Category Archives: Philosophy of Food and Wine

The Pleasures of the Table and Living a Good Life

02 Thursday May 2019

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

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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.

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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.

Differentiation and its Discontents in the Wine World

10 Wednesday Apr 2019

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

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vineyards in barolo 2The wine world thrives on variation. If the thousands of bottles on wine shop shelves all taste the same, there is no justification for the vast number of brands and their price differentials. Yet the modern wine world is built on processes that can dampen variation and increase homogeneity. If these processes were to gain power and prominence the culture of wine would be under threat. In my Three Quarks Daily column this month I look at some of the historical forces that have contributed to increased homogeneity.

The Wine Critic’s Job (part 2): Tracking Variation

08 Monday Apr 2019

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romanee conti vineyardIn my last post in this series on wine criticism I argued that the job of the wine critic is to make readers aware of a wine’s features,  communicate the kinds of responses available because of those features, and what the reasons are for those responses.

Which features of a wine are the most important to mention in a review? Obviously how the wine smells and tastes must be the focus along with any information that might explain why the wine tastes as it does. Most importantly, the critic must convey what’s noticeable about a wine that calls us to respond to it. A list of aroma notes isn’t sufficient. What the reader needs to know is why those aroma notes or textures are worth mentioning.

Which leads me to the most important feature of any wine that appreciation depends on—the degree to which a wine is distinctive. By “distinctive” I mean variation that carries with it value or high quality. For a wine to be distinctive it must be different from its competitors.

Variation is the life blood of the culture of wine. What makes Barolo (or Bordeaux, Rioja, etc.) important as a region is that the wines made there are distinctive. There is no other location in the world that makes wine that tastes like Barolo. The top wine regions in the world are recognized as such because  their products show significant variation from lesser regions with less distinctive products. In fact the whole appellation system depends on the idea of variation. To qualify as a distinct appellation, they must show there is something distinctive about the geography of the region that warrants the implication of individuality that comes with the appellation designation.

Furthermore, within Barolo, the prestige and price of, for instance, Giacomo Conterno Monfortino, is in part a result of the wine being distinctively different from other producers in the region, and particular vineyards are valued because the grapes they produce variations that are highly valued.

Wine appreciation also includes an appreciation of vintage variation. Much of the excitement of a new vintage for enthusiasts results from the expectation that each vintage will show distinct characteristics that can be compared and contrasted with earlier vintages. And the process of aging wines is interesting precisely because each bottle ages as an individual and thus can show variations that surprise (or disappoint) when opened.

Without variation as a dominant value, wine would be as uninteresting as orange juice or milk and there would be no reason for the vast number of brands and the price differentials that distinguish them. It is variation that makes wine the cultural icon it has become.

Thus, because of the importance of variation, it’s the primary job of the wine critic to track variation and report it to her readers. The ability to recognize and put into words how a wine varies from its competition is the most important ability a wine critic needs to be successful.

Six Types of Wine Tasting Experiences

27 Wednesday Mar 2019

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wine tastingWe drink wine in a variety of situations. Almost all wine drinkers drink wine to accompany meals, loosen inhibitions at a party, relax after work or to savor while cooking dinner. Many share wines with family and friends, visit wineries on weekends or attend tastings where education is part of the agenda.  Some wine lovers study a wine and savor it over several hours; others taste wine professionally. In most cases there is something else going on when the wine is poured; distracted drinking is unavoidable.

Given this diversity of situations in which wine is consumed, we need a variety of approaches to wine tasting in order for our level of attention to fit the situation. In fact for many people, their wine drinking is stuck at one of these levels.

It seems to me there are 6 such categories that organize our level of attention and type of focus.

Background Tasting

Background tasting involves tasting when there is something else going on that requires your nearly full attention. At best you can occasionally steal a moment to taste and think about the wine, but your attentiveness to the wine dips in and out and you can find yourself consuming a glass without ever having focused on it. Dinner parties, if you’re the conversational type, usually require background tasting. People who drink wine out of habit or because it’s there may never taste any other way.

Whimsical Tasting

In whimsical tasting there is some opportunity and  willingness to savor but our attention to the wine consists of intermittent moments of seeking aroma notes or enjoying the finish. We taste whatever we feel like, with attention bouncing around like a jar fly,  but there is no attempt to organize our experience or gather thoughts about the wine. I would imagine this category to be typical of most wine drinkers who are neither connoisseurs, students of wine, nor industry people

Atomistic Tasting

In this category one sees wine appreciation as something to aspire to and the taster may have learned a bit about varietals or wine regions. But the focus is on what is widely accepted and discussed as something to be noticed about a wine. There is searching behavior going on as the taster tries to identify aroma or flavor notes but at best only isolated parts of the wine are identified without attending to how they fit together or what they mean. In some cases this kind of tasting experience may be more about appearing sophisticated or hip with no effort to genuinely comprehend the wine. But usually this is just an early stage in acquiring genuine expertise. Focusing on what other people say is part of learning how to taste.

Narcissistic Tasting

The narcissistic taster is a genuine connoisseur with experience and good taste. But her response to the wine never gets beyond I like or I don’t like it. There is no attempt to understand why the wine is good or bad or to communicate reasons for her judgments based on features of the wine. The wine itself is seldom the focus of attention—the attention is directed at her own reactions.

Prismatic Tasting

Prisms reveal the complexity of light by refracting light rays that display colors not seem without the prism. There is a kind of wine tasting experience that functions like a prism. No one can engage all the features of a wine at once. Wines are too complex for one-off sampling and only a series of tastes over time, with attention systematically focused on various dimensions of the wine, will get the whole wine into view. For instance, you can’t seek obscure aroma notes while at the same time allowing the wine to induce an imaginative state. The former act of attention requires intense focus while the imaginative state requires relaxed, diffuse focus. Yet, like a prism, that search for aromas can put you in an imaginative state. It can send the mind on a journey enabling you to think of metaphorical attributions that help get the whole wine into view. This is where we get wine descriptors like “brooding”, “a street walker”, or  “the parry and thrust of acidity”. Unfortunately, there are many in the industry who think prismatic tasting should not exist.

Performance Tasting

This is the kind of tasting required to pass difficult certification exams and used by professionals to converse about wine. It is the self-conscious scrutiny of aroma notes and structural characteristics, a narrow field of attention compared to prismatic tasting, which aims to objectively and accurately identify features of the wine that have a bearing on quality and typicity.

The question of which of these types of tasting experiences are genuine aesthetic experiences is important but will have to wait for another day.

This taxonomy was inspired by the taxonomy of listening experiences developed by John T. Lysaker in his very fine book entitled Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports. The term “prismatic listening” was coined by him.

Are We Training Wine Tasters or Cyborgs?

25 Monday Mar 2019

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robot wine tastersIn my series on the nature of wine criticism, I’ve been arguing  that part of what distinguishes wine criticism from other kinds of wine evaluation is that the critic is not simply describing a wine, but communicating her response to it.

The critic wants the reader to understand that the properties of the wine she identifies are worthy of attention and invite a response, whether positive or negative.

In this post I want to sharpen that distinction between describing and responding via a thought experiment:

Imagine two wine tasters who taste the very same wine and give identical descriptions of it.

One taster is a human being who finds the wine delicious and thrilling. The other taster is a cyborg who experiences no qualitative mental state or pleasure but is programmed to identify properties of the wine via taste and aroma sensors and report on them using appropriate wine critical terminology.

Wouldn’t we want to say that the cyborg doesn’t really understand the wine? It doesn’t get the point of the wine (or wine in general) even if it recognizes that some feeling it can’t experience is appropriate. The point of wine tasting is to savor the wine via a qualitative state, not just to compute an outcome from the wine’s chemical properties and an index of appropriate wine terminology.

Even if the machine were to give a more accurate description of the wine than the human taster it would still be the case that the human taster’s response to the wine was superior. Since the cyborg can’t feel anything, it doesn’t grasp what wine is about. If wine doesn’t produce an enriching experience it has no point.

What this thought experiment shows is that aesthetic experience is central to wine appreciation and criticism. This makes me wonder whether the tasting grids and tasting methodologies of the wine certification programs are really training people to taste wine. The focus on “getting the wine right” seems much like the cyborg’s passionless description. How much enjoyment one gets from the wine is an afterthought if mentioned at all. There is a place for purely objective tasting but it’s a very small corner of the wine world.

This is the thought behind my approval of Hannah Fuellenkemper’s recent polemic about the poverty of our wine language.

The Abilities of a Good Wine Critic (Part 6 in a series)

21 Thursday Mar 2019

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wine taster 3I argued recently that the job of the wine critic is to help readers appreciate a wine by communicating  the properties and appropriate responses to those properties that a wine makes available, as well as reasons for why those responses are appropriate. The critic’s aim is not just to describe the wine but to enable the reader to understand that these properties are worthy of their attention and invite a response, whether positive or negative.

Given this definition of wine criticism, a good critic must possess several abilities.

She first of all must be articulate,  getting readers to grasp without too much difficulty what kinds of appropriate responses one can have to a wine as well as the reasons for those responses if they aren’t clear. Thus, she must also be a good judge of what her readers need to know. Conveying one’s admiration for a wine or some feature of the wine isn’t sufficient.  The reader may need to know what the reasons for admiring it are. She may need to be persuaded that a fact obtains or that it is a reason to judge the wine favorably so she can see that for herself. Thus, a good critic must be a good judge of how to communicate what the reader needs to know—choosing words not only to inform but to guide the reader’s perceptions.

Of course in order to accomplish all of this, the critic must be more knowledgeable and more perceptive than her readers. If the job of the critic is to aid appreciation, she must provide a perspective that the reader couldn’t easily acquire on her own. Being more knowledgeable makes the critic at least potentially more aware of what the reader is unlikely to know, although this requires some empathy on the part of the critic. Relating to the reader how a wine is made can make her aware of why a particular wine is a dramatic departure from how things are normally done. The fact that a wine violates a norm is a reason to take an interest in it. These are the kinds of facts that a critic must be able to provide the reader. All this is in addition to the need for the critic to be aware of features of a wine that readers are likely to miss, especially as it compares to other wines of its type. Noting how a particular flavor profile is closer to a more traditional style of winemaking may get readers to focus on a feature they otherwise would have missed. Knowledge and perceptiveness are intimately related in wine criticism and appreciation.

Being articulate, knowledgeable and perceptive are all about getting the reader to become more aware of features of the wine she might not have been aware of had she not been acquainted with the critic’s work.

But getting the reader to appropriately respond in a way she is unlikely to without the criticism is also part of the job of the critic. And that means she must be a good judge of the kinds of appreciative responses that one can appropriately have to a wine, whether they be approving or disapproving.

This task involves two additional abilities:

(1) A good critic must be able to have a particular response herself, especially if it is a response an ordinary taster would not typically have. A critic may be particularly impressed by a feature of a wine and find it deeply moving, a response that is unlikely to be available to someone less aware of the range of appreciative responses that a wine makes available and their significance. For instance, a critic with a comprehensive understanding of what a vineyard is capable of may find a particular vintage remarkable (or disappointing), a response unavailable to someone unfamiliar with many vintages from that vineyard.

(2) In addition, a good critic must be good at thinking of appropriate responses, even if she doesn’t have those responses herself. Critics must taste wines in various styles some of which may not be to her liking. Yet, she must be able to judge what an appropriate response would be for someone else who does like that style. This is an especially important ability for a critic to have. Most critics write for a large audience with diverse tastes and preferences. A critic must be able to think of how people with a broad array of preferences will respond to a wine.

All of this raises questions about whether we should prefer critics who share our taste preferences. Don’t we learn more from critics whose range of responses fall well outside our own?

Below are the other posts in this series.

The primary purpose of wine criticism is to aid in appreciation. Thus, to provide an account of how wine criticism performs that function I provide an account of wine appreciation.

In order to appreciate a wine two conditions must obtain:

(1) Tasting the wine or accurately imagining it based on reliable perceptions of a component or stage of the wine; (for more detail see this post)

and (2) Responding appropriately to the wine. (See this post  and this post for more details on appropriate response).

Thus the job of a wine critic is to help readers appreciate a wine by communicating  the properties and appropriate responses to those properties that a wine makes available, as well as reasons for why those responses are appropriate.