Tag Archives: aesthetics of wine

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.

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How to Talk About Wine

20 Wednesday Mar 2019

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wine talkThe question of what language we should be using to describe wine is important not only for wine appreciation but to enable wineries to sell their wine and expand their customer base. So I read Hannah Fuellenkemper’s recent post with some skepticism. Entitled “Why You Don’t Need to Learn to Talk About Wine”, she writes:

Lock me up for thoughtcrime, but winespeak often creates more distance then it connects. And like any glossary, it has its limitations. Take ‘varietal typicity’ – whether a wine shows it can only be answered yes/no. How far does that go? Or the sling all your things in that old duffel-bag descriptors of ‘black fruit’ and ‘herbaceous’. To hear it is like listening to opera through a stethoscope – a scientists’ tool not suited to translating art.

Well I agree with that. In fact, the only two things in the post I disagree with are the title and her implication that she doesn’t know how to talk about wine.

When I drink, I drink to savour, not for the right terminology or the specs. I drink for associations and memories, joy and energy, for colour, to contemplate but also to refresh. I drink for kaleidoscope glitter, shapes, unexpected turns and twists. Sometimes there’s mystery, other times it’s more about fluidity than a sense of individuality. Best of all is when I feel that pulse of liquid electricity.

Hannah, that is exactly how to talk about wine. There is a time and place for standard winespeak but no one ever captured the essence of a wine by listing fruit notes or reporting how much oak was used. Describing the individuality of a wine—if in fact it is distinctive, many wines aren’t—is something we are not very good at because people like Hannah have been browbeaten into thinking highly descriptive or metaphorical language is too subjective.

But there is no standardized language for describing uniqueness—if there were it would not be uniqueness you’re describing. This is why I find musical metaphors to be useful.

So, Hannah, please keep talking about wine; you do it better than most.

Appreciating Wine for the Right Reasons (Part 4 in a Series)

07 Thursday Mar 2019

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wine with question markIn my recent post on the nature of wine appreciation, I argued that to appreciate a wine is to respond appropriately to it. For appreciation,it is not sufficient to identify features of the wine. One must respond to those features by becoming aware of their significance. I then listed four ways of responding appropriately—via perception, cognition, emotion or desire.

However, I should probably say something about what a inappropriate response would be. These would be examples in which an appropriate response is blocked by errors of judgment. Thus, part of appreciation is responding to a wine for the right reasons.

Some inappropriate responses are rather obvious although common. If one’s response to a wine is solely based on its price, snob appeal or marketing materials rather than the wine itself, then these responses are inappropriate. One’s focus on the wine is impeded by failing  to properly judge what is relevant.

If your appreciation of a wine is based solely on the fact it reminds you of long lost weekends at the beach then your focus is on your own responses rather than features of the wine–again, a misjudgment about relevance.

Failure to consider the type of wine you’re drinking or facts about the origin of a wine is also inappropriate. Treating the daily porch pounder as if it were a work of art, or vice versa, is inappropriate as is complaining that a rosé lacks tannins or a German Auslese is sweet. Both are intended to be that way. Complaining that Amarone is high in alcohol without noting whether the alcohol is well handled or not is inappropriate. Because of the way it is made, Amarone will always be relatively high in alcohol. What matters is whether the alcohol is too obvious.

These are all cognitive mistakes that inhibit appreciation of a wine. There are also failures of attention.

Because the aim of aesthetic attention is to experience as many aesthetically-relevant properties of a wine as possible, if our attention to a wine is so one-dimensional that it blocks our attention to other dimensions, our response is likely to be inappropriate. For instance, if we’re attracted only to the superficial, easily accessible aspects of a wine, its power, softness, alcohol content, or ability to refresh, without considering the full range of its properties you haven’t really appreciated the wine.

Although we often think of wine appreciation as primarily involving perception, reasoning correctly about a wine is also central to its appreciation.

Earlier posts in this series on wine appreciation are as follows.

Wine Criticism and Appreciation (Part 1 in a series)

A Definition of Wine Appreciation: The first condition (part 2 in a series)

How To Respond to a Wine: Part 3 of a series on Appreciation.

Wine is a Peculiar Pursuit

04 Monday Feb 2019

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magniying glassThe wine world is an interesting amalgam of small but meaningful variations within a context of relative stability. Most major wine styles are embedded in traditions that go back hundreds of years and are still vibrant today. The weather is an agent of change as is the genetic instability of grapes.  New varietals are continually introduced,new wine regions emerge, and new technologies and methods are developed, but these are minor deviations from a core concept that seems immune to radical change. There are, after all, only so many ways to ferment grape juice. Red and white still wine, sparkling wine, and fortified wine have been around for centuries and are still the main wine styles on offer. Every wine we drink is a minor modification on those major themes.

And so as wine lovers we revel in nuance. We find minute shifts in aromatic expression worthy of deep thought. A slight zing of extra acidity or an elegant softening of hard tannins is worth hundreds of dollars. We debate whether an increase of .5% alcohol has thrown a wine completely out of balance. In no other dimension of life is so much made of so little.

Perhaps that is part of wine’s appeal. Wine is not loud, not extreme, not intrusive or monumental. It is demanding but inconsequential. A very peculiar pursuit.

What Do You Sell When You Sell Wine?

24 Thursday Jan 2019

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

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vineyard-3619525_960_720The form of the question suggests that wine is more than wine, more than an alcoholic beverage.  In thinking about the problem of slowing growth in the wine trade and questions about who is buying, who isn’t, and how wineries ought to respond to market conditions, it occurred to me that we can’t answer these questions unless we pay attention to the many things that wine is.

For many people, perhaps the majority of wine drinkers, wine is a commodity, an alcoholic beverage alongside other alcoholic beverages, that is affordable, pleasing to consume and will get you buzzed enough to relax. For others, the pleasant taste and alcohol is a stimulus to conviviality and good cheer, something you drink at parties to encourage a particular kind of social interaction. For these consumers, (call them “buzz babies”), much of what they are trying to accomplish can be achieved via other beverages. One might have a preference for wine over beer or vice versa but substitution is usually an option. And for this consumer price really matters. Alcohol is alcohol and as long as your threshold of drinkability is met, you’re not going to pay more.

But for others, wine is primarily an accompaniment for food. It enhances a meal and the meal feels incomplete without it. The effects of the alcohol matter as well but it’s the food enhancement that distinguishes a good experience from a mediocre one. This consumer (let’s call them “food freaks”) even when looking for an everyday, hassle free experience, will be more selective than the buzz babies. Particular meals will require particular wines. and not just any wine will do. And of course for some interested in food enhancement, choice of wine becomes a carefully managed puzzle to get the pairing just right. For food freaks, substitutability of one type of alcohol for another may not be possible. Although there are foods that go well with beer or spirits, and cocktails can sometimes be precisely calibrated to dishes, wine is widely acknowledged to be the superior food accompaniment. For food freaks, they may be willing to pay more for a bottle because they must be more selective, and a poor choice can have a negative impact on the food.

The next step up on the wine chain is the “casual connoisseur”. She enjoys the alcohol and food enhancement but also enjoys learning a bit about wine, will go to wineries regularly because she enjoys the winery experience, and may join a wine club. She is known to sip wine just to appreciate the flavors, aromas, and textures. There is no substitute for wine for the casual connoisseur, and although not into wine enough to spend big bucks she will splurge on occasion just to enjoy the experience.

The casual connoisseur however is also prone to suddenly falling head over heels for wine and transforming into the “compulsive connoisseur”. This person will study tomes devoted to obscure Italian wine regions, track down rare vintages for which she mortgages the house, and practices blind tasting with vials of synthesized aromas. Vacations are more accurately described as pilgrimages. (Most of you reading this blog will recognize the type). Price sensitivity is determined solely by the size of the bank account and the only substitute for a wine will be a better wine.

Then finally there is the status seeker who buys wine in order to display wealth or cultural capital. Price is not an obstacle but is the point of the purchase.

My point is that wine markets include a lot of diversity and on questions such as ability to raise prices, the profitability of direct-to-consumer sales, and strategies for increasing sales will depend on the category your customers occupy.

Yet operating behind the scenes for most of these wine consumers is a particular image of wine that subtly influences purchases. This image has at least three inter-related components.

1. Wine is a symbol of refinement. It is a beverage that aspires to elegance and requires the recognition of nuances in order to appreciate it. Wine is also typically consumed in contexts where there is an expectation of good behavior and respectful conduct.

2. Wine is  symbol of the sweet life of conviviality, good food, and good taste–a simple life of everyday pleasures where the benefits of community and romance are acknowledged and acted upon as a matter of routine.

3. Wine is an expression of place. Artisanal wines are rooted in the geography and culture of a particular people and are an expression of their sensibility.

When you sell wine you are selling the image of wine as well. Discussions of the future of the wine industry, prospects for growth, and strategies for overcoming obstacles have to take this image into consideration. Strategies that undermine this image are unlikely to be successful.

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

Why We Love Wine

19 Wednesday Dec 2018

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embracing a wine bottleAlthough wine is a beverage that brings enjoyment because of its flavor and alcohol, for many people wine is much more than that. Many winemakers and wine growers give up lucrative careers to take on the uncertainties of making wine, and wine lovers devote countless hours to studying its every nuance and permutation.

Why? What makes wine an object of love?

I try to answer that in my latest essay at Three Quarks Daily.

Tension is the Key to Great Wines

26 Monday Nov 2018

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tension in artIn my Three Quarks column this month I argue that it is tension and contrast, not harmony, that makes great wine.

Here is an except:

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, and in themselves often ugly.  If we think of wine as exhibiting flavor themes, these divergent 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.

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

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

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