13 Thursday Feb 2020
Installment two of my series on wine language, entitled Fleshy With a Bad Attitude: Metaphor and Wine Tasting Notes, is up at Three Quarks Daily. It’s about the challenges of describing the holistic properties of wine.
The first in the series is here.
20 Monday Jan 2020
Posted in Philosophy of Food and Wine
Oliver Styles, as usual, raises an interesting question in his latest article for Wine Searcher: Do we over-emphasize the impact a winemaker has on the finished wine?
My immediate response to the question was “well, it depends on the wine and the winemaker”—a point he readily acknowledges.
As he points out, sometimes accidents contribute to great wines. Some winemakers are working within long-established traditions, have exceptional vineyards to work with, or do work framed by a celebrated “house-style” established long before they were on the scene. Some winemakers operate under more commercial pressure than others; business models help to determine whcih wine gets made.
The general point to draw from this is that wine is made by a community, not an individual. Viticulturalists, farmers and vineyard workers, cellar hands, owners, marketing staffs, accountants, tasting panels that enforce standards, peer pressure, critics, and the consuming pubic through their feedback, as well as the winemaker, all play a role in the finished product. So do the climate, weather, and soils not to mention the vines themselves.
How should we apportion credit given this long list of inputs? As I noted, that is a good question.
One question I think is utterly irrelevant is the one he keeps coming back to:
How do we know what wines one winemaker would make if completely free of responsibilities to the board, responsibilities to the market, the pressures of their peers (this latter is a factor, especially in natural wine circles)? In other words, we can’t be sure that the winemaker we praise wouldn’t have made a completely different wine to the one we like if left completely to her or his own devices.
The answer is we can’t know. We call these “counterfactuals” in the philosophy business and their epistemology is obscure. When a baseball team wins the World Series we don’t wonder whether the manager could have won with a different team. The answer is probably not but that doesn’t detract from the manager’s accomplishment. Would Monet have painted the series entitled “Waterlilies” if he lacked a garden in Giverny to inspire him? Probably not. So what? We are evaluating an accomplishment under the conditions that explain its genesis, not some alternative accomplishment under different conditions.
He asks: “imagine our top Bordeaux winemakers were transposed into Languedoc-Roussillon without any of their current reputation, would we be using words like “kudos” or “bravo” when talking about them and their Cabardes or their Costieres de Nimes?”
No because skillfully making an average wine, while praiseworthy for the skill involved, isn’t producing a noteworthy finished product.
My point is the way we praise winemakers is somewhat problematic: are we praising the person themselves and their abilities; are we praising the employee of a company for doing her or his job; are we praising their ability to please us?
Wine is an aesthetic object (at least many wines are) and as such it’s primarily the aesthetic quality of the object we are interested in. Whatever praise is due the winemaker flows from that quality.
Of course, we could just bracket the finished product and evaluate the abilities of the winemaker, the way they do their job, or their knack for assessing the market. There is nothing wrong with these evaluations for certain purposes but in doing so we are losing touch with the aesthetic accomplishment.
He closes with another peculiar question:
That doesn’t mean I don’t think winemakers should get any credit, I’m just struck by the possibility of someone out there getting “kudos” for making a wine they themselves don’t like. It must be akin to an actor realizing for the first time they are being typecast.
This contains a genuine puzzle. We praise people for their accomplishments even when there is luck involved. Works of art often have aesthetic affects that were not intended by the artist. That doesn’t diminish the accomplishment. But Oliver is raising a different kind of case. How do we evaluate a case in which the winemaker makes a wine she intended to make, the wine is of high quality, but it’s in a style she doesn’t prefer?
It isn’t obvious to me that the winemaker’s preferences should matter. Presumably, the finished product reflects her skill and aesthetic judgement—she made the right moves to produce the wine. Why would we withhold praise because she would prefer to make a different wine?
12 Thursday Dec 2019
Posted in Philosophy of Food and Wine
In a previous post I described the motivation behind a revised wine tasting model that elevates a wine’s rhythm and motion on the palate, giving them equal billing with aromas.
In this current post I give a rough summary of what I mean by “rhythm”.
A tasting regime that focuses on movement and rhythm must begin with structure. Structure refers to the interplay of the basic foundational components of a wine. It is that interplay that sets the wine in motion and gives us the perception of movement. “Structure” refers to four primary components of a wine: fruit power including residual sugar when present, acidity, tannins, and alcohol.
These structural components create the body of the wine. However, the interplay between these components does not occur all at once. We sense this interplay as unfolding in time. The relationships between acidity, tannins, fruit power, and alcohol shift as the wine unfolds. How they do so contributes to the personality that each wine has. Most tasting notes include reference to a cumulative, quantitative assessment of structural elements—a wine might be described as “full bodied”, with high acidity and firm tannins. Textural descriptors such as “soft”, “textured”, or “angular” are also typical. But these descriptions do not tell us much about how the wine will be experienced unless we view them as part of an unfolding process. The quality and personality of a wine depend on how these components come together in relationships of mutual support or antagonism. It is this interplay and the intensities we experience from it that I refer to as rhythm.
It’s important to point out that, although we taste a wine as a whole, each structural component is contributing a distinct quality to the wine and they form a series of contrasts or polarities. Fruit power gives the wine weight and roundness. Alcohol can contribute to the softness of the texture. Acidity contributes sharpness, angularity, and can make the wine feel hard while also causing the mouth to water. Tannins contribute roughness and astringency. These are sharply contrasting tactile sensations that must become integrated and work together if the wine is to be pleasing. However, that integration does not happen all at once. Most reasonably complex wines have moments of tension where the components seem to resist each other and moments of relaxation in which harmony ensues. The key point is that as we track this dynamic movement on the palate the wine is setting up polarities. The relative prominence of the fruit, acidity or tannins, exhibit high points and low points with the acid straining to be noticed against the swelling graininess of the tannins, or the fruit power trying to hold on to its prominence as the other components emerge.
Wines differ in how much tension is exhibited through this dynamic movement. In some wines the contrast between the sweetness of the fruit or the softness of the alcohol seems in tension with searing acidity or the grain of the tannins. In other wines, the struggle for attention between structural components is reserved and full of finesse. But in any case, in a wine of high quality the various elements are constraining each other, working together at key moments to reign each other in, each providing an anchor that the others play off of. As we taste a wine, the wine is at work resolving these tensions. How it accomplishes that resolution is an important dimension of wine quality.
Tasting vitality is about mapping these polarities and then experiencing their resolution.
In a future post I will introduce some categories to help grasp this motion on the palate.
04 Wednesday Dec 2019
Posted in Philosophy of Food and Wine
For the past two years, I’ve been working intermittently on developing a new wine tasting model to be included in the book I’m writing on the philosophy of wine. I’ve finally gotten around to working it up into something publishable at least on a blog. So I will be devoting some posts to it over the next several weeks.
Current tasting models used in tasting notes and in certification programs are focused largely on aromas and flavors, and we have a well-developed vocabulary for describing them. It is obvious why tasting models focus on aromas. Aromas are the signature of a wine—they provide important clues about the varietal, where the grapes were grown, and how the wine was made. Because the paradigm of wine assessment is blind tasting with a goal of inferring origins from a wine’s properties, the identification of aromas is important for that task.
As important as aromas and flavor notes are however they are not the whole wine. Blind tasting aside, our enjoyment of a wine depends crucially on mouthfeel but also on a dimension of wine that is seldom emphasized in our tasting models—the movement of the wine on the palate. In fact, I want to suggest that a wine’s perceived movement on the palate is not only one determinant of wine quality but is central to a wine’s personality. Distinctive wines have a distinctive manner in which their tactile qualities unfold. Yet, our way of describing these features is not nearly as well developed as our description of flavor notes.
Thus, my primary goal in developing a tasting model is to provide an analysis of this dimension of wine tasting. Essentially, I’m arguing that individual wines have a rhythm and I’m trying to describe the various rhythms that wines exhibit. I won’t be ignoring aromas or flavors but rhythm and mouthfeel will get equal billing.
So stay tuned.
23 Wednesday Oct 2019
Wine importer Terry Thiese’s wonderful book What Makes a Wine Worth Drinking: In Praise of the Sublime raises many philosophical issues. 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. Why does wine move the mind and the heart? How does it do so; what are the mechanisms through which wine moves us?
I try to answer these questions in my Three Quarks Daily column this month.
16 Wednesday Oct 2019
Posted in Art and Wine, Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture
I know people who insist on drinking only the best wines from any category, the wines with pedigree and reputation. After all, there is a reason why “the best” have earned their reputation. Although reputation isn’t a guarantee of quality and surely no guarantee that the wine will fit your personal taste, more often than not wines that have impressed critics over many vintages will have something to offer most wine lovers. But that is nevertheless a bad strategy for choosing what to drink.
Earlier this week we were in Philadelphia strolling through the Philadelphia Museum of Art. They have an extensive collection but we had only a few hours before heading out to dinner and couldn’t see it all. The visitors guide has a helpful list of highlights—the most famous works in the collection—and maps you to them so you can skip the lesser lights and visit the stars.
But we never take that option because you lose out on the thrill of making new discoveries. I would rather just stroll through the rooms without a plan looking for something that catches my eye. Instead of another bowl of fruit from Cezanne or sparkling, dappled lilies from Monet, I discovered the contemporary, Italian artist Marisa Merz who manages to be simultaneously charming and menacing. Had I toured the stars, I would have missed lesser works by famous figures like this peculiar work by Dali called Agnostic Symbol that I never knew existed.
Similarly, if you drink only signature wines from well-known producers you won’t discover the seemingly infinite variety of equally compelling wines that fly under the radar. These lesser known wines will likely show far more originality and distinctiveness than what you find among the stars since it’s the stars that define what conventionality and orthodoxy mean at any point in time.
Both in the art world and in wine, what gets famous has a lot to do with effective PR, cash, and the celebrity that comes with being a celebrity. The star system may sometimes stumble upon quality but it discovers only a small part of a larger universe of quality and seldom uncovers what is genuinely original.
03 Thursday Oct 2019
Posted in Philosophy of Food and Wine
Last week I linked to several examples of what has become a favorite theme in wine media—complaints about wine language, especially the use of metaphors that make use of the features of a person to describe a wine. (See here, here and here for examples of the complaints)
The complaint is almost always that metaphorical attributions are too subjective and ambiguous and serve no purpose other than advertising the writer’s facility with words.
There are several things to say about these objections. One is that the problem is not unique to wine. Unless metaphors have become dead metaphors there will always be ambiguities about how to interpret them in any field. Poetic metaphors are obviously complex and difficult to parse, but even conversational metaphors such as “Bill is a bulldozer” or “Jane is a block of ice” may raise questions about which features of Bill or Jane the metaphor is highlighting. You would have to know something about Bill or Jane before being confident about what the metaphor means. All living metaphors require interpretation.
In interpreting metaphors, context is essential. To grasp what a “sinewy” wine might be, one must know something about the range of textural and tactile differences in wine and have tasted enough to sense the differences between them. To know what Robert Parker meant when he referred to the 2001 Batard-Montrachet as a “streetwalker”, you have to know that some wines are flamboyant and expressive, but unrefined, superficial and lacking substance. The complaint about ambiguity is often made from the perspective of a wine novice. But, of course, wine metaphors will be opaque to a novice. Understanding a metaphor will often require refined capacities to taste. It would be a peculiar writing practice if its most excellent examples were aimed only at novices. We don’t have such an expectation regarding the language used in art appreciation, baseball, or bird watching. Some of the vocabulary of any domain of expertise will be opaque to novices.
As to more experienced tasters, many metaphors have become so common they require only a bit of thought to figure out what they mean. Wines are routinely described as “generous”, “brooding” or “shy”. Surely, these pose no special interpretive difficulties for someone with some tasting experience and there is no reason to think these are more subjective than, for instance, aroma notes. Thus, it’s only new metaphors that have no established history of conventional use that might be troublesome. Which brings me to the most important reason why metaphor is essential. There is no off-the-shelf vocabulary for describing holistic properties that also get at a wine’s individuality without employing metaphor. Individual fruit and flower descriptors will only get you so far.
I will explain what I mean by this next week when I continue this series of posts on wine metaphors.
25 Wednesday Sep 2019
It’s fashionable to criticize wine critics for a variety of sins: they’re biased, their scores don’t mean anything, and their jargon is unintelligible according to the critics of critics. Shouldn’t we just drink what we like? Who cares what critics think?
In my Three Quarks column this month, I defend wine criticism by showing how wine criticism contributes to wine appreciation.
12 Thursday Sep 2019
Posted in Wine Culture
Since I’ve been writing and thinking a lot recently about the role of the wine writer, I couldn’t resist commenting on this post by Tom Wark. Tom links to an article in The New Yorker by Troy Patterson, Jr. entitled, “How the Orange-Wine Fad Became an Irresistible Assault on Pleasure” .
The linked article is a take down of wine drinkers who have latched on to “orange wine” as the latest hot trend in the wine firmament. (Orange wine is a white wine allowed to macerate on the skins like a red wine giving it some color and tannins.)
There was honey in the aroma. An intense whirligig of tannins metallically attacked my mouth and, on the finish, there was an astringent sizzle, with undertones of acid reflux. Tasting notes described this as a “long persistence.” I found it to be a test of stamina. While I waited for the wine’s acrid smack to wear off, I meditated on how this chic but peculiar elixir reflected the terroir of the urban social landscape.
OK. So he doesn’t like orange wine. Most people don’t.
But Tom writes that there is larger issue at stake:
Patterson is not so much communicating his dislike of the Orange Wine genre or the challenge of many of its examples. Rather, he has his cultural critic hat on and is attempting to make sense of the embrace of difficult drinks by Nicheites. What is it, Patterson is asking, that draws a certain type to these new, challenging and oh so nouvelle drinks? …he is questioning the propriety of elevating unpleasantness to a point of trendiness and proof of superiority.
I agree with Tom—that is exactly what he’s doing. The problem is it’s bullshit. Patterson is claiming that people who drink orange wine don’t really like it—they just drink it because its trendy. Because many conventional wine lovers don’t like it, it gives the “nicheites” a sense of moral superiority.
Really? They’ve been making orange wine in Eastern Europe for millennia. Those folks would be surprised to learn they really weren’t enjoying themselves. As for the current wine scene, wine lovers seek out alternative production methods because differentiation is the beating heart of wine culture. We naturally seek out differences because we get bored drinking the same thing all the time. Part of the excitement of wine are the differences that nature and culture conspire to produce from wine grapes. That’s not being trendy—it’s an essential element of being interested in taste.
Of course, not every difference and variation is worthwhile. The wine has to taste good and give pleasure. When made by people who actually know what they’re doing, orange wine is delicious. I traveled to Friuli and Slovenia last year and had stunning orange wine that was not at all difficult to drink. I recently poured a Gravner (mentioned in Patterson’s article) for a group of knowledgeable, conventional wine drinkers skeptical of anything trendy and it stole the show. Granted, there are some bad ones out there. I tasted one last month in Prince Edward County, Canada that Patterson’s description fit perfectly. But there is a lot of bad Pinot and Chardonnay out there as well. Why would the bad examples define the whole category?
As to Patterson’s larger point that there is something inauthentic and feigned about people who pursue difficult tastes, Scotch drinkers would also be surprised to find out they aren’t really enjoying themselves. Dark chocolate, black coffee, stinky cheese, cured anchovies, sushi, durian, raw oysters—all difficult to eat at first but we persist and learn to like them. (Well, Duran not soo much) Were we just being trendy and sanctimonious when we persisted or did they offer something intriguing despite being challenging? There are people in all sectors of culture that merely follow trends and mimic what’s hip. That is not unique to orange wine drinkers, natural wine drinkers, or people who pursue “difficult tastes”.
Tom doesn’t necessarily endorse Patterson’s views on orange wine but he thinks Patterson is a talented writer and the wine world needs more like him:
He is fun to read. Very thoughtful. He possesses the ability to make intriguing connections between subjects and ideas….The problem with wine writing is that there are no Troy Patterson Jrs in the wine writing club.
No doubt Patterson has a way with words but his article is frankly stupid. I agree, we need more talented wine writers. But I shouldn’t have to swallow ignorance with my hyperbole.
31 Wednesday Jul 2019
For wine enthusiasts, artisanal wine is about continuous variation and the singularities that emerge from those variations. Wine enthusiasts devote most of their attention to tracking variation and assessing it. Differences between regions, varietals, vineyards, winemaking styles, weather and climate variation, soil variation, and bottle variation are of primary aesthetic interest. Life, vitality, is also fundamentally about variation. This shared connection between life and wine is the key to understanding wine’s expressiveness. The art of winemaking is basically the art of expressing vitality. I make the case in my column at Three Quarks Daily.
