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Wine Tasting, Subjectivism and Nonsense

14 Wednesday Nov 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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No. Wine Tasting is Not Subjective

22 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by in Wine Culture

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wine flavor wheelIf you’ve been reading this blog for some time you probably know I get a case of the furies when someone dismisses wine tasting as subjective. Yes there are aspects of subjectivity when tasting wine, but there are objective parameters that frame the practice of wine tasting when conducted by people with the relevant experience and training. The claim that it is all subjective is lazy and ill-informed.

So I was happy to see Master Sommelier Tim Gaiser weigh in on this topic with a particularly helpful blog post detailing all the dimensions of professional wine tasting and noting where judgments can be expected to be objective.  He also makes the important point that only at the extremes can we say a judgment is wholly subjective or wholly objective. Subjectivity and objectivity are poles delineating a continuum and many judgments will be a mixture of subjectivity and objectivity depending upon where on that continuum a particular judgment lies.

After going through the tasting grid used by certification organizations he concludes:

I used 28 of the 43 total criteria on the deductive grid. My scorecard breaks down as follows:

  • Objective: 15 criteria or 53%
  • Objective-subjective: 8 criteria or 28%
  • Subjective: 5 criteria or 19%

Only 19% of the relevant criteria are wholly subjective. I strongly encourage anyone unsure about this topic to read Tim’s post.

As helpful as Tim’s post is, I think we can go even further in defending the objectivity of wine tasting. The definitions of objectivity and subjectivity are dictionary definitions but they are adequate for my purpose here:

“Objective experience: of, relating to, or being an object, phenomenon, or condition in the realm of sensible experience independent of individual thought and perceptible by all observers.”
“Subjective experience: refers to the emotional and cognitive impact of a human experience as opposed to an objective experience which are the actual events of the experience. … For instance, we are all having a subjective experience whenever we are experiencing pain.”

Notice the first part of the definition of objective experience—“of, relating to, or being an object.” What matters in objective experience is that the experience is reliably connected to the object, i.e. it is appropriately about the object. One of the examples Tim gives of subjective criteria is the identification of fruit flavors. He writes:

Our response to fruit qualities in wine is always dependent on our unique life memories of said aromas and flavors. Hence, my “kiwi” call on a particular white wine could be your Bartlett pear, which might be someone else’s Fuji apple.

This is true as far as it goes. But if Tim identifies “kiwi” and I identify “pear” is there any reason to think both of our experiences are unreliable, i.e. not connected to the object in an appropriate way? It is unlikely that either of us are dreaming or hallucinating. Such a disagreement is compatible with us both having a reliable experience of the wine; our disagreement may be about which word to attach to the experience. By contrast if he identifies “kiwi” and I say “no that’s smoke” then we have reason to think one of us lacks that reliable connection to the object since we are unlikely to be experiencing the same object.

The problem arises because wine is a vague object and aromas often lack sufficient clarity and intensity to mark a distinction between similar aromas such as pear and kiwi. Both of us might in fact be correct, not because our responses are subjective, but because the actual aroma is undecidable between pear and kiwi. Such disagreement is not necessarily evidence of the kind of idiosyncratic response that would render the judgment entirely personal or a product of “individual thought”, which are hallmarks of subjectivity as defined above.

To put the put differently, with regard to most aromas there will be a range of descriptors that supply evidence of being reliably connected to the object because the distinctions between aromas are gradients expressing nuances that are objectively a quality of the wine.

When we toss the words “subjective” and “objective” around we often forget that a purely subjective experience would be an hallucination, dream or an imagining, unrelated to the actual object being perceived. Such a disconnection to reality might characterize novice tasters who lack the training and expertise for wine tasting. It is unlikely to be true of most of the judgments of  trained professionals.

There is of course reason to think some of our judgments really do lack this reliable connection to the object. Many of us may have specific anosmias—particular aromas we can’t detect. And all of us differ in the biologically-influenced  thresholds above which we can be affected by the chemical compounds that cause aromas. When our biology limits our capacity to detect specific aromas then that reliable connection to reality is compromised. This, along with the inherent subjectivity of attaching words to our perceptions, means that the detection of aromas will always be threatened by a degree of subjectivity.

Thus I think it is not quite right to place the detection of fruit aromas in the subjective category; it belongs along the objective-subjective continuum as long as there is no reason to think the connection to reality is severed.

It’s probably worth a reminder that preferences are a whole other story—they are largely subjective and that is a good thing.

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

Another Important Point about Wine and Objectivity

17 Monday Sep 2018

Posted by in Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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ancient winemakingRecently, I pointed to success at passing the tasting component of the Masters of Wine exam as evidence that wine tasting and wine quality are not purely subjective. If it were, success on these exams would be random and arbitrary which they clearly are not.

Another bit of evidence for the same conclusion is more historical. We agree that some wines taste better than others because that agreement is based on focused investigations through several centuries by thousands of individuals, who could make a living only if they convinced others that their product is better than their competitors.

Through hundreds of years, generation after generation, particular plots of land have been carefully cultivated separating out the inferior vineyards from the successful ones with success determined by whether people buy the wine or not. Over that time, viticulture and winemaking techniques have also been tested, again weeding out what works from what doesn’t with everyone searching for an edge that will sell their wine.

The view that winetasting is subjective and wine quality arbitrary cannot explain those countless, independent decisions made under conditions that crucially matter for the survival of their communities.

Is it plausible to think these decisions were made by flipping coins or taking wild, uninformed guesses? Isn’t it substantially more plausible to think these decisions were usually based on a shared sense of what counts as good wine that was continually honed through innovation after innovation because it mattered that they get it right?

Obviously there were mistakes made along the way and corrupt motives often held sway—wine communities are human communities after all. And obviously there are different conceptions of quality, several ways for wine to be delicious.  But it is implausible to think there was no concept of quality informing these decisions.

No doubt there have always been sharp disagreements about wine quality. But through trial and error some people win debates and some people lose, because some wines taste better than others. Over time the frauds, hucksters and incompetents are found out and eliminated.

There is an in eliminable subjective dimension to wine preferences, to be sure, but given sufficient time, independence, and incentives to improve, the merely personal and idiosyncratic that are unsupported by a concept of quality are less likely to be reproduced.

Two Kinds of Wine Criticism

05 Wednesday Sep 2018

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wine criticismIn wine evaluation it seems there are two kinds of judgments that often get confused. In one sort of judgment there is some actual property of the wine that is sufficient to justify a claim that the wine has some merit because the having of that property satisfies a norm. A Pinot Noir from Burgundy might have an elegant finish or a Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa might have great concentration and thus is a good example of Burgundian Pinot Noir or Napa Cabernet. The judgment is justified because there is a well established norm about Burgundian Pinot Noir and Napa Cabs. This sort of judgment is at the heart of professional wine criticism. When learning to evaluate wines in wine certification programs you are essentially learning the norms of wine tasting. In these cases it’s appropriate to say that the wine itself has the value asserted of it and that the judgment is reasonably objective.

But there is another sort of judgment that is not guided by norms, or at least not norms alone, but is filtered through the personal tastes and sensibility of the taster. In this case the actual properties of the wine—the elegance of the Pinot Noir or the concentration of the Cabernet—are not sufficient to justify a judgment that the wine has merit. We might call these judgments of appreciation.  Thus, one might grant that the Napa Cabernet is concentrated but the wine doesn’t speak to you. It’s a good example of its type but you don’t find it compelling. In this sort of judgment, the value is not in the wine but is in the ascription of value on the part of the taster.

There are cases in which we can acknowledge the value of a wine but we don’t enjoy it or acknowledge the deficiencies of a wine yet still enjoy it because of some personal association.

The question is what we want out of wine criticism. Surely in some professional contexts, for instance in judging wine in competitions, or assessing purchases for a retail store, only norm-guided judgments are appropriate. But in other contexts such as reviewing wines for a newsletter or blog it’s the appreciative judgment that may be interesting. In some criticism—and this is true of books, film, music, and theatre criticism—it’s the critic’s distinctive point of view that has value. We don’t expect film or music criticism to simply articulate norms. Neither should we always expect that of wine criticism.

The Best Evidence for Genuine Wine Expertise

03 Monday Sep 2018

Posted by in Wine Culture

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UT-hmpg-link-white-finalThe press and the public seem to never tire of the lazy, thoughtless assertion that wine expertise doesn’t exist, that wine quality is just subjective.

So I’m going to use this happy occasion to once again point out the obvious—we are virtually certain that wine experts really do know what they’re talking about.

My former WSET instructor and all around nice person Lindsay Pomeroy, owner of Wine Smarties, is now a Master of Wine! Congratulations Lindsay!

There are fewer than 40 U.S. masters and only 380 in the world. To pass the tasting portion of the exam you have to sit for three 12-wine blind tastings, each lasting two and a quarter hours, in which wines from anyplace in the world must be assessed for variety, origin, winemaking, quality and style.

Guess what. They aren’t consulting oracles or hallucinating their answers. If you don’t know your stuff, you don’t pass, period.

If wine tasting is nonsense what explains their ability to pass the exam? I can’t think of an argument, except for some conspiracy worthy of Trump, that would refute this obvious point.

The fact of the matter is, the more you taste attentively, and the more knowledge you have about wine regions, vinification processes, etc. the more you can use that knowledge to shape your tasting experience to conform to objective properties of the wine.

Of course, the exam has been around since 1953, and that hasn’t stopped people who should know better from acting the fool because it flatters their audience.

Why Don’t We Hear about Blind Tasting Success?

12 Thursday Oct 2017

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blind tasting scoresWhenever wine tasters fall flat on their face the press celebrates by publicizing the fact far and wide claiming it offers proof that wine tasting is nonsense. So why didn’t we hear more about this rigorous empirical study that clearly shows trained wine tasters can successfully identify varietal and region of origin?

Two teams of seven tasters each (including one reserve per side) were presented with 12 wines, six whites and six reds….The group’s overall accuracy was far superior to what could be expected from random chance. Given the thousands of potential country-variety pairs, a monkey throwing darts would have virtually no hope of getting a single one right. But 47% of the Oxbridge tasters′ guesses on grape variety were correct, as were 37% on country of origin.

The competitors′ performances on each individual glass rarely matched these headline averages. Some wines were well-nigh unmistakable: all 14 drinkers identified the Pinot Noir, 12 called the Chardonnay and Gamay right and 11 identified the Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Sauvignon. Similarly, 13 participants recognised that the Gamay was from France (it is scarcely grown anywhere else), and nine said that the Semillon was Australian (though only four also determined that it was a Semillon)

At the other extreme, no one knew what the Friulano was made from—an unsurprising result, since the grape is little-known internationally. Only one drinker nailed the Rioja (made from Tempranillo) and Châteauneuf-du-Pape (a Grenache-based blend), wines from prominent regions that should have been relatively easy to spot.

Similarly, the averages obscured wide differences in performance among individual drinkers….

The failure to identify Tempranillo is surprising but otherwise the results are what you would expect. Blind tasting is challenging but nevertheless employs real expertise.

This study was published earlier this year but it received very little coverage or discussion. I guess successful blind tasting doesn’t flatter the audience that they know more than the experts.

Wine Critics and Their Biases

22 Tuesday Apr 2014

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

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Wine writer Jamie Goode raises a key question about wine criticism—should critics allow personal  style preferences to influence their judgment?

He thinks style preferences inevitably color a critic’s judgment:

Admirable as this sentiment is, I don’t think this can work in practice. At some level, a critic will have to make a call on style, because some wines force you into this. In practice, even critics who profess to leave their personal style preferences to one side when they assess wine, can’t seem to do this in practice.

Why? Because of balance.

Balance is important in wine, and it’s a style call. This makes it quite personal.

He grants that what he calls ”spoofulated wines”—overly-ripe, high alcohol, heavily oaked wines—taste out of balance to him and thus are inherently deserving of low scores; and such differences in preferences explain widely divergent scores among critics.

Thus he concludes “It’s a myth to think that there is some objective measure of wine quality that professional critics can tap into.”

Truth be told, I don’t think a wine critic’s job is to be objective. It is to discover what is beautiful, different, or remarkable, to make readers think about their own preferences, and lead them to discover something they might not otherwise have noticed. To do that, one needs an aesthetic perspective, a distinct point of view, not objectivity.

But it is important that critics avoid certain kinds of biases regarding price, reputation, marketing, or personal connections, and if a critic’s preferences are too idiosyncratic her reviews might not be generally useful so it is an interesting question whether objectivity, when appropriate, can be achieved.

I think Jamie is right at least about the relationship between balance, style, and the role of personal preference. Balance is a function of the relative prominence of the various components of a wine—fruit, acidity, tannin, oak flavors—and the extent to which they seem integrated and unified.  Decisions about how to adjust this balance account for at least some stylistic differences among winemakers as well as differences among consumers and their preferences.

Because balance is an inherently relational concept, an assessment of how a number of independent variables in a particular case are related, there can be no objective measure of it. In other words, the balance point of each wine will depend on its unique characteristics and thus there can be no general rule, scale, or metric that determines balance.

But balance isn’t all there is to wine quality. Complexity, intensity, length of finish,  how much flavor there is on the finish as opposed to merely tactile sensations, and liveliness on the palate are also elements of wine quality. Unlike balance these are more one-dimensional, and at least roughly measurable because they are primarily about magnitude and thus can be represented on a scale. I would hesitate to say these are purely objective properties—differences in physiology and background will produce disagreement about them among experienced critics. But the fact that a single magnitude is being assessed reduces the scope of disagreement and increases the possibility that, through training, diverse tasters can calibrate their judgments to each other.

I might not prefer “spoofulated” wines, but I can nevertheless judge their complexity, concentration, length of finish etc. assuming my bias doesn’t prevent me from attending to these features.

But this raises another more far-reaching issue. The judgments of wine critics may be initially subject to all sorts of biases. But can an attentive, self-aware critic overcome these biases? If a critic recognizes that they prefer certain wine styles to others, and is able to analyze the way such biases influence her judgments, can she overcome the bias?

I’m not sure what the answer to that question is.

There has been a good deal of research on cognitive biases. The work of Daniel Kahneman especially has demonstrated that our thinking is subject to all sorts of unconscious biases that seriously distort our thinking.

For instance, take what Kahneman calls the “planning fallacy”—our tendency to overestimate benefits and underestimate costs, and hence foolishly to take on risky projects.  Yet, clearly, if we know about this bias and discipline ourselves to stick with the hard evidence and have the appropriate skepticism with regard to unsubstantiated predictions, we can overcome this bias.

Are taste biases similar?

With regard to criteria such as overall hedonic quality, on the basis of which point scores are awarded, it is hard to see how biases can be avoided. If your judgment is simply a matter of identifying how much pleasure you get from a wine, then personal preference inevitably enters the picture. You can’t pretend to enjoy what you don’t enjoy or gauge how much you would enjoy a wine if only you had enjoyed it. But there is more to wine criticism than measuring overall hedonic quality.

It is common for art, film, and music critics to give positive reviews to works they didn’t particularly enjoy—perhaps the theme makes them uncomfortable, the film or score was too long, the meaning opaque. But the work might nevertheless be complex, moving, interesting, and have integrity. Pleasure is not the only criterion for judging anything and thus personal preference need not govern all our aesthetic judgments.

I see no reason why wine criticism should be different.

Do We Live in Different “Taste Worlds”?

06 Tuesday Aug 2013

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

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taste-in-restaurants Are tastes really subjective? Obviously people have different food preferences. Two people can eat the same food—one will love it, another detest it. According to conventional wisdom, there is no right or wrong on the matter, just blameless disagreement.

Moreover, the science on taste and aroma shows that individuals differ in their ability to detect flavor compounds in food. “Supertasters” are more sensitive to bitter compounds than the general population, some people require fewer sugar molecules in solution to detect sweetness than others, and about 15% of the population thinks cilantro is vile, probably because they can’t detect the molecules responsible for cilantro’s fresh, floral aroma. Thus, even scientists are claiming that we live in different “taste worlds” and that each person has a unique palate shared by no one else.

But this idea of different “taste worlds” is misleading, and differences in preferences should not lead us to conclude that taste is thoroughly subjective.

The idea of different “taste worlds” suggests that the qualities of another person’s taste experiences are utterly inaccessible to me. But the fact we have different thresholds for tasting substances like sugar or other compounds doesn’t entail that taste is thoroughly subjective. If I detect sucrose in a 1 part in 200 solution and you detect it in a 1 part in 198 solution, there will be a substantial difference in our “taste worlds” only for foods with sugar content that falls within that very narrow range. Chocolate ice cream will taste sweet to both of us. Unless someone suffers from a pathology or has a genetic incapacity to detect a particular substance, small differences in detection thresholds will matter only on the margins. In other words, there will be a large overlap in our ability to taste sweetness. That does not create different worlds even when aggregated for the vast number of compounds human beings can taste and smell. Rather, we live in a shared world of tastes about which we have a slightly different perspective in a small number of cases. It isn’t as if lots of people are baffled by the phrase “sweet as honey.”

Taste preferences of course are another matter. We differ in what we like and have vastly different histories of taste experience. But “different worlds” is still not the right way to characterize those differences. Our tastes are continually changing. We outgrow the milkshakes and candy of youth and replace them with kale and quinoa. We know from experience that we can learn to like new foods and new flavors; and in some cases we can learn to overcome aversions and disgust if we work at it. Furthermore, there is substantial evidence that our tastes are influenced by the place setting on which our food sits, the physical, social, and musical environment in which we eat it, the beliefs we have about it, and the opinions others offer about it. Our tastes are subject to influence in very surprising ways. The faddishness of our foodways makes that obvious.

Thus, our taste preferences do not create independent worlds but instead form a complex, overlapping manifold of continually shifting, malleable connections. Yes, we disagree about taste but that disagreement is not stable, and neither your perspective nor my perspective is inaccessible to mutual influence and the possibility of inter-subjective agreement.

Granted our tastes are internal. I cannot have your experience nor you mine. And I can never know with certainty and precision what your taste experiences are like.  But that does not mean there is no common world of flavor that we are striving to grasp or that disputes about taste are meaningless, futile and not subject to norms and standards.

So let’s stop talking about different taste worlds. Celebrate our differences but with the recognition that they are fleeting, partial, and subject to influence.

Wine Talk is About Communication, Not Objectivity or Accuracy

02 Tuesday Jul 2013

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

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wine-descriptions-for-new-world-barbera-wine When wine is mentioned in the news (outside the columns of regularly-featured wine writers) the topic is all too often the unreliability of wine reviews. Wine critics are accused of being influenced by price and are notorious for their inconsistent judgments and cavernous disagreements about the same wine, as in this recent assessment. The implication is that wine is wholly subjective and the very idea of wine expertise should be discarded.

I’ve discussed the objectivity of wine tasting in the past (here, here and here). Some of the criticisms of wine tasting are misleading; others are simply misguided. As wine critic Steve Heimoff argued recently, the fact that there is a subjective dimension to wine tasting does not mean that wine criticism is useless. What we want from the critic is his/her personal opinion, not a scientific analysis.

Why don’t people get so upset about restaurant critics or movie critics? You’ll never see an article headlined RESTAURANT REVIEWS ARE JUNK SCIENCE. That’s because restaurant reviewers don’t pretend to be offering anything but their opinion.

Well, neither do wine critics.

Steve is exactly right. But I want to take his point one step further and suggest that, in many contexts, values such as accuracy of description or consistency of judgment are not primary—wine critics are aiming at something else.

The ultimate point of wine reviews, especially the descriptive part of the review, is not to accurately describe the wine. If it were, wine criticism would be an abject failure since critical descriptions of the same wine by different critics can be worlds apart. Instead, what the wine critic is trying to do is get the reader/drinker to taste what the critic is tasting. The critic is using words to call attention to features of the wine that another taster—perhaps less experienced or inattentive—might miss. The purpose is to direct the the reader/taster’s attention, to share an experience.

This conception of critical communication is from an academic paper written many years ago by philosopher Arnold Isenberg who was writing about criticism in the visual arts. In discussing critical remarks about the “wave-like contour” of a line in a painting, Isenberg writes:

Now the critic, besides imparting to us the idea of a wavelike contour, gives us direction for perceiving, and does this by means of the idea he imparts to us, which narrows down the field of possible visual orientations and guides us in discrimination of details, the organization of parts, the grouping of discrete objects into patterns. It is as if we found both an oyster and pearl when we had been looking for a seashell because we had been told it was valuable. It is valuable, but not because it is a seashell….And if communication is a process by which a mental content is transmitted by symbols from one person to another, then we can say that it is a function of criticism to bring about communication at the level of the senses; that is, to induce a sameness of vision, of experienced content. (Original in Philosophical Review, 1949)

Wine criticism has a similar intent. When a wine critic refers to for example “road tar” in a wine, he/she is pointing to a feature that may or may not resemble road tar. But the description is directing our attention to something the critic wants us to taste and is proposing that we call it road tar. Of course, the more precise the description, the more successful the directive is likely to be. The point is not that critics should ignore accuracy. The point is that the reader/drinker is moved to search for and hopefully find something she may have missed, or could not describe, prior to reading the description. The aim is not objectivity, and accuracy is just a means to an end. The goal is to communicate an experience.

Metaphorical descriptions of wine—as sexy, brooding, or flamboyant—or evaluative terms, such as elegant or graceful, are even more useful in getting an audience to focus on relevant features. The fact that another critic might use a different word to direct our attention is largely irrelevant. Since each of us has different tasting histories and different habits of talking about those experiences, which description works best to direct attention will be a matter of individual differences.

If, by pointing to the flamboyant personality of a wine, I get someone else to describe it as lively, I’ve done my job. We have a common referent despite the different meaning. Of course, if she describes that same wine as mute and closed, there is obviously egregious miscommunication.

So critics are not striving for objectivity. We are instead striving for awareness, mutually focused attention, and shared experience.

Wine scores, of course, are a different matter. They don’t attempt to shape our thoughts or experience. Their purpose is to help consumers find a bargain, gain advanced knowledge of quality, or provide marketing points for wineries—a purely commercial rather than aesthetic function.

To be sure, wine scores are useful to consumers but if wine criticism were to reject the tasting note in favor of an exclusive reliance on numerical ranking, the purpose of critical communication would be lost.