structure, linearity, length, depth, focus, power, precision, life, sweet, savory, and minerality.

They sound a lot like the vitality forms I use in my reviews although I focus more on how the wine changes on the palate.

I couldn’t agree more with all of this; it’s great to see someone with actual influence making the case for more useful wine reviews.

Winemaking: The Vital Difference

17 Wednesday Jul 2019

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living cellsWine is about continuous variation–differences between regions, varietals, vineyards, winemaking styles, weather and climate variation, soil variation, bottle variation. Wine enthusiasts devote most of their attention to tracking variation.

Life, vitality, is also fundamentally about variation. Thus, the art of winemaking is basically the art of expressing vitality.

(Fair warning, there is metaphysics up ahead)

Reality is not merely a collection of objects dispersed in space and time. Reality is also a field of potential differences, latent, unactualized dispositions that inhere in material objects and their relations to be unlocked when some new event traverses a threshold. New relations expose new dispositions like when you meet someone new and they bring out a hidden dimension in your personality, or when weather variations expose new flavor potential in a vineyard.

Living things have a special role to play in this economy of change. Living things have an active internal structure that uses matter and energy to resist degradation while accelerating and directing change. As Darwin showed, life is creative, a continuous process of developing novelty, that pulls the past into the present, using it as springboard for the future, without plan or program.

Any individual entity that emerges out of the chemical soup is merely a passageway, a stage, a provisional outcome within a larger process of change. But that individual is also a solution to a problem posed by the convergence of conflicting forces. Living things contract, select and harmonize the conflicting forces that create them thus making a life for themselves.

Yet, a living thing never quite achieves self-identity. There is always disparity, a new problem to solve, a variation that must be integrated—it’s difference and disparity that drives the life process. Resistance to degradation, continuous variation, and continuous yet failed integration are the hallmarks of all life.

I think it could be argued that all art infuses matter with life, not by imposing form on an inert substance but by unlocking hidden dimensions of the artist’s materials. An artist’s materials are a swarm of unactualized dispositions, a capacity for variation, that the artist intensifies and actualizes. Art intensifies and transforms the artist’s materials, giving something non-living a life of its own, integrating conflicting forces in the process, and those materials in turn intensify and transform life.

This is certainly true of wine. The winemaker’s job is to find the singularities, the variations in their vineyards and grapes that promise a new direction, intensify those variations and then integrate them into something people want to drink, building in to the wine a capacity to resist degradation and support continuous change as the wine lives on in barrel and bottle.

Winemaking is the quintessential expression of vitality, harvesting living organisms, accelerating variation and change through the fermentation process, and then taking the resulting inorganic liquid and building back in the features of an organism—life becomes art becomes life becomes….

Wine is a Process; Forget About Consistency

10 Wednesday Jul 2019

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process metaphysicsWine statistics guru David Morrison has done great work evaluating the degree to which wine scores are consistent between critics and repeatable by the same critic when re-tasting. His data shows a lack of consistency and repeatability.

The main issue, as I see it, is the lack of repeatability of the ratings between tasters. I have previously noted (The poor mathematics of wine-quality scores): Most wine commentators’ wine-quality scores are personal to themselves. That is, the best we can expect from each commentator is that their wine scores can be compared among themselves so that we can work out which wines they liked and which ones they didn’t.

In this recent post he shows that when wines are re-tasted by the same critic there is nevertheless substantial variation in wine scores:

So, about half of the wines were better and half were the same or worse when re-tasted 2 years later, which is what might be expected from random chance. While bottle variation may be a factor here, it is unlikely to change the results (although it might determine which wines did better or worse).

His conclusion, which is almost certainly true, is that wine scores lack the mathematical precision suggested by the use of a quantitative score.

It’s good to have this statistical analysis of wine scores. But we really shouldn’t be surprised by this lack of consistency. It conforms to everything we know and generally acknowledge about wine. Wine grapes change from year to year because of weather variations. Fermentations,  barrel ageing and bottle ageing involve constant, unpredictable variation. Even once in the glass, wine continues to change and so do we as we taste it. Our impression of a wine can fluctuate depending on what else we’ve been tasting, and our preferences change over time as well. Wine is inherently a vague object, some of its features difficult to detect even with training. Unlike the clarity of objects directly in our visual field, wine gives us only hints of flavors, scents, and textures all of which can be influenced by environmental factors.

Wine will not sit still for our analysis. Understanding a wine is like tracking a ghost through fog. It’s the variation that makes wine interesting.

Anyone who has spent much time around wine knows all of this already. So why would anyone expect wine critics to be consistent? Why would we want them to be consistent? The demand for consistency and precise judgment violates everything we know about wine. Yet that demand never goes away.

In this wine, is not alone. Our civilization is based on the idea that behind the churn and flux of life there must be something stable and unchanging. Despite evidence to the contrary we still can’t get free of that assumption.