Tag Archives: subjectivity of taste

A Fundamental Mistake about Subjectivity in Wine tasting

06 Monday Jul 2020

Posted by in Food Science, Philosophy of Food and Wine

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wine flavor wheelI keep seeing this inference in discussions about subjectivity in wine tasting by people who should know better.  Gordon Shepherd makes it in his book Neuroenology: How the Brain Creates the Taste of Wine, and Jamie Goode makes it in his  otherwise fine book I Taste Red. Both insist that the flavor of wine is not in the wine but in the brain.

The mistake is this. From the fact that the brain integrates a variety of multisensory signals in order to create flavor perceptions, it does not follow that the brain creates the flavors that we perceive. Flavor is one thing. Flavor perception something else just as a color is one thing and our perception of that color something else. We can sometimes make mistakes when perceiving color and we can sometimes make mistakes when tasting wine. The act of perceiving is distinct from the thing perceived.

No doubt flavor perception requires input from our sensory system and the brain. But it requires something else as well—the flavors perceived. The mistake is to think that if perceptions occur in the brain that the thing perceived must also be in the brain. No doubt we can know only what we perceive but to think the thing perceived must then exist in the mind is to conflate what I can know with what exists.

The brain by itself does not create the taste of wine. And we don’t live in separate taste worlds as Jamie Goode sometimes suggests. We may disagree about what what we taste in a particular wine but we’re tasting the same wine.

Perception is an interaction between the brain and our environment—you need both to create a perception and the object is not an empty cipher. It has real causal properties without which perception cannot occur.

Alder Yarrow Jumps the Shark (Part 2)

08 Wednesday Apr 2020

Posted by in Contemporary Food Culture, Wine Culture

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my head hurtsI’m still recovering from the brain cramps I get when trying to fathom the point of Alder Yarrow’s claim that food and wine pairing is a sham because it violates the norms of pre-modern Europe. (My Part 1 is here) But I will soldier on because the mid-section of his post trots out the hoariest of canards from the wine populist’s bag of treats. Taste is all subjective, he claims, so there is no point in making recommendations on what to eat or drink. Need I point out that this is coming from someone with thousands of wine reviews under his belt. What is the point of wine reviews if taste is subjective?

Here’s the offending introductory passage:

Contrary to the impression conveyed by “authoritative” tasting notes and numerical scores from experts, not to mention what you might see MS candidates trying to do in movies like SOMM, science increasingly suggests that the experience you have when tasting a wine is uniquely your own.

Science shows nothing of the sort.

He goes on to provide the usual liturgy of variables that influence what we taste—biological differences in our sensitivity to chemical compounds, the complexity of saliva, the influence of environment, price, and reputation, the company you’re with. These are all well-established influences on what we taste; those are the facts. But the conclusion that taste is purely subjective simply doesn’t follow from these facts.

Yes, we are all unique in our biological constitution. But the differences are typically not large and there is a great deal of overlap in our sensory equipment. There is simply no evidence that people vary widely in their natural ability to taste. We are dealing with statistical norms here, tendencies, not absolutes. This is why recommendations from genuine experts are worth heeding—they are more or less likely to be useful. We know from the wine trade that a wine scored in the mid-90’s by Parker, Suckling and the Wine Spectator is likely to be worth drinking even if you think the score is inflated. There obviously is no guarantee. There are exceptions and all of us have our idiosyncrasies. But the idea of a normal distribution of preferences and sensitivities describes most of us most of the time and no scientist would tell you otherwise. Despite our differences most people like chocolate and think Petrus is worth drinking. Most people will find Chardonnay is better with lobster than Petite Sirah.

The exceptions can be starkly salient. If you’re really sensitive to brett you will find Chateau Beaucastel disgusting. If you can’t smell pyrazines you will find Sauvignon Blanc boring. To some people cilantro tastes like soap.   A super taster sensitive to bitter compounds may not be able to handle espresso. But these are on the tails of the curve. In other respects, these same people will fall into a normal range. (And don’t ignore the word “range”. It is a range and degrees matter)

People with talent and experience who seek to provide guidance about food and wine pairings are speaking to what is likely to be appealing to most people most of the time. They are assuming statistical norms. What else could they be doing? Sometimes they will miss—by definition since statistical norms are averages. That doesn’t make wine and food pairing a sham. It makes it more or less useful, and when it isn’t, not something to get worked up about.

What does get me worked up is this bullshit about taste being subjective. Yarrow claims that all this pressure to seek quality food and wine pairings is harming the wine industry—it’s all just becoming to complicated. I’ll tell you what will ruin the wine industry. The belief that wine tasting is subjective. Everyone in the wine industry from winemakers, to wine retailers, to wine critics, to consumers are in the business of making quality distinctions about wine. If wine quality were wholly subjective there would be no reason to listen to anyone about wine quality. Wine education would be an oxymoron; quality control an exercise in futility; wine criticism just empty talk; price differentials based on nothing but marketing.

That is not a world anyone reading this blog should welcome.

Poor, Stressed Wine Drinkers Battered by Wine Experts

22 Wednesday Feb 2017

Posted by in Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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stressed wine drinkerMore drivel about wine and subjectivity, in this case, from a Professor of Oenology no less. In an article for US News and World Report entitled “You Aren’t Wrong About Wine” Anna Katherine Mansfield writes:

There’s no denying that sommeliers and and their ilk go through extensive training in order to match descriptive words to wine qualities, but that doesn’t mean that their description of a wine is right for you, or that you’re wrong if you don’t agree with it.

And after detailing the litany of reasons why people differ in what they taste and can describe in a wine, she offers balm to stressed out consumers worried about their tasting deficiencies:

This Valentine’s Day, pick a wine you already know you like, or one that you can taste at the store or winery before you buy, because all you really need to enjoy a glass is your own nose, your own palate, and good company to share it with.

Up to a point, this is good advice. Obviously you can enjoy a wine without analyzing it, and if you’re buying a wine for Valentine’s Day, wine appreciation probably isn’t the main thing you’ll have on your mind.

But the entire thrust of the article is that there are no standards by which to judge wine and everyone’s opinion is equally valid regardless of experience.

The problem is that if how a wine seems to you is your only consideration in judging wine quality, and there is nothing independent of your current opinion that your judgment must answer to—in other words if there is nothing to get right or wrong about a wine—you have no reason to explore wine further. You already know everything there is to know since there is nothing beyond your current sensations to discover.

Obviously this is a recipe for boredom and ignorance. The very idea of growth and development assumes that there is something you don’t know that requires further inquiry. (One would expect a university professor to know this. Go figure)

The article begins with a complaint about how often the taste of the wine does not conform to the tasting notes on wine bottles, which she argues are presumably written by experts. Well no. Tasting notes on wine bottles are written or at least vetted by marketing departments interested in selling wine. They use whatever descriptors will convince you to buy. So I wouldn’t take them as the standard.

But when you find that a tasting note by an independent critic does not conform to what you taste in a wine, the best thing to do is taste again and again in order to taste what the critic does. In the end you might not succeed because as individuals we sometimes do differ in what we can taste. But more often than not you will discover something about the wine that you didn’t taste before investigating.

The point of this is not that you want to train to be a sommelier but that you want to maximize your enjoyment of the wine. Quality wine always has more to give than what we are aware of in the present moment. The point of wine education is to enhance experience, not to diminish it.

This tendency, when writing for the public, to flatter everyone’s untutored opinion is neither good for the consumer nor good for the wine industry. It encourages the industry to produce mediocre wine and the public to accept it without question.

Don’t Trust Your Palate!

13 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by in Wine Culture

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everything you know is wrongIf there is any phrase more common in the wine world I don’t know what it is. “Trust your palate” is everyone’s sage advice about choosing wine. Usually it’s followed by “drink what you like.”

But I’m not entirely sure what it means.

Who doesn’t trust their palate? Does anyone say, “mmmm, I really like that Pinot Noir but give me the Zinfandel. I hate it but I must be wrong.” It seems like a bit of advice that no one needs, like your mother telling you to be careful.

Perhaps the advice is meant to soothe the feelings of people who think their own tastes are unsophisticated and out of step with the experts. But I rather suspect it is meant to signal that the speaker is on the side of the audience against those snobs and trend-chasers–because she has something conventional to sell.

At any rate it is bad advice. It assumes that we have nothing more to learn. That there are no experiences out there that we might have to stretch for in order to understand. “Trust your palate” is a ticket to boredom.

Of course, drink what you like. But keep in mind that what you like is a very small part of  what there is, and there are likely plenty of treasures that you will never discover if you stick to the tried and true.

Pâté, Dog Food and Fine Wine—It’s All Good

18 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by in Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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dog foodDavid White wants wine lovers to relax about those studies purporting to show that even wine experts can be systematically fooled about what their tasting. The problem is not wine tasters but our perceptions generally; we are easily fooled when our environment is manipulated or when expectations are disrupted.

Consider a 2012 study from Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab. By giving an extreme makeover to a Hardee’s, researchers discovered that people will eat less but enjoy their food more when at a fine-dining establishment instead of a fast-food joint. A 2006 study led by John Bohannon, a biologist and science journalist at Harvard University, found that most people can’t distinguish pâté from dog food.

Does this mean that Michelin-starred restaurants should replace pâté with Purina Puppy Chow and start serving Hardee’s Patty Meltdowns? Of course not.

White attributes this to our tendency to make mistakes and the inherent subjectivity of taste preferences. But there are deeper reasons why perceptions are easily fooled.

Our brains are designed to rely on contextual clues. Change the context and even ordinary perceptions become unreliable. In the end, it’s a good thing our expectations play such a large role in what we perceive—it helps us adapt quickly to normal situations so we can focus attention elsewhere. If expectations did not influence what we perceive, every moment would be new, every change in our environment a revelation.

The unreliability of wine tasters is only in part about the subjectivity of preferences; variations in how contextual clues are handled are equally important.

10 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Be a Picky Eater

13 Tuesday Aug 2013

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

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yuck face Here is a bit of conventional wisdom: Each of us is an expert on what we like and picky eaters are not at fault for their fussy attitude. If I hate sushi, I haven’t made a mistake or committed a crime. I can’t help it; I like what I like.

But that bit of conventional wisdom is wrong. Here are ten reasons why you shouldn’t be a picky eater.

1. We are not experts on what we like. Our tastes change constantly and in surprising, unpredictable ways. Remember hating asparagus as a kid or never liking sardines until having them grilled on the beach in Sicily? We often dislike something because our experience with it is limited or because its presentation was unflattering.

2. Picky eaters are well on their way to a life of blandness and tedium unless they compensate in some other way. The world of flavor is large and diverse and promises a different experience each day. Life is just more interesting when you eat widely.

3. Omnivores have ready access and the motivation to learn about the tastes, habits, and ways of life of other cultures. Food is a window into other cultures, one that is often just down the street. Picky eaters sacrifice this opportunity,

4. Curiosity about food can stimulate your desire to travel.

5. Omnivores are open-minded about food and being open-minded is a good habit to develop in general because you discover more value in the world. Being open-minded about food can help develop that habit in other areas of life.

6. Picky eaters experience less pleasure, are less curious and will have less self-knowledge than omnivores unless these deficiencies can be made up for in some other way.

7. Picky eaters are dogmatic and inflexible about food. It is in general a bad idea to approach any aspect of life by emulating Professor Umbrage on a bad day.

8. Picky eaters harm themselves because they don’t develop their capacities for sensation to the fullest. We are designed to get pleasure from diverse foods.  Picky eating is like being willfully color-blind.

9. Picky eaters inconvenience others and are often disrespectful and thankless since they cannot fully endorse a gift of good food when served something they don’t like.

10. Picky eaters miss out on shared experiences they would otherwise enjoy.

Of course, some people are off the hook for refusing to try some foods. Vegetarians and vegans have moral objections to eating certain foods that are worthy of rerspect, and these objections would have to be weighed against the virtues of being omnivorous. People with health issues cannot be expected to sacrifice their health. And if you think of food as fuel only and get no pleasure from it, then you lack the motivation for food adventures.

Everybody else should stop whining and eat.

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.