Category Archives: Philosophy of Food and Wine

The Book is Written

03 Monday Aug 2020

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jumping for joyFour years ago, I decided to start working on a book on the philosophy of wine. This weekend, I finished the draft. (Celebrated with a nice Vouvray on a very hot Sunday afternoon). Notice I didn’t say the book is finished. It won’t be finished until I hit the publish button. There are still tweaks and editing to do, but all the heavy lifting is accomplished.

Entitled “Beauty and the Yeast: A Philosophical Exploration of Wine, Life, and Love”, the book explains why some wines have the appeal of great works of art or life long friends. The thought that wine is expressive in the way that complex living beings are expressive is the foundation for a new aesthetics of wine, which I work out in the book.

Of course writing the book is only half the battle; it must also be published if people are to read it. I have made the decision to forgo the conventional route to publication. I will publish the book myself.

Conventional academic publishing moves at a glacial pace even in the best of times; and these are not the best of times. Using a conventional publisher, it would likely take 1 1/2- 2 years for the book to appear and it might sell for well north of $40 per copy depending on the publishers marketing strategy.

That is too long and too much. It will take me about 3 months to self-publish the book and I can set a reasonable price that will encourage more readers.

That means I will have to hire my own book designers and editors with many upfront costs, but after careful consideration, at this late stage in my career, I think the benefits of self publishing outweigh the costs. I’ve set a tentative publication date for November 10.

Here is the table of contents.

Introduction

Chapter 1 Wine’s Promise

Chapter 2 Vinous Vitality

Chapter 3 Winemaking and Creativity: The Slow Art of Wine

Chapter 4  Ambiente: It Takes a Village to Raise a Wine

Chapter 5  Wines of Anger and Joy: Vitality and Expression

Chapter 6  Wine Criticism and Appreciation

Chapter 7  Wine and Aesthetic Experience

Chapter 8   Metaphor, Imagination, and the Language of Wine

Chapter 9  Beyond Objectivity and Subjectivity

Chapter 10 Beauty, Pathos, and Rhythm

Appendix: Tasting Vitality

Wine is a Vital Force

27 Monday Jul 2020

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motion artTo me, what matters most about a wine is whether it moves the mind and the heart. Does a wine send thoughts on a quest for new territory, seeking something not quite present, exploring multiple meanings, inspiring speculations, and promising more provocations to come? Wine commands our attention because it generates a unique sensation, something out of the ordinary, and we become open to what more it might have to say. The alcohol is a necessary part of this. It modifies our mood and allows us to engage the world sympathetically. Once achieved, that sympathetic engagement makes us fully available for what the wine can express.

That remarkable sensation sympathetically engaged uncovers a  wines spirit, it’s vitality. A delicate Pinot Noir not only tastes and smells differently from an Australian Syrah—it feels different to taste it. The wine reveals an energy that seems to track human feeling states and we begin to construct a concept of the wine’s personality.

The essence of wine are these garrulous tides, the nerve and pulse, that give wine its rhythm.

Does a Novice and an Expert have the Same Sensory Experience?

22 Wednesday Jul 2020

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wine glassSome philosophers hold the position that wine tasting (or any kind of tasting for that matter) is a purely sensory experience. No input from the mind—thoughts, knowledge, or use of language—has any impact on what we taste.

Thus, a novice with little experience tasting wine and a highly educated wine expert, when they taste the same wine, are having the same sensory experience, assuming they have similar biological capacities. The expert can use her knowledge to compare the wine to other wines and evaluate it according to criteria which the novice cannot do. And the expert will get intellectual pleasure from her knowledge of how the wine was made or where the grapes were grown. Knowledge may contribute non-sensory pleasure to the experience.

But with regard to the sensory experience itself, no cognitive input is necessary.

This strikes me as implausible. In the transition from tasting novice to expert, I imagine we all have experienced our tastes changing as we gain more knowledge of regions, varietals, winemaking styles, etc. The increasing expertise seems to be having some impact on what we are able to taste.

It has also been firmly established in countless studies that our beliefs about, for instance, the price of a wine influence not only our judgment about the wine but the properties the wine is perceived as possessing.

Furthermore, I think it is rather common to be puzzled about what aromas a wine exhibits until someone says “that’s baked apple” at which point the baked apple becomes crystal clear. It seems to me the suggestion doesn’t merely give me a label to assign to the aroma. It makes the aroma more salient thus changing the experience.

On my view, beliefs, knowledge, and linguistic signs regulated what is salient—what stands out from the background—and thus directly influences the sensory experience.

The novice and the expert are not having the same experience at all.

Food Rules and Authenticity

08 Wednesday Jul 2020

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mostlyreal_thumbCooking is an art mired in tradition. Each nation has its food rules encrusted with the patina of age, and each region within each nation has its way of doing things that seem natural and “right”. Violations of “food rules” are met with moral indignation and contempt.

In Italy, the food rules say grated cheese is never added to seafood, oil and vinegar is the only proper salad dressing,  and coffee is never consumed during a meal. In France, salad is always eaten after the main dish, never before, ketchup is not a condiment for pommes frites.  Even in the “anything goes” United States, beans are part of a chili recipe only in certain regions of the country; and do not eat Carolina barbeque in Texas. [The rules are of course routinely violated—the food police carry no weapons.]

But of what value is authenticity when defined in terms of these rigid norms? Does it matter if these rules are followed or broken?

“Food rules” ignore the fact that all food traditions have been influenced by outsiders. All food traditions are a hybrid hash of influences thrown together by the movement of populations and the imperatives of trade. For instance, neither tomatoes nor polenta are native to Italy. Tomatoes and corn were brought to Europe from the Americas.

Whatever “authenticity” means it cannot mean pure or unadulterated.

Authenticity is not about origins but about the commitments people make and what those commitments reveal about their sensibility. There is a reason why tomato sauces marry nicely with pasta and why a tomato served with olive oil and basil is heavenly. Tomatoes may not be originally Italian, but Italians have done wonderful things with tomatoes. They committed themselves to tomatoes, discovered how they resonate with their local ingredients, and now there is a certain way with tomatoes that is uniquely Italian.

So should we just throw out the food rules?

I think not. It’s good that food rules exist because they set the table for innovation—they define the standards that innovation must meet. Food rules say: “If you want to violate this tradition it better be good.” Without tradition, innovation is just novelty.

However, anyone who is just a slave to tradition and rigidly conforms without entertaining new ideas is violating the very identity of living traditions—their ability to be affected. What makes traditions great—and this is certainly true of Italian food traditions—is their capacity to seamlessly absorb new influences.

Tradition and authenticity are not opposed to innovation–they depend on it. No tradition can remain alive if it does not innovate by accepting and transforming influences from abroad.

So if you’re dying to try miso polenta or achar-spiced pancakes. Go for it. You may be creating the food rules of the future.

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A Fundamental Mistake about Subjectivity in Wine tasting

06 Monday Jul 2020

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wine flavor wheelI keep seeing this inference in discussions about subjectivity in wine tasting by people who should know better.  Gordon Shepherd makes it in his book Neuroenology: How the Brain Creates the Taste of Wine, and Jamie Goode makes it in his  otherwise fine book I Taste Red. Both insist that the flavor of wine is not in the wine but in the brain.

The mistake is this. From the fact that the brain integrates a variety of multisensory signals in order to create flavor perceptions, it does not follow that the brain creates the flavors that we perceive. Flavor is one thing. Flavor perception something else just as a color is one thing and our perception of that color something else. We can sometimes make mistakes when perceiving color and we can sometimes make mistakes when tasting wine. The act of perceiving is distinct from the thing perceived.

No doubt flavor perception requires input from our sensory system and the brain. But it requires something else as well—the flavors perceived. The mistake is to think that if perceptions occur in the brain that the thing perceived must also be in the brain. No doubt we can know only what we perceive but to think the thing perceived must then exist in the mind is to conflate what I can know with what exists.

The brain by itself does not create the taste of wine. And we don’t live in separate taste worlds as Jamie Goode sometimes suggests. We may disagree about what what we taste in a particular wine but we’re tasting the same wine.

Perception is an interaction between the brain and our environment—you need both to create a perception and the object is not an empty cipher. It has real causal properties without which perception cannot occur.

Emotional Wines

02 Thursday Jul 2020

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wine and emotionWe call wines elegant, simple,sexy, sophisticated, brooding, lively, rustic, authentic, and subtle. These terms are already a routine part of the wine lexicon. So why not describe wines as joyful, angry, melancholic, cheerful, nervous or rowdy? Our ability to describe the individuality of wines would be greatly enhanced by a vocabulary that included the full range of human emotions and personality traits.

Instead of a winemaker making a wine intended to be lively or sexy, why not make a wine that is cheerful or angry?

What matters is whether describing wines in this way would make sense of our experience of them. Does it help us to understand the wine? For such a practice to be worthwhile, our descriptions would have to be more then imaginative flights of fancy. They would have to be anchored in features of the wine.

But it seems to me good wines have the complexity and perceived movement characteristics to anchor such ascriptions. And by doing so we would be able to dig deeper into the uniqueness of each wine and the capacity of a wine to affect us.

After all we interpret specific brush strokes on a canvas and specific notes and rhythms in a musical piece as evocative and expressive of human personality traits or emotions. Why would aromas, textures, and their transformations be less evocative than lines, shapes or sounds?

The Taste of Round

29 Monday Jun 2020

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roundWhen I taste and evaluate wines, one of the most readily apparent feature of the wine is the wine’s shape and the way that shape evolves on the palate. Wines can be round, chunky, sharp, angular, contorted, flat, curvaceous, sculptured, sinuous, tapered, etc.  Wine of course is a liquid; it doesn’t literally have a shape. Nevertheless these shape words really help to characterize a wine. So what is going on here? Are these just metaphors?

Perhaps. But even if they are metaphors it remains to be explained why these metaphors can be readily understood. I doubt that people with some experience tasting wine would find it difficult to understand why a ripe Pinot Noir from the Santa Lucia Highlands is described as round or a Sancerre is described as angular. Since they are readily understandable they are likely not poetic metaphors. Their accessibility suggests there must be some literal similarity between wine and shapes.

Recent research shows that all of us are capable of making these associations. Test subjects routinely are able to reliably associate, for instance, milk chocolate with round shapes and dark chocolate with more angular shapes.

Interestingly, these cross-sensory associations appear to be transitive, that is, they extend to other associations with sounds and names (see Figure 3): Meaningless words like ‘maluma’ (Köhler 1929, 1947; Usnadze 1924, 1927) and ‘bouba’ (Bremner et al. 2013; Ramachandran and Hubbard 2001b) are matched both with more rounded shapes and, in Western populations at least, with milk chocolate. Meanwhile, angular shapes such as ‘takete’ or ‘kiki’ are matched with bitter-tasting foods such as dark chocolate. We would like to argue that transitivity is not a property of metaphors, but rather a property of sensory mappings and associations (e.g., Stevens 1966).

Spence and Deroy, the authors of the linked survey, hypothesize that the association is not purely linguistic and thus not metaphorical. There are actual perceptual interactions between the sense modalities of vision and taste.

Additional research seems to show that viewing shapes can influence what we taste.

Next, the participants were given a small piece of cheddar cheese to taste. Intriguingly, those participants who had just been looking at the angular shapes rated the cheese as tasting around 7% sharper than another group of participants who had just evaluated three organic shapes instead.

This research seems to show that there is a lot more going on in a wine than just fruit aromas. The area of cross-modal correspondences offers the potential for greatly expanding the expressive range of wine.

Not all Arguments Against Wine Scores are Coherent

25 Thursday Jun 2020

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wine scoresI have no particular axe to grind with regard to wine scores. Consumers seem to like them because they are convenient. However, there is no doubt they over-simplify the complex topic of wine quality and give a misleading picture if used without the accompanying tasting notes.

There is however one argument against wine scores that doesn’t work. People often point to the absurdity of assigning a score to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony or Picasso’s Guernica and then argue that wine scores are absurd for similar reasons. But the cases are not at all analogous.

The difference is that the works of Beethoven and Picasso are already part of the art canon. Their iconic status was decided over a century ago and there is no serious challenge to it. Scoring their work would perform no useful function even if we could decide on what criteria to use.

In essence the work of great composers and painters from the past are no longer in a market that the public has access to. There is a market for performances of Beethoven but not the work itself. And the market for paintings by the great masters is among museums and wealthy private patrons, neither of which need scores to direct their purchases.

Notice that film and contemporary popular music do receive scores on sites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes. This is because, like wine, there is a publicly accessible market for them.

Furthermore, unlike paintings and the score of musical works, wines change from year to year. Vintage variation requires we have a means of tracking those changes. Wine scores are one convenient way of doing so.

They may be arbitrary or simple-minded but wine scores do satisfy a need and have a clear function.

Why Wine?

18 Thursday Jun 2020

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vineyard in proseccoWine is many things to many people. That it contains alcohol, encourages conviviality, and tastes good are surely the reasons most people drink wine. But these reasons don’t quite explain why some people are deeply devoted to wine. Neither do they explain why wine has become an iconic, culturally significant signifier of good taste and aesthetic appreciation. The great wine writer Hugh Johnson provides the most compelling explanation:

Think, for a moment, of an almost paper-white glass of liquid, just infused with greenish-gold, just tart on your tongue, full of wild flower scents and spring-water freshness. And think of a burnt-amber fluid, as smooth as syrup in the glass, as fat as butter to the smell and sea-deep with strange flavors. Both are wine. Wine is grape-juice. Every drop of liquid filling so many bottles has been drawn out of the ground by the roots of a vine. All these different drinks have at one time been sap in a twig. It is the first of many strange and some – despite modern research – mysterious circumstances which go to make wine not only the most delicious, but the most fascinating drink in the world. It would not be so fascinating if there were not so many different kinds. Although there are people who do not care for it, and who think it no more than a nuisance that a winelist has so many names on it, the whole reason that wine is worth study is its variety. (from Wine: A Life Uncorked)

Variety and variation are the keys to understanding wine’s aesthetic appeal. But it isn’t only the variations made possible by the vineyard and the sensitivity of grapes to weather and geography that matter. Cultural variations are equally important—the variety of styles, techniques, winemaker’s sensibilities,  traditions and interactions with food intersecting with those vineyard variations give wine a richness of permutation that is rivaled only by art, music, and nature.

Wine has earned its iconic status because of the way it integrates and provokes culture and nature to express endless variation.