Tag Archives: food and wine aesthetics

Why Taste is Important

18 Thursday Feb 2016

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

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savorThe issue of what we eat or drink is often considered to be trivial, a personal matter that has no larger significance and is thus unworthy of philosophical attention when important matters like the meaning of life or the definition of free will are at stake.

But this is a grotesquely short-sighted view.

Our resource- intensive way of life, supported by an economic system that requires constant growth, is unsustainable especially because the rest of the world would like to emulate it. For example, it is estimated that if everyone in the world consumed our meat-heavy diet, we would need two planet earths to supply sufficient land, feed, and water.

In the very near future, we will have to  live differently, and that means, fundamentally, learning to  desire differently—and to desire food differently.

How we refine desires and pleasures and attend to their moderation, balance, and harmony has been a philosophical topic since the Ancient Greeks. That discourse has never been more important than it is today and our food desires must now lie at the center of that discourse. Food is our most basic material need and ties together a vast number of issues from environmental concerns, to considerations of social justice, to the nature of human happiness all are tied to how we manage our desires. To ignore food as a philosophical issue is to ignore that foundational discourse regarding the  management of desires that has been central to philosophy’s history.

And the process of learning to desire differently must begin by finding that place where beauty, pleasure  and a focus on things that have intrinsic value occupy our attention. Finding extraordinary meaning in simple things and their particularity, such as a meal or a bottle of wine, is the most accessible path to a good life in this damaged  world.

A concern for taste is the first step in shaping our desires toward more sustainable forms.

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Disputing Taste

15 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by in General Aesthetics, Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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water lillies“To each his own”. “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.” Platitudes about disagreement over taste are a “dime a dozen”, as numerous as platitudes about cheap stuff. And indeed, disagreements about sensory experiences are often pointless. If I happen to like red roses and you like yellow roses there is not much I can say to convince you you’re wrong. There just isn’t any reason why you should share my preferences.

But in the realm of art appreciation matters are different. If I like Monet’s Water Lilies and you don’t, I can give you reasons why you should like the painting and can, perhaps justifiably, criticize you if you don’t “get it”. I can intelligibly argue that you lack sensitivity toward certain aesthetic properties. Of course, I could be wrong in my criticism. My point is that the very idea of me criticizing your inability to appreciate Monet would not be a head scratcher like my criticism of your preferences for yellow roses would be.

So preferences for works of art seem less subjective than preferences for colors. Conclusions about a work of art seem to prescribe a certain way of looking at the work; conclusions about ordinary sensory experiences don’t. When we make judgments about music, books, or art we think people ought to agree with us and when they don’t we think it is at least worth some effort to persuade them otherwise. In other words, in the realm of art, literature or film I assume my reasons can at least in principle make sense to you if properly laid out and that I can potentially move you from disagreement to agreement with my argument. I take it all of us have had the experience of being persuaded that a film or book we didn’t like was actually better than we thought after hearing someone else’s reasons.

So where does wine (and food) fit? Are our judgments utterly subjective like a preference for the color red or are there reasons for them that can potentially persuade? Obviously, the whole practice of wine evaluation and criticism suggests judgments about wine are more like judgments about art than color preferences. We argue about wine just as we argue about art or books.

The case against the intelligibility of wine criticism is that wine appreciation involves tastes and smells which allegedly are more private than vision or audition because they involve individual differences in biological and psychological makeup. Tastes and aromas are not “in the world” like colors or sounds. But this doesn’t seem to be the case, at least not to the degree that renders all judgments about wine subjective. We can agree that a wine feels tannic or tastes of ripe fruit just as we can agree that a rose is red, although with wine it takes some training to do so. The many objective tasting exams given by various certification agencies show that tastes and smells can be reliably identified and agreed upon by different people over time.

Even some wine preferences are widely shared. Few trained experts would dispute that Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Napa make great wines and we can point to features that make them great. Of course, at some point, individual idiosyncrasies take over. We don’t agree on which Napa Cabs are the best.  We can expect to get agreement without succeeding; we can give reasons that don’t persuade. But that is true of disagreements in art as well. In both cases the possibility of agreement is intelligible and the methods of persuasion clear even when unsuccessful.

It’s clear from this that the idea that wine appreciation is utterly subjective is false. It is also clear however that the terms “objective” and “subjective” don’t capture the range of options available in explaining our capacity for judgment.

Enjoyment and Contemplation

20 Thursday Nov 2014

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

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table full of foodNow that food has become an object of discourse rather than a taken-for-granted necessity, it has also become the focus of myriad ideological crosscurrants—vegan vs. vegetarian vs. carnivore; paleo vs. rawfoodist vs. low-carb; debates about GMO’s, sustainability, global hunger, etc. But with all this controversy, we risk losing sight of what is important about food—the pleasure of eating. So I very much like this short essay by Miriam Ava:

Here’s the thing, though: If we become too invested in, or even obsessed with, our food choices we lose sight of what’s really important: that we feel good & enjoy life. If one focuses on counting calories; if one takes in the pain of others endlessly; if one constantly evaluates how this or that ingredient impacts the body; if one restricts oneself to the point of Puritan approval; if food has an overwhelming grip on one’s mind no matter one’s desired diet, then its offering of nourishment & enjoyment has been replaced by stagnation & fear.

I doubt that there is any meaning to life beyond the full experience of it. And that requires the maximum enrichment of our everyday activities. All objects we encounter have a kind of eloquence about them that we are obliged to recognize if we seek this enrichment. Our food is no exception; indeed food may be the most readily available source of this eloquence since the enjoyment of food is so accessible to us—all you have to do is eat with full awareness, a capacity we all possess if we can eliminate the distractions.

Of course a life of contemplation and awareness cannot ignore the moral questions that concern us. But when the table is set it is time to focus on what is before us.

Enjoy your day.

Nausea and Restaurant Reviews

07 Tuesday Aug 2012

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atelier crennIn doing some research on Atelier Crenn, the restaurant featuring the visually compelling, poetically-rendered cuisine that I blogged about last week, I came across this review of the restaurant by food critic Jonathan Kauffman of San Francisco Weekly. As he reports, many of the dishes were spectacular, visually and on the palate, but there were long waits between courses and problems of execution marred some of the dishes. To sum up his less than enthusiastic impressions he writes:

But I think, for Atelier Crenn to succeed artistically, the chef will have to resolve how to balance her food-as-art intentions with the food-as-meal expectations of patrons.

My first response to the review was the thought that perhaps he should seek out a Denny’s or Appleby’s if he wanted a meal. Atelier Crenn is not about serving meals but creates cutting edge, original works of edible art. Sometimes it takes longer than expected to produce a finished work, and sometimes it will fail—art is like that because it involves taking risks. The review seemed to assume that Atelier Crenn should be judged using the same criteria as any other fine dining establishment. But it shouldn’t be so judged. It is not just a place where the well-dressed eat fussy food at a premium price. One goes there to have the imagination provoked and the intellect stimulated.

But my second thought was that even a restaurant consciously striving to create art must nevertheless get the timing and execution right—there is an element of performance art in great cuisine, and practical considerations of delivering meals cannot be entirely pushed aside.

The predicament of chefs creating culinary art is similar to the problems faced by an architect striving for aesthetic impact. Form cannot be entirely divorced from function. A lovely building that crumbles to the ground is not art; just a pile of rubble.

building falling A beautiful plate of food served after one’s attention has waned and the passage of time feels like a glimpse of eternity has become just another course having lost the aura of expectation on which it depends

So the review had a point. A work of culinary art that cannot function as a meal cannot succeed as art.

Nevertheless the language of the review was inappropriate. Cuisine like this cannot be reduced to the pursuit of a meal. The reviewer begins by expressing discomfort with the question of food as art:

Here’s a question I hesitate to type, for fear of its nausea-inducing effect: What makes food art, and not just a meal?

A little pre-meal nausea is not the best condition under which to write a review of a restaurant.

Intoxication

31 Tuesday Jul 2012

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

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Seilenos-Dionysus A bottle of Jack Daniels is intoxicating if you drink enough of it. The ambient music of Steve Roach is intoxicating as well. Clearly, they are not intoxicating in the same way.

The Jack Daniels will cause drunkenness; but the experience of drinking plays no role in the intoxication just as the experience of taking a sleeping pill has nothing to do with its effects. The effect is all that matters, and you will be just as intoxicated if you drink absentmindedly. Drunkenness is an experience, but it is an experience in which our attention is not directed at anything in particular.

By contrast, with music, the listening itself is crucial to the intoxication. The intoxication is not just an effect of the music; the experience itself, and the attention we give to it, is a necessary component. The hearing is itself intoxicating, and the experience is about something—namely the music.

Happily, wine is intoxicating in both respects. In sufficient quantities it causes the intoxication of drunkenness but the experience of tasting wine is itself intoxicating. The smells, flavors, and textures of wine can be moving and exhilarating just as the sounds of music can be when we direct our attention to them.

As Roger Scruton writes in his article “The Philosophy of Wine” (available in this anthology)

“The intoxication that I feel is not just caused by the wine: it is, to some extent at least, directed at the wine, and not just a cause of my relishing the wine, but in some sense a form of it. The intoxicating quality and the relishing are internally related, in that the one cannot be properly described without reference to the other….I have not swallowed the wine as I would a tasteless drug; I have taken it into myself, so that its flavour and my mood are inextricably bound together.”

Scruton’s analysis seems right up to a point but I doubt that aesthetic intoxication is wholly unrelated to the mild, alcoholic buzz induced by wine. The flush of exhilaration caused by the alcohol (in small quantities) seems to sharpen one’s anticipation, and lends itself to feelings of enchantment that may influence our perceptions and judgments. Even in contexts where I taste and evalluate many wines, and must spit and dump to remain sharp, enough alcohol is absorbed through mouth tissue and accidental swallowing to influence my mood. The attentional focus of relishing and savoring are important but I doubt that they are the whole story.

The intoxication of music may also depend on effects that go beyond savoring. Music influences our moods and expectations in ways that are likely to profoundly influence our judgments about the music.

Recent research has demonstrated the role of neruotransmitters in our enjoyment of music:

Our experience of the music we love stimulates the pleasure chemical dopamine in our brain, concludes a new study produced by a slew of scholars at McGill University. The researchers followed the brain patterns of test subjects with MRI imaging, and identified dopamine streaming into the striatum region of their forebrains “at peak emotional arousal during music listening.”

Not only that, but the scientists noticed that various parts of the striatum responded to the dopamine rush differently. The caudate was more involved during the expectation of some really nice musical excerpt, and the nucleus accumbens took the lead during “the experience of peak emotional responses to music.”

In other words, just the anticipation our favorite passage stimulates the production of dopamine.

I doubt that this kind of influence necessarily involves critical reflection, although the study does not explicitly address this point. It is also not  surprising that increased levels of dopamine are implicated in drunkenness.

Scruton wants to distinguish between intoxication I (drunkenness) and intoxication II (aesthetic appreciation) by insisting that relishing or savoring—a kind of critical inspection—is involved in the latter but not in the former. It is that moment of thoughtful reflection, and our ability to form a representation of the music or wine, that enables us to appreciate the finer points of wine or music.

But I doubt that the content of that critical inspection can be sharply distinguished from causal effects of the wine or music that may not be part of our representation of the wine or music.

It may be that the two forms of intoxication are more closely related than Scruton allows.

Dionysus would not be surprised.

Wine, Art, and the Value of Dirt and Sky

28 Thursday Jun 2012

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This has been a very active week for the philosophy of wine in the blogosphere. This paper by philosopher Barry Smith discussing the objectivity of wine flavors is interesting. I will comment on that when I get a chance.

But I was especially appreciative of Frederic Koeppel’s engaging and thoughtful post contemplating various definitions of wine.

It gives me a frisson when I see terms borrowed from philosophy in a discussion of wine–terms such as “objective correlative”, “aspirational signifier” and “paradigm”. These terms are themselves aspirational signifiers indicating that wine is more than a commercial product that tastes good and gets you drunk.

More importantly, Koeppel’s post brings out the symbolic dimension of wine, a dimension that is crucial to the idea that winemaking is an art.

That is, wine, especially at its greatest, is the perfect vehicle to fulfill the highest level of a grape’s possible achievement. In this perception, wine conveys a sense of inevitability that other beverages or agricultural products rarely contrive. One does not drink beer, for example, even in its best or most powerful manifestations, and think, “Ah, yes, this is the apotheosis of cereal grains.” The grape, however, is never far from one’s thoughts….

Striving for an aesthetic ideal and using material—paint, musical notes, or grapes—to symbolically refer to that ideal is surely one characteristic of art.

But Koeppel goes on to point to another symbolic dimension of wine:

A glass of wine, perhaps the one you’re holding in your hand now, serves — let me say should serve — as an emblem of a piece of earth, a stretch of vineyard, a swath of sky, a defined region where its grapes were nurtured and harvested. That sentence summarizes the notion of terroir, the French idea that wine is influenced by and reflects the nature of the vineyard where the grapes were grown.

Koeppel is right, as I have been arguing in the newsletter. The subject matter of a wine understood as an art object—what it refers to, what it is about—is a particular winemaking tradition that often depends on a terroir for its intelligibility. Winemakers are symbolically referring to traditions even when actively opposing the practices of the tradition in which they work.

There is, however, a tension between these two aspects of wine discussed by Koeppel. As an aside, he writes:

(A few winemakers in California try to assert that terroir includes whatever processes occur in the winery as well as the agency of the winemaker him- or herself. Any thoughtful person will see that this caprice is nonsense; too often the winemaker interferes with a wine and negates the effect of terroir.)

Perhaps, but it may be that winemakers, with their blending genius and winery wizardry, may “fullfill the highest level of a grape’s possible achievement” even while rendering obscure the residue of terroir in the glass.

Arguably, the first-growth wines of Bordeaux. which are generally acknowledged to be the best, are not terroir-driven. They are blends of more than one grape variety from various vineyards that are often not contiguous and may not share the same characteristics of terroir, especially after undergoing filtration, fining, and aging in oak. The result is not a pure expression of a vineyard, but a product of a winemaker’s vision of what those grapes can be.

Does that abort the artistic impulse? Are lovers of highly sculpted “winemaker wines” soulless philistines robbing wine of its real meaning?

I’m not convinced. It smacks a bit of the public’s initial negative reaction to abstract art, as if wines could only be what they were in the past.

I suppose, in the end, wine lovers will settle the issue.

Wine, Objectivity, and a Taste for Purple Haze

26 Tuesday Jun 2012

Posted by in Art and Wine, General Aesthetics, Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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hendrix Any consideration of objectivity in wine tasting must take into consideration a fundamental fact. Our experiences of taste and smell are not “pure” or “uninterpreted” sensations. Rather, our sensations are influenced by a variety of factors such as previous experience, knowledge, expectations, and cultural influences as well as our individual imaginations. What we think and imagine influences what we focus on, what we taste, and how much pleasure we receive from an experience.

The question is, when we look at how we are influenced by these factors, is there any reason to think our judgments about wine can be objective?

Here is one way in which our beliefs influence what we taste. Our beliefs about how to categorize an object often create expectations that determine what we taste. With regard to wine, this was borne out in an experiment in which expert tasters were given a white wine tainted by red food coloring. All tasters reported characteristics typically associated with red wines. (This result is entirely predictable. Wine tasters are taught to exclude certain possibilities based on color. They were doing precisely what they were supposed to do.)

This is not peculiar to wine tasting. When we listen to a rock song such as Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix we expect to hear a ponderous, repetitive drum rhythm, and Hendrix’s ethereal yet soulful vocals, supported by the incongruity of highly distorted guitars prominently employing electronic feedback playing chords imported from the jazz world. It is easy to discern the aesthetic properties of this song and understand why it helped to fundamentally shape the future of rock music.

However, when we listen for the first time to the Kronos Quartet’s early versions of Purple Haze, played by a string quartet with standard instrumentation, we are unlikely to perceive the aesthetic properties of the work—we don’t know what category to place it in and in order to apprecaiate its quality we have to relearn how to listen to that song in a non-standard context.

Relative to the category “innovative (psychedelic) rock song from the 1960’s” the virtues of Purple Haze are obvious. Relative to the category “standard string quartet repertoire”, its virtues are less than apparent. (Which is not to say they are absent. That is a topic for a different post)

The general point is this: Different categories against which a work of art is perceived will profoundly influence our aesthetic reaction to it. The same is true of wine.

How does this help us understand the objectivity of wine tasting?

Because, at least some of the time, there are correct categories in which to place a wine. Just as it is correct to put Hendrix’s version of Purple Haze in the category “innovative (psychedelic) rock song from the 1960’s”, it is correct to put most Siduri Pinot Noir bottlings in the category of “high-alcohol, ripe, California style”. It is incorrect to put them in the category of “classic Burgundian-style pinot”. This judgment can be made independently of whether one likes the wine or not, just as a knowledgeable music critic can identify the genre of Purple Haze independently of whether they like the song.

What counts as a correct categorization of a wine? The presence of features standard for that category, the fact that a particular wine more readily shows its virtues in that category, the intentions of the winemaker, and the fact that such a categorization is widely recognized by wine experts. And we can define categories in various ways, according to varietal, region, style, vintage, quality, etc.

Once we place a wine in its correct category and judge it against other wines in that category, our judgments can claim a measure of objectivity. Because there is agreement on standard features implicit in the notion of “correct categorization” there is agreement on the criteria used to judge a wine in that category. This does not eliminate all subjectivity or personal preference, but it narrows the range in which personal preference can operate. I may prefer Burgundian style pinots to California-ripe pinots, but if I am judging a California-ripe pinot only against others of the same style my personal preference for Burgundian pinots need not come into play.

Of course, it will often be difficult to properly categorize a wine, just as it is difficult to know which genre to place the Kronos Quartet’s version of Purple Haze. In the wine world today, boundaries are unstable, well-known classification systems are undergoing change, experimentation is rampant, and the popular style of using very ripe grapes tends to erase some distinctive characteristics of certain wine styles. Some of this is good for wine drinkers; but it makes judgment more challenging.

This is why large wine competitions are virtually useless for arriving at objective judgments about wine. Wines of different styles are typically thrown together in these competitions, wines are tasted blind and so judges often lack clues about proper categorization, and thus judges are left evaluating based on personal preference alone.

Thus, the claim that all wine evaluation is purely subjective is simply not true if we are careful to specify the comparison class against which a wine is being judged. The narrower the category, the more clearly we can delineate standard properties of that category, the greater the potential for objectivity.

Who’s The Expert?

01 Tuesday May 2012

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

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200902_top-chef-winner-2 I have been musing about the nature of tasting expertise (wine and food criticism) in recent weeks (here, here, here, and here);  but I don’t think I’ve quite gotten to the bottom of the matter yet, so here are some more musings on the topic.

Do wine and food critics have a special expertise that gives authority to their pronouncements, or is it all just subjective preference dressed up with clever wordplay? Here is one way to understand the kind of expertise tasters might have: They are more skilled than ordinary people at detecting objective properties of wine or food. Take, for instance, the identification of phenols in wine.

Phenols are chemical compounds in red wine, extracted primarily from grape skins, that help give wine its structure and flavor. For some people, phenols have a bitter flavor, but others report no flavor at all. Scientists have identified the taste receptors on the tongue that enable us to taste bitterness; some people are more sensitive to bitter flavors than others because they have more densely populated bitter receptors on their tongue, and thus can more readily taste the phenols in the wine. In fact, some people are “supertasters” with excessive sensitivity to bitterness.

Thus, disagreements about whether a wine exhibits phenolic bitterness can be explained by physiological differences in the tasters.  Expert tasters of phenols are those people well-equipped to taste phenols. There is a measurable objective property of the wine, and an explanation of variation in the ability to taste that property. No interpretation on the part of the taster is required—you are either equipped to taste phenols or not.

If we can extend this analysis to other properties of wine or food, we then would have a general, measurable account of tasting expertise.

However, off hand, I can think of four reasons why this is not a promising approach to understanding tasting expertise.

1. The experience of tasting often does not track the objective properties of wine or food. For instance, the level of phenols in a wine, as measured in a laboratory, tells us little about how the wine will taste. Winemakers earn their keep by finding ways of keeping flavors in balance by masking flavors they do not want. A wine high in phenol may not taste bitter because there is sufficient fruit to mask the bitterness.

2.  Whose disposition to taste phenols counts as expertise? There will be a lot of variation in our response to phenolic bitterness—not only non-tasters, tasters, and super-tasters, but variation within those broad groupings. Which one is correct? Given the importance of phenols in the overall flavor of red wine, we might argue that non-tasters cannot qualify. But which level of sensitivity is the right level? A statistical average? Canonization by Robert Parker? Who is to say?

3. Most flavors are not as straightforwardly detectable as bitterness. There may be a measurable relationship between substances in food and wine and our ability to taste sweetness, saltiness, bitterness, sourness, and umami, since these correspond to types of taste buds in the mouth. But the overall flavor of something is as dependent on smell as it is on taste; and it is not at all obvious that smell works in the same way. Is the difference between someone who smells blackcurrants, smoke, and toasty oak in a wine, and someone who smells black cherry, fig, and dried flowers really a physiological difference in detection thresholds? Maybe, but the science just isn’t there yet and there is no reason to think disagreements about the flavors of food and wine can all be explained by physiological differences.

4. And finally some aesthetic features of wine and food, perhaps the most important ones, don’t seem to be straightforwardly underwritten by chemical constituents. Flavor balance, elegance, evolution, coherence, unity, power, sharpness of contrast, etc. do not refer to chemical properties. It is not obvious that they are perceptual at all. Yet, critical judgments often depend on such concepts.

So the aforementioned conception of expertise is too limited.

This post is already too long, so I will suspend this discussion for now. But I will get to the bottom of this.

Creative Chefs and the Proletarians

25 Wednesday Apr 2012

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Genuine culinary artistry faces a fundamental hurdle–the preparation of food is also a business and the customer must be satisfied. Art and music production also have commercial elements, but artists and musicians can more easily keep their customers at arm’s length during the creative process. You can see a painting before you buy it—you can’t sample a dish before you order it.

Here is an interesting take on this problem from Richie Nakano, a chef who clearly senses the tension between food as art and food as a commodity.

It’s late after a particularly busy pop-up, I’m about three whiskeys past my comfort zone, and I have to start all over again eight hours from now. I switch into auto mode and wash my station down, the still-hot French-top range hissing at me every time I scrub anywhere near it. I just want to wrap it up and go cry in the shower a little, but my cook has been hounding me about an idea for a dish, and now I’ve got no choice but to hear him out. He hands me a piece of paper scrawled with columns and arrows and drawings and ingredients and for fuck’s sake what am I looking at? …

The conversation goes on for another 20 minutes, during which I drink two more whiskeys and a glass of very sugary Riesling. Eventually I’ll ask him to make the dish so we can taste it, but in the days that follow I end up shooting it down completely. He’ll quit, after saying I’m not open to new cooking techniques and that he just wanted to make my food “better.”

And I will realize that—shit—I’ve been here before. Only last time, I was the one who felt betrayed.

Most experiments don’t work and no one wants to taste, let alone pay for, someone’s failed idea. Restaurant cooking is about pushing as much well-prepared, familiar food out the door as you can. The economic realities of the culinary profession work against the romantic notion, fostered by the phenomenon of the celebrity chef, that cooking is a means of self-expression.

For every executive chef imagining techno-emotional magic on a plate, there is an army of proletarians doing the scrubbing, scraping, and pounding, waiting for their shot.

Yet some manage to achieve that magic despite the odds.

Taste Is a Co-Production

17 Tuesday Apr 2012

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The debate about whether wine tasting has objective standards too often assumes a mistaken picture of how taste works. The mistaken picture is something like this: Wine has chemical properties that produce flavors that are fixed features of the wine itself. When tasters report characteristics of the wine they either get it right or not. If a wine is said to have ripe blackberries, fig and chocolate aromas, either the wine has those properties or it doesn’t.

But I doubt that this is the right picture. The biggest drawback is that it cannot explain why there can be multiple, legitimate interpretations of what a wine has to offer. Wine critics often disagree about the properties of a wine; the standard picture assumes that all but one must be wrong. But that goes against what, for me at any rate, is a common experience. Two critics disagree about a wine and I can see the point of both of them. Just as a work of art can support multiple interpretations, so can a wine.

So what is the right picture? I think it goes something like this. The flavors and aromas in wine are caused by substances in the wine that have the ability to effect us. But the flavors themselves don’t exist in the wine independently. There are no flavors or aromas until they are sensed by sense organs and processed by the brain. Flavor is a relational property—a relation between a wine and a taster. Yet we know that neural processing is influenced by all sorts of things—the background music, our mood, expectations, past experience, etc. When we drink wine we don’t confront a series of raw sensations but sensations already shaped by personal and environmental factors which will, of course, vastly differ from person to person.

Does that mean that wine tasting is thoroughly subjective? No. Not at all.

Flavors are produced when wines and tasters intersect. But wine lovers seldom taste or learn to taste in isolation with no communication between them. Flavors are always experienced in relationship to a community within which those flavors have meaning—wine media, salespeople, tasting groups, friends, and family all influence how and what we taste.

When someone describes a wine as “zesty”, what determines whether that is an accurate description depends on whether it can gain a suitably wide consensus.   If a diverse collection of differently situated, experienced tasters agree, then the wine is appropriately called zesty. But that agreement is not arbitrary. It comes about because the conversation has focused our attention on something in the wine that is potentially shareable, and, if we are open to that experience, and what others say about it, we might come to agree about the zesty wine even though we didn’t originally sense it.

Through this process of testing personal taste against a broader consensus, flavor notes that lack the potential to be shared, that are idiosyncratic or merely subjective get eliminated as implausible.  Tasters who claim to taste them may indeed be tasting what they claim to be tasting, but the property lacks the capacity to be shared and thus cannot support a consensus.  We can identify and eliminate bad (meaning thoroughly subjective) interpretations.

When consensus is achieved it is not merely because the tasters are being influenced by each other, but because the wine has the power to effect various quite different individuals in the same way, even if in the beginning they may interpret the flavor quite differently. This is especially true of properties like “zesty”—relatively easy to identify.

When we rely on the judgment of others we are also learning about our own inclinations and we begin to see where our palate differs and where it agrees with the broader consensus and thus become more practiced at identifying what is shareable about a wine.

Taste is accomplished through a collective effort that provides a frame of reference, direction, and helps put sensations into words so we can more easily recall them. Without that collective effort, our ability to perceive is very limited.

Tasting notes are not just about informing consumers about wine. They are aimed at creating a shared sensibility. Thus, the wild taste descriptors some wine reviews employ play the role of shaping that consensus by identifying novel features of a wine that may be potentially shareable. It is a intervention in the process of making taste, not an attempt to identify a flavor that already exists.

So what about those vast disagreements between expert tasters? Multiple interpretations of the same wine exist because we are not always motivated to seek consensus. As wine lovers we have different values, we look for different things in a wine, and we all have slightly different comparison classes in mind when evaluating a wine. (A white Burgundy may be “zesty” when compared to a California chardonnay, but a bit flat when compared to a Chablis.) But more importantly, there is absolutely no reason why we must all agree. Multiple interpretations make wine more interesting, not less. There are few consequences to our disagreements so the process of consensus formation is short-circuited, especially when the properties in question are more difficult to discern.

As long as we can eliminate the bad interpretations, we have nothing to lose and much to gain from letting many flavors bloom.