Tag Archives: objectivity and taste

Flavor is Not Only in the Brain

11 Wednesday May 2016

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2 plus 2Harold McGee is a fine food scientist and writer but even he fails into lazy talk when discussing the philosophy of food.

In his article on flavor perception in the May issue of  Lucky Peach he insists that “Flavor is in the Brain, Not in Foods”:

These days, neuroscientists are telling us that flavor is all in the brain. Flavor is a perception, an experience that’s constructed in the brain. Food is made up of molecules, and molecules by themselves don’t have any sensory qualities. Our experience of food is sensory: there’s taste and smell and pungency, texture and temperature. The chemical and physical materials that generate these sensations in us do not, by themselves, have any of those qualities.

So the quality of saltiness is something that is the result of sensors in our tongue telling our brain that there are sodium and chloride ions in whatever we just put in our mouth. Our brain turns that into a sensation of saltiness. Yes, chemically, the food has salt in it—but the taste and experience of salt is a construction of our brain and the sensors that feed into it.

Well, not really. Yes, there is plenty of neural processing going on to create our sensations of flavor. But food has objective qualities that our sensory mechanisms respond to. When we taste there are flavors in food that we can fail to notice. If flavor is entirely in the brain there would be nothing to be mistaken about. A jalapeno pepper is hot and spicy; its not just hot and spicy to me. Of course people may differ with regard to how sensitive they are to capcaisin, the heat-producing substance in hot peppers. But the fact remains it’s the capcaisin that causes the heat.

Flavor is a complex interaction between objects in the world, our sensory mechanisms, and our brains. Subtract any element from this equation and you won’t taste flavor.

It is puzzling why commentators are so quick to ignore the object when discussing flavor. We seem to reflexively reject any intimation that there may be something in a plate of food or wine that we are not fully appreciating; that our tastes can be mistaken.

Does it matter that influential writers like McGee consider taste a purely subjective affair? I think it does. If we cannot be be mistaken about what we taste, if the pleasure we get from food or beverages is just something each of us manufactures in our private sensorium, then there are no critical standards for what is good. And without critical standards our burgeoning culture of food and beverages will wither and fail to advance. No doubt taste is in part subjective, but the “in part” is important.

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Wine Tasting and Objectivity

09 Monday Nov 2015

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

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I pulled together all of last week’s deliberations on wine and objectivity plus several new wrinkles for my Three Quarks post this month. If you think wine tasting is all just a matter of subjective opinion, head on over to Three Quarks Daily to be disabused of the notion.

In Taste Is There No Argument?

30 Thursday Jul 2015

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arguments about tasteIt’s a cliché to point out that taste is subjective, not only because people have different preferences but because our ability to taste various substances in food and drink differs from person to person. But the crucial question is to what degree these abilities are trainable. Can we learn to taste better and thus potentially overcome these subjective differences?

Science has discovered that some of the variance in our sensitivity to bitter compounds is genetic, and that suggests that some of these taste thresholds may be fixed—we can’t do much to change them. But that would be too hasty a conclusion according to some new research.  A team of scientists headed by Danielle Reed an the Monel Chemical Senses Center recently did a study of the perception of sweetness in twins compared to non-twin siblings and unpaired twins and found that about 30% of the variance could be explained by genetic factors:

The researchers gave the twins and the other subjects two natural sugars (glucose and fructose) and two artificial sweeteners (aspartame and NHDC) and then asked them to rate the perceived intensity of the solution.

They found that genetic factors account for about 30 percent of the variance in sweet taste perception between people for both the natural and artificial sugars.

This suggests that 70% of the variance is not genetically hard-wired leaving some significant room for other factors such as history and culture to influence taste.

Reed cautions,

The finding doesn’t mean that the people who have a weaker ability to taste sweet necessarily dislike sugar. And just because you don’t get a big high from a little sugar doesn’t mean you eat more of it. “How you perceive [sweet] may influence what you like in the extreme, but it’s more like shades of gray,” she says. “And we still need to see whether this has any implications for people’s food behavior.

If taste is largely a matter of enculturation and personal history, then at least in theory, tastes are up to a point educable and can be changed, suggesting that disagreements about taste are not always intractable. (Which is not to say the process of educating taste is easy)

The slogan de gustibus non est disputandum itself may be subject to dispute.

Wine Writer Jumps the Shark

07 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by in Wine Culture

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jumping the sharkThe debate about alcohol levels in wine is not only tedious. It is causing otherwise sane people to lose their grip on reality. I’ve enjoyed Mike Steinberger’s essays on wine and food in the past, but his recent article for Wine Searcher is disturbing. The article starts out promisingly enough,deploring the grossly overpriced and overhyped Sine Qua Non (a rosé sold at auction for $42,780 last year!) which routinely gets astronomical scores from Robert Parker.

I’m not being dramatic when I say that I literally can’t stomach them. I’d think twice about dumping the wines in my sink for fear of damaging the pipes.

The complaint from Steinberger and many others, in addition to the excessive price, is that Sine Qua Non and other wines of their type are too ripe and too alcoholic. Nothing new about this accusation—this debate about Parker’s palate and over-ripe grapes has been going on for decades; and Steinberger concedes he and his low-alcohol partisans are having no luck convincing the rest of the wine world that they are right:

Personally, I’ve made my peace with this kind of polarization. The evidence is overwhelming – tastes vary dramatically, and one man’s nectar is another man’s rotgut. That’s just the way it is, and I think it’s part of what makes wine such a compelling topic and rewarding hobby.

Good point. If we all liked the same wines, wine would be boring with nothing to talk about. But the frustration of failing to convince his fellow wine lovers must be getting to him. He then goes on to say:

Critics, of all people, have an obligation to take a stand, and if you truly adore the subtlety and elegance of La Tâche, it is impossible to believe that you can derive equal pleasure from wines like Krankl’s The 17th Nail in My Cranium (it’s a Syrah that weighs in at around 16 percent alcohol). These are wines that offer completely conflicting notions of balance and quality – and, no, it doesn’t matter a bit that they are made in different regions and from different grapes. In fact, I’d say that any critic who gives whopping scores to SQN and then turns around and does the same with DRC is not really a critic; he’s a shill or – worse – a cynic, deliberately not coming down on one side or the other for fear of offending his audience or costing himself potential readers/subscribers.

Huh? This is absurd. For those unfamiliar with the jargon, DRC refers to Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, producers of La Tâche arguably the finest Pinot Noir in the world—elegant, full of finesse and subtlety, and relatively low in alcohol. La Tâche is radically different in style from Sine Qua Non. The former is seeking elegance and finesse, the latter raw power and concentration. Why can’t I admire Sine Qua Non for its power and La Tâche for its subtlety?

No doubt, these high-scoring, over-ripe, over-the-top new world wines such as Sine qua Non and Saxum are garish and exaggerated, trying too hard to be hedonistic.  I couldn’t possibly drink more than one glass in an evening. I prefer Burgundy Grand Crus—it’s not even close. But the Sine Qua Non is still an achievement; it is one of the better wines of its type and I can recognize it as such. Steinberger is claiming that wine critics in principle cannot maintain the objectivity to judge wines they don’t prefer according to their merits.

Think of how ridiculous this sounds. According to Steinberger if I prefer impressionist paintings I must therefore despise cubism because they are radically different styles of painting, and the features that make impressionist paintings lovely are nowhere to be found in Cubism. Moreover, I could not judge Picasso (in his Cubist period) as great a painter as Monet, since I prefer Monet’s style, without being disingenuous and cynical. This is absurd. Part of developing critical expertise is developing the ability to judge merit without wholly succumbing to mere personal preference. Personal preference cannot be eliminated from the equation—why would we want it to be. But good criticism should teach us something about the wine, not just about our likes and dislikes.

Someone striving to look beyond personal preference to find something intriguing about a wine other critics praise is neither a shill nor cynical—it’s called curiosity. It is hard to think of anything more cynical than the view that there is no such thing as expertise, only prejudice and corruption.

Are Wine Scores Inflated?

06 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by in Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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Complaints about the 100-pt. rating system for wine are ubiquitous in the blogosphere and I’ve commented on it myself. But beating a dead horse is a vastly under-rated activity. Beating a live horse after all would be cruel; and if there were no dead horses around to beat, there would not be much to write about.

So the topic for today is whether score inflation is ruining the 100-pt. wine scoring system. As reported by Wine Searcher

The number of wines given a perfect 100 points by Robert Parker and his fellow Wine Advocate critics stands at more than 500, and the list is growing with exponential speed.

Wine Searcher features a list of the 511 commercially available wines that have been awarded 100 “Parker points” and it makes interesting reading.

So far this year, 69 wines have been elevated to perfect status, following on from 102 last year and the end of the year tends to see a bumper crop. Yet only five years ago, the number of wines awarded 100 points was 38 and even that more than doubled the number from 2004, which was just 17.

Red-to-Brown Wine Reviews reports a similar phenomenon with Australian wine critic James Halliday.

Does this grade inflation render wine scores meaningless? By themselves, these numbers don’t tell us much. If the total number of reviews is increasing then it is not surprising that there are more high-scoring wines. I have no access to information regarding whether Parker’s or Halliday’s publications are simply publishing more reviews.

Parker for his part has responded to these criticisms of score inflation by claiming the general quality of wine is increasing thus leading to higher scores. But critics claim that even if this is true wine critics should tighten their criteria for 95+ wines.

As Red To Brown writes:

Wine criticism is a profession riven with conflicts of interest (a topic for another day). However, I used to be of the belief that these conflicts could largely be managed. However, it seems I was wrong. The plethora of overrated wine about the place would appear to be evidence of this. Ultimately I believe it’s incumbent on people who are scoring things in their professional fields to show a level of restraint and integrity in the way they rate things. Giving everyone a guernsey does no one any good in the long term.
In my day job I’m involved in reviewing and rating investment opportunities for clients. I know that if I were to adopt the Parker or Halliday approach to my scoring I might make some fund managers happy in the short-term, but my credibility would ultimately come under question, and in the end I would be out of a job. Admittedly overrating a wine won’t have the same consequences as putting someone’s life savings in a dud investment, but I’ve got no doubt that if this points inflation trend continues, critics might ultimately find themselves out of a gig. There are only so many times a consumer will buy what they are told is a 96 point wine before it starts to become shorthand for just a solid bottle of wine, at which point how relevant is a wine critic?

I’m rather ambivalent about this. Surely the integrity of wine criticism must be protected. If mediocre wines are given high scores then there is no reason to take scores seriously. But the problem with insisting on tighter standards is that beyond a certain point judgments about wine quality are not tracking objective features of the wine but are dependent on personal preferences of the reviewer. It is relatively easy to assign numerical scores to sub-90 point wines because they will lack features that wine experts largely agree are the mark of excellence in a wine—complexity, intensity, balance, structure, etc. But wines nearer the top of the scale will not be lacking in these features. Thus the score reflects little more than the impression left on the reviewer on that day and how she assesses that impression relative to other wines she has tasted. There is no precisely measured quality that distinguishes a wine scored 96 and one scored 97. That is not to say such scores are meaningless—if you admire Robert Parker’s palate then such distinctions should matter. But they are measuring Parker’s sense of deliciousness, not something more objective.

So what does it mean to tighten standards? It really is a matter of personal integrity and trying to maintain a precise taste memory over time. There is no inherent problem in having more 95+ wines just like there is no inherent problem in have more great artists or great books. There are lots of different ways to be delicious and at some point, ranking them just doesn’t matter.

What does matter is that mediocrity not be granted admission to the pantheon. The issue is not high scores themselves but rather the rewarding of what is unworthy. Score inflation by itself is not necessarily evidence of that.

Have You Tasted an Illusion Lately?

28 Tuesday Oct 2014

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

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magic hatWine tasters have come in for their share of ridicule as the result of studies that seem to show we can be easily confused about what we are drinking. Foodies are now getting the same treatment.

In the video, two Dutch pranksters sneak into a large food-industry expo in Houten, The Netherlands. (The video doesn’t name the event.) There, the duo ask exhibitors and attendees to sample their “new, organic alternative to fast food” from their “high-end restaurant.” In reality, they are serving up cut-up pieces of what appears to be McDonald’s fare including muffins, burgers and nuggets.

Presented with bite-size samples attractively arranged on a platter with serving toothpicks, the patsies in this little experiment react with effusive praise.

Happily, unlike most media treatments, this story at NPR’s The Salt adopts the proper skepticism about what this shows.

(While the pranksters are clearly gleeful about duping people whom they describe as culinary or organic “experts,” we don’t really know who they are or whether they consider themselves “foodies,” as much of the coverage has styled them.)

Furthermore, the article raises an issue that is seldom discussed in these kinds of articles:

Research has found that when you tell people that what they are eating or drinking is a high-end product, they won’t just say that it tastes better than a cheaper product — their brains will actually experience it as better.

In one study, researchers gave subjects wine to sample and scanned their brains using an fMRI scanner. The subjects all drank the same wine twice. But on one occasion, they were told it was a $90 bottle, while another time they thought it was a $10 bottle.

Not only did these subjects report that the wine tasted better when it was presented as a much pricier vintage, but their brains reacted differently, too. Scans showed increased oxygen and blood flow to the medial orbitofrontal cortex, a part of the brain believed to play a role in how we experience pleasure in food and other types of rewards.

In other words, how a food is branded really does seem to affect how we perceive it on a neurological level.

 

Apparently, we are wired to allow expectations to influence what we experience. This result is reinforced by experiments using other sense modalities. We know, for instance, that stroking a fake hand placed in your field of vision and your real hand at the same time can fool your brain into thinking the fake hand is yours. But as recently reported in the New Yorker, when researchers using cotton swabs simultaneously stroked a real tongue and a rubber tongue placed within the subjects field of vision, subjects experienced what was being done to the fake tongue. Subjects watched lemon juice being applied to the cotton swab stroking the fake tongue, and they experienced the flavor of lemon even though the lemon was applied only to the fake tongue. The swabs stroking the real tongue were soaked in water.

So the problem of our senses being influenced by what we believe is not peculiar to wine tasting. Evolution has shaped our sense of taste to guide us to seek the food we need to survive, while avoiding harmful foods. Expectations help us do that by limiting our need to experiment which might be deadly.

Does this mean that some degree of objectivity is impossible. Not at all. Professional wine and food tasters have to be aware of the kinds of bias that can influence their judgment. But once we are aware of it those biases can be controlled at least up to a point. The expectation that the price of a wine or the lovely setting and good company might be influencing my judgment can cause me to take a second, more critical look at a wine. When I enter a high-end tasting I know from experience that several of the wines will disappoint. That knowledge tends to stanch the “oxygen and blood flow to the medial orbitofrontal cortex”. Expectations that warrant caution and increased scrutiny are expectations nonetheless and they influence judgment as well.

Experts are no different from anyone else in their susceptibility to cognitive bias. Where they (may)  differ is in their commitment to the pursuit of the truth. Casual wine drinkers and foodies can happily allow their expectations to govern their experience. After all, enjoyment is enjoyment whether it is subjectively induced or not. However, presumably, those who take taste seriously and want to understand it, and who have the proper training and experience, take steps to reign in cognitive bias—at least that should be their moral commitment.

Pushing Back Against the Green-Eyed Jealous Monster

07 Tuesday Oct 2014

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green eyed monsterSkepticism about the value of wine criticism is ubiquitous, as I detailed in this post last month. But pushback against the wine-tasting-is-bunk meme is gathering steam. Perhaps all the major media publishing this drivel will offer a retraction soon.

This article by Jonathan Lipsmeyer at Gargantuan Wine identifies the problem. In response to the charge that wine tasting is subjective, Gargantua simply grants the point—What form of criticism is not subjective? Imagining a gaggle of critics discussing a painting by the pointillist Seurat, he writes:

Not unlike our wine critics, no two critics would describe the painting in a completely similar manner. An integral part of the problem is that the galaxy of stimuli is so vast that it’s difficult to circumscribe — a seemingly infinite body of descriptive text could find its source in this one painting. And invariably, some critics would contradict elements of others’ description — perhaps the emotion conveyed; the nature of the colors; or the Pandora’s box that is the intention of the artist.

And yet, in spite of this, each critic would be contributing legitimate information. Each critic would be elegantly articulating a thoughtful impression. And — barring questions of integrity and candor! — each critic’s description could be considered equally valid, as it invited reflection, cultivated appreciation, and brought greater understanding.

In all other forms of criticism, we accept the fact that critics will be offering their own unique point of view. While it is in principle possible for others to share that point of view, most people don’t—that is what makes the critic interesting and her writing sufficiently original to bother reading. Yet with regard to wine, this role of the critic is denied by the naysayers, usually without argument.

There are nuances that Lipsmeyer alludes to but doesn’t discuss. Like all human perception, wine tasting is only partly subjective; it is also rooted in reliable connections between our perceptual mechanisms and reality. If wine tasting were wholly subjective we couldn’t intelligibly discuss wine at all. And in fact there is wide agreement among experts about some aspects of wine—Lafite is more complex and has better balance and depth of flavor than 2-Buck Chuck, 2005 was a great year for Bordeaux, Barolo’s tend to have lots of tannin. Anyone who disagrees is spouting nonsense.

The question of to what degree wine tasting is objective is an interesting philosophical question because it forces us to get clear on the various factors that influence taste and it is important to recognize that some methods of tasting will be more objective than others. But what we want from wine criticism is not a recounting of facts but an overall impression of the wine and an evaluation. In the end, these judgments will rely on our personal histories, unique biological factors and personal preference—there is no getting around that. But that doesn’t distinguish wine from most of the rest of life.

As Lippsmeyer says,

So much ire is founded in what seems to be a green-eyed jealousy that “these critics say they taste things that I sure as shit can’t”; so, the naysayer concludes, “it must all be worthless”. Curiously, other forms of cultural currency are spared this onslaught.

Why winetasting is singled out as being uniquely subjective is a mystery for which I have no answer. Perhaps taste preferences are so closely tied to personal identity that expert opinion is experienced as a personal affront.

The Wine-Tasting-is-Bunk Meme Won’t Go Away

12 Tuesday Aug 2014

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I’m working on a longer article to show why the studies that purport to show that wine expertise is bunk are misleading. But this article from the Guardian last summer entitled “Wine Tasting is Junk Science” was in the news again recently because of philosopher Alva Noë’s piece on NPR so I wanted to make a quick point about these headlines that periodically appear.

I don’t know anyone who thinks wine tasting is a science or that even expert wine tasters can achieve the level of accuracy required for scientific testing. Certainly every expert I know admits the difficulties of wine tasting and readily grants that we often get it wrong. The fact that wine experts are inconsistent in their evaluations is no surprise to anyone who pursues wine tasting seriously.

There is plenty of science that shows that our response to wine is influenced by all sorts of contextual factors—weather, temperature of the wine, the order in which you taste the wine, the kind of music playing in the background, price, reputation, one’s mood, conversations about the wine around you,  and most importantly, past experience. This doesn’t make wine different from anything else.  All of our judgments are influence by these factors.

Expert wine tasters are people who have training and experience but who also try as much as possible to reduce the influence of some contextual factors. But we only succeed to a degree.

The deeper question is why people insist on scientific objectivity when we evaluate wine. We don’t expect scientific objectivity from art critics, literary critics, or film reviewers. The disagreements among experts in these fields are as deep as the disagreements about wine. There is no reason to think a film critic would have the same judgment about a film if viewed in a different context, in comparison with a different set of films, or after conversing about the film with other experts. Our judgments are fluid and they should be if we are to make sense of our experience. When listening to music aren’t we differently affected by a song depending upon whether we are at home, in a bar, going to the beach, listening with friends or alone? Why would wine be different?

I suspect what we are witnessing with all this skepticism about wine tasting is the corrosive influence of the point system in evaluating wine. It is a handy device for consumers but it leaves the impression that wine evaluation is subject to mathematical precision. But nothing could be further from the truth.  A wine that receives 95 points is judged on a particular day in a particular context. There is no reason to think a critic (or a different critic)  would assign exactly the same score in a different context, in comparison with a different flight of wines, under different social and environmental conditions.

What we want from critics whether of music, art, or wine is a judgment made in light of their vast experience, one that can show us something about the object that we might have missed without their commentary. That can be accomplished independently of whether the critic is perfectly consistent or objective. We want the critic to have a certain kind of bias because it is that bias that enables her to taste what she does.

Some people seem to be psychologically invested in the “wine tasting is bunk” meme. I wonder why?

Should the Wine Critic Be Blind?

13 Thursday Mar 2014

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blindtastingsmall1Blind tasting, in which the person tasting the wine is prevented from knowing the producer and/or price and in some cases the variety and region, is thought to be the gold-standard of wine criticism because it preserves objectivity. But some features of a wine cannot be evaluated without knowing variety and producer. You can’t evaluate whether a wine is typical of its variety or consistent with a producer’s style without knowing these facts.

Fred Swan at Norcal Wine produced a terrific summary of the pros and cons of tasting blind. Some critics taste blind and other’s don’t

In a note to Jameson Fink, Harvey Steiman, who reviews the wines of Australia, Oregon and Washington for Wine Spectator, said, “At Wine Spectator every review in New Releases is the result of a blind tasting. We believe that blind tasting insulates our judgments from any bias that might result from knowing producer or price. It’s the fairest and most objective way to allow every wine to show its true character”

Steiman is worried that a critic with an agenda or theory about what wines are best is likely to be biased if tasting non-blind.

But other critics are concerned that blind-tasting excludes important information that users of the criticism want to know:

In a past interview, Antonio Galloni told me, “I generally prefer not to taste blind because the questions readers ask of me require some context.” Reader questions he fields include comparisons of different vintages of a particular wine, wines made by different producers from the same vineyard, differences between vineyard blocks, etc. Therefore, he likes to taste three successive vintages of each wine: the one being reviewed, the preceding vintage and a barrel sample of that upcoming. He, and other reviewers at wineries, will also taste a variety of vineyard designates side-by-side.

I have found blind tasting to be important in training one’s skill as a wine taster. It forces you to really concentrate on what you’re tasting because you are grasping for any scrap of information your senses give you. But I have also found that when tasting blind, I devote so much attention to trying to guess region and varietal that I focus less on quality, which is not a good thing for criticism.

In the end, whether blind tasting is useful or not depends on the purpose of the review. As Swan notes, consumers looking for a good buy benefit if the critic is blind. On the other hand, high-end collectors looking for age-ability and the track-record of a wine need reviews that are non-blind, as do consumers who want to know the story behind a wine.

As for me, on this blog I taste non-blind. That is in part for logistical reasons. It’s a huge challenge for one person to set up blind tastings, not to mention the cost involved in opening 5 or 6 bottles simultaneously.

But more importantly, Edible Arts considers wines as works of art. And I’ve never heard of a film, art, or music critic who evaluates works without knowing as much as they can about the object of their review. All art evaluation requires judgments about how a work compares to others in its genre, how successful it is as a manifestation of its style, what it says about trends, and most importantly what the work means and how the aesthetic features of the work contribute to its meaning.  None of these judgments can be made without knowing who produced the work and what the appropriate categories are for understanding it. Knowing what the work is attempting to achieve is essential for judging whether it achieves it aim or not.

The same holds for wine. Without knowing the varietal, the region, and the producer it is hard to know what the wine is aiming for and what the flavors and textures mean. The winemaker’s vision will in part be a product of where the grapes are grown, the style in which she chooses to make the wine, etc. Whether the wine is successful or not depends on knowing those facts.

Furthermore, unlike most critics, I do not taste many wines in one day. I focus on one wine and how it evolves over the course of an evening and how it  drinks the next day as well, and always in a quiet place with no distractions. I want to see the wine from as many dimensions as possible. It is not at all clear to me how this tasting regime mitigates worries about objectivity. It seems to me the more you taste a wine, the better your chances of uncovering mistaken impressions one gets from an initial tasting.

But at any rate, for my purposes, this multi-dimensionality is more important than objectivity. And that requires non-blind tasting.

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