Category Archives: Philosophy of Food and Wine

Wine Tasting, Subjectivism and Nonsense

14 Wednesday Nov 2018

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wine evaluation 2Philosopher Barry Smith’s recent article in World of Fine Wine magazine hits all the right points about the rampant, mistaken view that wine tasting is thoroughly subjective. I highly recommend the whole article.

The heart of his argument for a modest objectivity in wine tasting is that even when disagreeing about a wine, we’re nevertheless responding to something in the wine:

Much of the trouble here is the flawed idea that the taste of a wine is purely subjective: wholly a matter of the sensations we undergo when tasting. The idea of taste as sensation has it that what we taste is just a private experience, in which everything is given to us immediately. It allows for no gap between what I am tasting and my experience of it. And yet, as experienced tasters know, a wine does not give up its secrets all at once, or to just anyone. It takes time, knowledge, and experience to figure out what is going on in it….

The experience of flavor depends on inputs that may vary from taster to taster depending on whether one has the tongue of a supertaster, a taster, or a non-taster. Each of us is likely to have a specific anosmia, meaning that we are “blind” to particular odors. (I know of two food and wine scientists who are insensitive to TCA, or cork taint.) It is little wonder, then, that tasting judgments diverge. But this doesn’t mean they are idiosyncractic or inexplicable, nor that they are subjective and independent of the flavors in the wine. Were one to take the line that tastes just were just the sensations of an individual—based on ignorance of the science of the taster—one would readily understand why judgments of taste would seem like mere opinions, answerable to nothing but an individual’s socially mediated responses. But that’s not how things are.

This is exactly right. In fact no one in the business of making or studying wine really believes it’s subjective. If they did they wouldn’t bother doing what they do.

In philosophy we have a concept called a “performative contradiction” which helps explain the problem with the claim that wine tasting is thoroughly subjective. Essentially the idea is that actions taken by an individual would make no sense if that individual’s statements were true. For instance, if I were to say “I am no longer capable of forming a coherent sentence”, that would be a performative contradiction since my uttering the coherent sentence contradicts the meaning of my statement.

Similarly, when winemakers or sommeliers say wine tasting is subjective they are guilty of a performative contradiction.

When winegrowers make adjustments to their canopy in order to  enhance ripening they don’t believe wine appreciation is subjective. They believe there is a standard for ripeness in grapes that, if not met, will harm the wine. When winemakers choose to punch down three times a day rather than two, it’s because they believe doing so will improve the wine. There is a level of extraction they seek which can be met or not and not doing so will be a mistake. When sommeliers studying for their exams strive to discern the identifying characteristics of a Barolo from Serralunga they do so because there is a standard they’re trying to achieve, and they can fail to achieve it or succeed.

In each case they are responsive to a standard that is independent of their beliefs about it. These standards are not arbitrary, subjective, or entirely personal. If they were there would be no consequences to not meeting these standards. You could choose any standard you wanted and if you fail to meet it choose a different standard. That just isn’t how we operate.

To believe that wine tasting is subjective is to believe that there is no expertise in winemaking or wine tasting because there is nothing to get right or wrong.

As Smith says, “But that’s not how things are.”

For more on the philosophy of wine visit my Monday Column archives on Three Quarks Daily

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It’s Tension Not Harmony that Makes Great Wine

12 Monday Nov 2018

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tense skyGreat wines have dominant flavor and aroma notes that have clarity and focus and exhibit harmony in that they have a sense of cohesion, with each element working together in an overall pattern. But these dominant aromas stand out against a background of hints and nuances, aromas that can be only dimly perceived yet give the wine a sense of depth. Such wines are described as complex because they seem to have many dimensions that persist as a penumbra around the central aromas as our attention shifts back and forth from foreground to background. This is why tasting notes often contain a seemingly endless list of aroma descriptors which can baffle less practiced tasters. The aromas can be so faint they are open to multiple interpretations and are susceptible to perceptual threshold variations among tasters. Yet, even when they cannot be clearly discerned and identified, they contribute to the depth and richness of the wine, functioning much as a mirepoix does in a sauce. The carrots, celery and onion cannot be picked out as distinct flavor notes yet they add richness to the sauce.

These background aromas often develop a character that is in tension with the foreground aromas. Especially as wines age, the dominant fruit, floral and herbal scents are surrounded by aromas that remind us of gravel, tar, barnyard, cat pee, petroleum, musk, sweaty saddle, smoke, gunflint, and bacon fat, not to mention the less prized aromas such as band aid, nail polish remover, and rotten egg. These are not pretty and introduce elements in the wine that are disruptive, deviant, in themselves often ugly.

If we think of wine as exhibiting flavor themes, these deviant aromas are clearly in tension with the dominant fruit and herbal themes. A pretty peach-and-apple-inflected Riesling from Germany’s Mosel region that begins to develop diesel fuel aromas in the bottle is acquiring tension and conflict that adds to the impression of depth. When sufficiently reticent so they don’t overwhelm the dominant fruit aromas most professional wine tasters would argue that the wine exhibits harmony. But there is an important aesthetic difference between a harmony of similar qualities vs. a harmony achieved through balanced tension with qualities that are from a different flavor world.

Beauty is at its highest intensity when there is contrast between the components that make up the experience, when the background elements of an experience are brought into the foreground. For this purpose, contrast is vital.

As the early 20th Century American philosophy Alfred North Whitehead argued:

“Contrast elicits depth, and only shallow experience is possible when there is a lack of patterned contrast.” (Adventures in Ideas, 268)

I’m not sure “harmony” is the best way to describe wines that depend on contrast for their beauty. Great wines are so much more than harmonious.

For more on the philosophy of wine visit my Monday Column archives on Three Quarks Daily

Le Calandre and the Challenge of Fine Dining

08 Thursday Nov 2018

Posted by in Contemporary Food Culture, Philosophy of Food and Wine, Restaurant Reviews, Travel

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crudo-w-trufflesedit2For me, the biggest challenge in fully appreciating tasting menus is the pace, even in dining rooms where the wait staff and kitchen are sensitive about the timing of the meal. It is difficult to taste each dish carefully, to understand how all the ingredients interact, to reflect on the emotional expression of the dish and how it exemplifies the chef’s style, and to write all that down for future reference all in the few minutes in which the dish is in front of you (and still hot if it’s a cooked dish). Add to that an appreciation of how the wine pairings are working while carrying on conversation with dinner companions and leaving time for pure enjoyment– it feels like a hectic day at work instead of a consummate aesthetic experience. This is why restaurant reviews are usually just lists of ingredients with an adjective or two.  Perhaps each dish should come with an information card with detailed accounts of the chef’s intention as an entrée into the meaning of the dish.

Le Calandre is a 3-star Michelin restaurant just outside of Padua, Italy, on some lists among the top 40 restaurants in the world. I was fortunate to get reservations there last summer and was, as usual, faced with this dilemma about how to fully appreciate the meal. This time I was rescued by a mighty tome written by Chef Massimiliano Alajmo available for purchase at the restaurant. It included not just recipes but conceptualizations of many of the dishes we were served that evening, along with a dialogue that goes into some detail about how he thinks about his compositions. Of course, I didn’t spend the evening reading a book. The meal was delicious and interesting, and thanks to photos, a few notes and a subsequent reading of the book I’m still “tasting” the meal.

The most telling quote from the book is this. Speaking of his signature dish, cuttlefish in black cappuccino (see below), he writes:

It was clear from the beginning that coffee wasn’t the motive. The motive as an attempt to enter into contact, or even better to communicate with the intimate part of the ingredient because nobility is intrinsic in all true and genuine elements. In them we have two components: the essential and formal parts. The essential is interior and animated. The formal is exterior and obvious, and is passive in comparison. In other words, the ingredient is the way we view it but an in-depth study is the way we communicate with it. We elevate each element through understanding with comprehensive examination not limited to the exterior….Above all, to penetrate an ingredient means to go beyond the sensorial level (sight, touch, taste…) unleashing a metaphorical charge. The symbols bound to the elements also stimulate us to search within ourselves. This is how one grows, and learns, for example, not to be limited by the palate’s simple pleasures because more profound and superior gratifications exist.

al-aimo-editedThere is a lot going on in this paragraph but I think it’s essentially right. To understand anything, including ingredients in a dish, we must understand the underlying forces at work, some of which are barely perceptible and some of which can only be accessed via feeling states. It’s the chef’s job to uncover them and make them perceptible. Some of these themes are exemplified in the tasting menu below.

Italian food is noted for its simplicity. Although these recipes are not simple to prepare, they leave an impression of simplicity on the diner. The emphasis is on trying to pull out just a few intensely bright flavors in each dish. As far as I could tell there were few if any molecular techniques employed.

Here are the courses with a few comments:

Al aimo

This is a dish of red tomato tartar, green tomato tartar, fava bean tartar, fava bean, green bean and basil salad, ricotta sauce and Sardinian flatbread. The dish exemplifies the concept of weaving with the three tartars exemplifying overlapping yet distinctive flavors. The colors also represent Italy’s tri-color flag, itself a weaving of the separate regions that formed the nation of Italy in the 19th Century.

Cuttlefish in black cappuccino cuttlefish-cappucinoedit

This dish consists of small cubes of squid and drops of squid ink in a potato cream served in layers in a vertical glass cup. A play on tiramasu and cappuccino, it comes with instructions to plunge the spoon straight down so the fusion of the layers occurs in the mouth. A simple, comforting, enveloping dish that exemplifies layering. Indeed the layers persist in the mouth even as the ingredients are fused.

Sicilian raw shrimp with tomato cream and basil

A variety of interpretations on fresh, especially the raw shrimp which was exceptionally fatty and vibrant. It came together with the wine, a St. Clair Sauvignon Blanc from Marlborough, which cut the fat of the shrimp. As with all the dishes that included cream, it was light almost weightless.

Crispy ricotta and buffalo mozzarella cannelloni with tomato sauce

The chef calls this an anomalous calzone which represents tactility. Crispy cylinders and creamy flavors, it’s clearly a dish meant to evoke childhood memories of pizza, all the senses working overtime. Of course the tomato sauce was glowing.

shrimpcanneloni

Smoked tagliolini with carbonara, dried fruit, and gelatin of meat broth

Very aromatic, the fresh pasta freshly smoked and paired with a unique, Sicilian dry Moscato with a distinct smoke note as well. Despite all the smoke, the dish was light and multi-dimensional, a very deft hand with an ingredient that can overpower.

saffron-risotto-with-licoriRisotto with saffron and sorbet of licorice and rosemary

The saffron and licorice represents the extreme parts of a plant, root and flower, a dialogue between opposites. This dish is often served with licorice powder but in this case the licorice sorbet was brilliant, a thrilling contrast between hot and cold. Saffron and fennel, with its anise aromas, are a classic flavor pairing. This dish takes that concept in a new direction.

Beef tartare with black truffle, egg, cream, and star anise aroma [pictured above]

Velvety, hand chopped beef . Another dish of very fresh tasting fat with a wonderful fusion of truffle and anise aroma.

Roasted beet with burnt herbs.

The only dish that didn’t quite work for me. It was basically a well-roasted beet. Nice, attractively presented, but not intriguing.

Crisp, suckling pig  with olive sorbet, grean beans, and pea puree.

Once again the hot/cold contrast was a theme that amps up the intensity of the dish. Served with a bright, fresh, slightly bitter Amarone.suckling-pigedit

For dessert #1, an apparently empty dinner bowl was place in front of us. I just sat there waiting for the food to show up. But at the behest of the waiter, I finally flipped it over to reveal a creme brûlée in the bottom of the plate covered with a layer of gold leaf.

And finally a chocolate and hazelnut cannellone with hot chocolate foam finished the meal.

A delicious meal made more memorable by the chef’s attempt to put in words flavors too easily forgotten.

random-dineeditr

Of course I was accompanied in this culinary adventure by legal counsel. My accountant, however, had fallen ill and could not attend.

Wine Quality is Partly Intrinsic

07 Wednesday Nov 2018

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rose drinkerIs wine quality an intrinsic property of the wine or is it an extrinsic property? In other words, is the quality of a wine in the wine itself or is it conferred on the wine by some set of outside factors. Jamie Goode recently addressed this topic. He argued:

The most useful definition of quality is fitness for purpose. We can no more ask someone what the best wine is than we can ask a carpenter what the best tool is: if a nail needs to be knocked in, a hammer is better than a screwdriver.

So in terms of a wine, whether or not it is high quality depends on the context of drinking, the winemaker intention, the person consuming the wine, and the way the wine is served. Wine quality is to large part extrinsic not intrinsic.

I disagree with Jamie’s conclusion although I think his premises are sound.

First of all, I have no problem defining “quality” as fitness for purpose, although I think you could argue that some purposes are closer to the intrinsic nature of wine than others. For instance, using a quality wine purely as an alcohol delivery system ignores much of what that wine is about.

Using the above definition, Jamie argues that the context in which a wine is consumed is essential to determining quality. A crisp rosé on a hot summer’s night will be of higher quality in that context than a full bodied, young, Bordeaux-style wine independently of how well made the red blend is.

How the wine is served, individual differences among drinkers regarding sensitivities to compounds in the wine, and the winemaker’s intention when making the wine all influence perceptions of wine quality.

I agree with all of that but the conclusion of his argument should not be that quality is  largely extrinsic.

If a good rosé is more satisfying on a hot summer’s night than a big Cabernet, it’s in part because features of the rosé make it so. Such a rosé will be light bodied, with high acidity, and with floral and red fruit qualities that we tend to like on hot summer nights. Those properties are  properties of the wine. If no one were tasting the wine, the wine would still have those properties.

Of course our perception of quality also depends on our ability to appreciate those qualities that are in the wine. Yet without the wine and its intrinsic qualities there would be nothing to appreciate. To suggest that those qualities are not in the wine seems to entail that when the bottle is in the fridge and not being tasted those qualities disappear—that is bizarre.

On that hot summer’s night, a big Cabernet also has certain intrinsic qualities. The qualities that make it good on a cool autumn evening are still in the wine during the summer. It’s just that we can’t appreciate them under those conditions. The qualities of a Cabernet are not manifest when the temperatures are too high.

The best way to think about this issue is in terms of dispositions. Just as a glass is fragile even when sitting safely on your table, a quality Cabernet has the qualities it has even when we can’t appreciate them at the moment. Fragility is a dispositional property—the glass is disposed to break if it falls on the floor. The Cabernet has a variety of dispositional properties—it’s full bodied, with warm spice aromas and a long finish generated by drying tannins—which dispose it to being appreciated by wine drinkers when the weather turns cool.

These dispositional properties are intrinsic to the wine. They are in the wine even when they cannot be appreciated at the moment and show themselves only under certain conditions.

Jamie’s right that extrinsic factors are important in determining wine quality. But the intrinsic factors are just as important. Without both intrinsic and extrinsic qualities we would be unable to appreciate the wine. Wine quality is a product of both the dispositional properties of the wine and the dispositional properties of the people who drink it.

For more on the philosophy of wine visit my Monday Column archives on Three Quarks Daily

A Bad Argument for Why Food Cannot Be Art

01 Thursday Nov 2018

Posted by in Art and Food, Contemporary Food Culture, Philosophy of Food and Wine

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line cookThere are some serious although mistaken arguments for why some food preparations cannot be works of art. Then there are some really bad arguments for the same conclusion. Here is a really bad one by John Mariani which I rediscovered while going through some notes.

Thus, imagination and creativity go into cooking, often at a very high level, at which point it is called haute cuisine. But there is nothing that rises to the level of true art in a craft whose very existence depends on the constant replication of a dish, night after night, week after week. The replication of a series of stencils, even if originally designed by Raphael, does not constitute art, and I’m sure Andy Warhol was mumbling all the way to the bank when his work went from reproducing Brillo boxes to having assistants mimic his own work.

The claim that individual dishes are reproductions and thus cannot be original works is simple nonsense. Mariani apparently has never heard of a recipe. He is right about paintings.  Copies of paintings are indeed mere reproductions, not original works. A print of the Mona Lisa is not a work of art because painting is what we call in aesthetics  an autographic art—only the painter can directly cause the work to exist, and there can be only one legitimate instance of it.  Passing off a copy as an original is forgery.

But many arts are not autographic but are instead allographic. An allographic work has a master recording, score or some other form of notation from which individual works are derived. Thus, for allographic works, copies of an original are genuine instances of the original. My copy of Hamlet is a work of art even though it is a duplication of the original. The bookstore is not routinely guilty of selling forgeries. A streaming version of a Springsteen tune or live performances of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony are genuine instances of works of art despite the fact they are reproductions.

Cooking is similarly allographic. Individual dishes are instances of a recipe just as a performance of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony is an instance of its score. So the fact that line cooks churn out 25 copies of a dish in no way shows that cooking is not an art–unless Mariani is prepared to claim Beethoven and Shakespeare are mere craftsmen.

For more on the philosophy of food and wine visit my Monday Column archives on Three Quarks Daily

Wine Critics in Search of Difference

29 Monday Oct 2018

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seeking new winesMy Three Quarks column this month is, for the most part, a compilation of recent posts published here on Edible Arts on the aims of wine criticism. But I added an important new dimension to the argument for the Three Quarks column.

In earlier posts I argued that the purpose of wine criticism is appreciation, not necessarily evaluation or to guide purchasing decisions. In appreciation we savor what is there in the wine and seek to discover the various kinds of experiences available to someone who is fully attuned to it. This includes knowing the meaning and significance of the wine as well as savoring its sensory properties. Appreciation is open to all the properties of an object even if they have little to do with quality.

The goal of the wine critic then is to aid in the appreciation of a wine by revealing what is there to be appreciated. But wine reviews and other sorts of wine writing are often read by people who don’t have the wine in front of them, may not be able to acquire it, and thus will not be in a position to appreciate it. Why would wine writing and criticism be important for them?

Here is the argument I added to what had been previously published.

“For the wine community, knowing the meaning and significance of a wine, the kinds of experiences available when drinking it, and especially whether it represents a new trend or flavor experience is important information independently of one’s ability to experience the wine. The wine community is an aesthetic community held together by norms, standards of excellence, and especially a shared search for differences, flavor experiences that stand out for their uniqueness or originality. Thus, the job of the critic is in part discovery, a search for gems that deserve recognition. As an aesthetic system, wine appreciation thrives on differentiation. It’s the critic’s job to support that system by giving recognition to those meaningful differences. This is why it is essential to have critics with different palates who can expand the community’s capacity to discover difference and supply it with meaning. That reviews can be used for members of the community to decide what to experience is a useful service compatible with the larger aim to enhance appreciation.”

The fact that critics disagree about wine is a feature not a bug. Only a collection of  critics with different tastes and preferences will be likely to discover the full range of wines that exhibit interesting differences. The day critics all agree is the day wine loses much of its appeal.

Randall Grahm, Vitality, and the Next Phase of the Doon

25 Thursday Oct 2018

Posted by in Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture, Winemaker Interviews

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popelouchum

Hilltop overlooking the Popelouchum Vineyard

For the past few years I’ve been obsessed with the idea of vitality in wine which, in tasting, is expressed via the number, type, velocity, and quality of phases the wine goes through as it evolves on the palate. Some wines feel alive. They vibrate with an electric intensity that is more than just big flavor. Others are static and moribund. Vitality is a dimension of quality that is too often ignored in wine assessment. And of course some wines age gracefully, another indicator of vitality.

When there is something new and exciting in the wine world, it’s probably a good idea to ask Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon Vineyards about it since he is usually out in front of the issue. In fact, a couple years ago I heard him say he was interested in discovering the “qi” of wine, a concept from Chinese philosophy which roughly translates as “vitality”. So when passing through Santa Cruz last summer I reached out to Randall to get his views on the matter.

popelouchum2As we motored about the hillsides of his new vineyard project, Popelouchum in San Juan Bautista, the issue of vitality was woven with descriptions of this fascinating exercise in creative viticulture. Plots of Furmint, Timorasso, Ruché and Rossese, old European varieties seldom grown in the U.S., are being dry farmed and head trained to test their drought tolerance and flavor potential. New rootstock from wild vitis berlandieri seeds are showing potential; some vines are grown from seed to take advantage of genetic instability and they’re experimenting with self-pollinating vines in search of recessive genetic characteristics better adapted to this specific vineyard site; and conventional vines are used to develop new varietals bred for disease resistance and drought tolerance. Biodynamic farming practices and the use of bio-char (a carbon-based soil enhancment) to encourage mycorrhizal populations are all part of the mix.

All this in addition to growing the conventional Rhone varietals that will make up Bonny Doon’s lineup going forward. The vineyard is almost ready to generate production-level yields which means there are big changes afoot for Bonny Doon. The iconic Le Cigare Volant, which has been the backbone premium wine for Bonny Doon since 1984, will no longer be a premium GSM. Beginning with the 2018 vintage it will be a Cinsault/Syrah blend designed to be consumed when young and sold for under $20. Going forward, as the Popelouchum Vineyard begins to produce, the premium wines will be from this vineyard expressing the terroir of this unique site—an event that will hopefully rock the wine world.

Oh. What was I saying? Ah, vitality, vitality that was the topic.

Randall began his discussion of vitality with a disclaimer. “The idea of life force is tricky, but minerality is connected, although even that is fraught with disagreement since there is no physical presence of minerals in the grapes.” Yep. Some people think this kind of talk is nuts. By “vitality” I don’t mean anything too metaphysical and by “minerality” we don’t mean that you’re actually tasting rock residue in the wine. It’s a stony, chalky, steely, or saline character that makes a wine more than fruit juice.

“It’s correlated with soils and the available minerals in the soils and the available microflora that can help plants extract minerals”, he notes, which makes his efforts to encourage fungi in his soils directly relevant

“Reduction is correlated too.” Reduction refers to the state of wine that has not been exposed to sufficient oxygen. This creates stinky aromas, especially sulfurous notes like cabbage, garlic, or burnt rubber but also more appealing aromas such as gunflint. Reductive aromas are a natural by product of yeast metabolism and for many winemakers this is a necessary stage in the wine making process because it protects the fresh fruit from early oxidation. “Stinky aromas when young often indicate that the wine will live long”, insists Randall. Obviously, you want these aromas to dissipate when the wine is exposed to oxygen as it ages. “But screwtops intensify reduction and that’s a challenge for super-reductive wines”, he laments.

Acidity is connected. Lower PH wines seem to have more life. So are suspended solids. “Unfiltered wine takes longer to saturate with oxygen”, again protecting the fruit from oxidation.

And finally, vitality requires persistence on the palate which is created by acidity and tannins. “You need some green tannins or hard tannins to drive evolution on the palate”, he says. New world wines tend to have soft tannins and no green tannins, the implication being that perhaps new world wines need a bit more vitality.

As for vitality, “The best wines have it”, referencing especially Domaine Romanée-Conti and Côte-Rôtie.

“In the end, if there is a secret to greatness, it’s using impeccable grapes, ripe and intense, but extracting gently…When you don’t punch down you are allowing subtle nuances to emerge.”

This is a complex topic. Notice Randall speaks of correlation, not causation when discussing the factors contributing to vitality.  There is a lot we don’t know. I’m a bit surprised by the connection to reductive wine making. Orange wine, barrel fermented Chardonnay and the vins jaunes of Jura are oxidative wine making styles and some of these wines have vitality. Many red wines, especially Cabernet Sauvignon, need oxygen to facilitate polymerization and color stabilization so the wine making for some varietals is less reductive. So there are lot of factors involved. As with so much of wine making, it is a matter of how much oxygen and when it is introduced.

Thanks to Randall for taking the time to show us his inspiring vineyard and validating my obsession with vitality. For more on how wine expresses vitality see my monthly column at Three Quarks Daily.

Wine and Music Pairing Redux

24 Wednesday Oct 2018

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wine and musicI must confess to being a bit puzzled about why wine and music pairing has not become a more popular phenomenon. The empirical evidence that music can influence our enjoyment of wine continues to mount. The idea has been around now for several years and has received a fair amount of exposure in the press. In a culture always hungry for pleasure one would think this piling of hedons upon hedons (units of pleasure in philosophical jargon) would be snapped up like nachos in a beer bar. But I haven’t detected an upsurge in interest. And I still run into people who are skeptical of the whole idea.

Perhaps the problem is complexity. Wine is already complicated. Wine and food pairing is an additional complication and hard enough to get right. Are we going to add an additional burden to our quest for peak experience? Well, why should peak anything be easy? It will by definition be outside the ordinary. I suspect this is part of the problem.

At any rate, we shall soldier on. Here is a recent article in National Geographic relying on new iterations of some of the same evidence I’ve been reporting on.

A study by Professor Charles Spence from Oxford University has been trialling matching tastes such as sourness and sweetness with different sound properties….carefully chosen music or sounds can be used to “sonically season” your drink.  Essentially there is music we associate with sweetness and some music that we associate with bitterness and sourness, and even, as professor Spence explains music that has notes of spice and cream.

Clarinet and flute pair with white wine. String quartets, because of the cello and viola foundation, work nicely with tannic Bordeaux.

The article claims that “music doesn’t have the ability to totally change what you are tasting.” I am not sure what the author means by “totally”. But I’ve found choosing the wrong music, so there is a perceived conflict between the music and the wine, will substantially diminish your enjoyment of the wine. You can of course tune the music out and the effect will go away.

The researcher Spence also notes that “… what you can do is use the music to draw people’s attention to something in their tasting experience.”

This suggests that the pairing works because the music draws your attention to the congruent feature of the wine.The high pitched, lighter sounds of clarinets and flutes will draw your attention to the floral, fruity notes in a white wine.

I think this is part of the picture of how the pairing works. But a wine’s movement on the palate is another feature that can be matched with music. Drawing on the work of Daniel Stern, a psychologist who discovered the vitality forms that enable us to grasp the motion of anything that moves, through music we can experience a congruence between the rhythm and pace of the music and the movement of the wine on the palate, enhancing the wine’s mouth feel and sense of harmony. (Here is more complete account of how vitality forms work.)

Spence continues to do great work on this issue transforming what would be a speculative relationship into one with solid empirical support.

For more on the philosophy of wine visit my Monday Column archives on Three Quarks Daily

Wine’s Vocation

18 Thursday Oct 2018

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daliI don’t know what possessed me to do it but I sat down to read some Arnold Schopenhauer (a 19th Century German philosopher) this past weekend. Schopenhauer was famous for his pessimism. A couple brief quotes will give you the flavor of his joyful wisdom:

“If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world.”

Or: “Today it is bad, and day by day it will get worse―until at last the worst of all arrives.”

Charming.

He thought  the way most of us try to alleviate the agony only makes it worse. Power, money, and sex are cruelly transitory, the pleasure vanishing quickly leaving only more painful desires and frustration. Life has only one direction, a more and more precipitous decline and there is nothing we can do about it. This is true for all living beings but humans have it worse because we have memory and imagination so we can relive the horrors and imagine our demise. Distractions such as politics, religion and family life are as unstable as pleasure and desire.

Life with Arnold must have been a barrel of laughs. The problem is nothing he says is false. He’s right that pleasure and desire are short-lived and much of life is unstable and subject to persistent decline.

The solution to coping with these truths, one that apparently never occurred Schopenhauer, is to embrace the transitory. The fact that an event is short-lived makes it even more precious, even more worthy of esteem.

If wine teaches us anything at all, it is to do just that.  Wine changes from the moment it is fermented until it is finally consumed. Aroma notes are ephemeral, vintages and bottlings disappear forever once they are consumed, the very best wines inevitably decline. You really cannot fully appreciate wine without appreciating its ephemeral, transitory nature. The work of wine is get us to acknowledge that.

Schopenhauer makes only occasional references to wine so I don’t know if he admired it. But one thing is sure—he did not understand its significance.

For more on the philosophy of wine visit my Monday Column archives on Three Quarks Daily

The Aim of Wine Criticism Is Appreciation

17 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by in Philosophy of Food and Wine

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El_Greco_-_The_Burial_of_the_Count_of_Orgaz

El Greco’s The Burial of Count Orgaz

Last week I argued that the purpose of wine criticism is not primarily to aid purchasing decisions, but I left undecided what the primary purpose is. In this post I argue that wine criticism is primarily about appreciation. On the way to that conclusion I consider the most prominent views of the aims of art criticism because they are directly applicable to wine.

One of the more plausible views of the purpose of art criticism is that art critics are trying to shape our perceptions–how we view a painting or hear a musical work. Philosopher Arnold Isenberg articulated the canonical defense of this view in the mid-20th Century, arguing that when a critic praises the figures in El Greco’s The Burial of Count Orgaz for their “wavelike contour”, that description is causing the reader to perceive something in the painting that the critic admires. The accuracy of the description is not of primary concern; what matters is that the reader’s perceptions have been properly directed toward the feature the critic wants her readers to experience.

This view of art criticism can be directly applied to wine reviews. When a critic favorably evaluates a wine because of its “richly evocative aromas of tar and dried roses which is typical of the best wines of this type”, she is directing our attention to those features of the wine that she wants us to experience. We might not perceive precisely the same flavors and aromas as the critic. But nevertheless, when the description succeeds, we perceive what she considers essential in appreciating the wine. The aim is not a true description so much as an attempt to properly direct attention.

This seems to me to be on the right track. Given that wine is a vague object, one of the virtues of communicating about wine is that other people may perceive something that I might miss. This is certainly the case when a critic has vast experience tasting wines of the relevant type and a finely honed capacity for discernment. This capacity to direct attention is one of the virtues of successful wine reviews. But the problem with this as a full account of the purpose of wine reviews is that it applies only to people currently experiencing the wine or who can remember clearly its flavor profile. As I noted last week, many wine reviews are of wines we can never acquire, and Isenberg’s theory would not apply at all in these cases.

Isenberg writes that “reading criticism, otherwise than in the presence, or with direct recollection, of the objects discussed is a blank and senseless employment”. It is not obvious that that is true. Reading descriptions of old vintages of Bordeaux premier crus is hardly “blank and senseless” however much it may pale in comparison to actually tasting them.

More recently Noel Carroll in his book On Criticism asserts that “evaluation is an essential feature of criticism. If a piece of discourse lacks explicit or implicit evaluation, it would not qualify as criticism”. Furthermore, he claims, critics must supply good reasons for their evaluations, not merely a verdict. It is the evaluation that distinguishes criticism from other forms of writing that employ description or analysis.

I am perhaps displaying a philosophical prejudice in asserting that wine reviews that give a verdict without an explanation are less than useless. Be that as it may, I agree with Carroll that a proper review of anything ought to supply reasons. But Carroll’s view doesn’t  address the question of what the purpose of the evaluation is. If it isn’t to influence a purchase what is its aim? Why are we concerned with the critics reasons? Furthermore, I have reservations about the claim that criticism must involve evaluation. Wine writers often describe a positive aesthetic experience without objectively assessing the wine or supplying an ultimate verdict.

This is because the primary aim of wine criticism is appreciation not evaluation.

How do we mark the difference between appreciation and evaluation? It seems to me they have different goals. The goal of appreciation is to savor what is there in the object and to discover the various kinds of experiences available to someone who is fully open to and attuned to the object. These experiences would include knowing the meaning and significance of the object as well as savoring its sensory properties. By contrast, the goal of evaluation is to render a verdict and assign a ranking and thus must focus on properties of a work that can be specified and articulated as markers of quality. Appreciation is open to all the properties of an object even if they have little to do with quality.

The goal of the wine critic then is to aid in the appreciation of a wine by revealing what is there to be appreciated. This might involve pointing out those properties that figure in an evaluation. Thus wine criticism often includes giving advice about purchases and investments. It also includes directing a reader’s attention to those properties that are there to be savored when the wine is in front of her. Thus it incorporates Isenberg’s point about the importance of aiding perception. But wine criticism has a larger goal—to provide an account of the meaning and significance of a wine, its place in the wine community, and the kinds of experiences one can have with it.

For the wine community knowing the meaning and significance of a wine, the kinds of experiences available when drinking it, and especially whether it represents a new trend or flavor experience is important information independently of one’s ability to experience the wine.

It is all part of the main purpose of wine criticism which is to aid appreciation.

For more on the philosophy of wine visit my Monday Column archives on Three Quarks Daily