Tag Archives: wine aesthetics

Wine and Music Pairing Redux

24 Wednesday Oct 2018

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wine and musicI must confess to being a bit puzzled about why wine and music pairing has not become a more popular phenomenon. The empirical evidence that music can influence our enjoyment of wine continues to mount. The idea has been around now for several years and has received a fair amount of exposure in the press. In a culture always hungry for pleasure one would think this piling of hedons upon hedons (units of pleasure in philosophical jargon) would be snapped up like nachos in a beer bar. But I haven’t detected an upsurge in interest. And I still run into people who are skeptical of the whole idea.

Perhaps the problem is complexity. Wine is already complicated. Wine and food pairing is an additional complication and hard enough to get right. Are we going to add an additional burden to our quest for peak experience? Well, why should peak anything be easy? It will by definition be outside the ordinary. I suspect this is part of the problem.

At any rate, we shall soldier on. Here is a recent article in National Geographic relying on new iterations of some of the same evidence I’ve been reporting on.

A study by Professor Charles Spence from Oxford University has been trialling matching tastes such as sourness and sweetness with different sound properties….carefully chosen music or sounds can be used to “sonically season” your drink.  Essentially there is music we associate with sweetness and some music that we associate with bitterness and sourness, and even, as professor Spence explains music that has notes of spice and cream.

Clarinet and flute pair with white wine. String quartets, because of the cello and viola foundation, work nicely with tannic Bordeaux.

The article claims that “music doesn’t have the ability to totally change what you are tasting.” I am not sure what the author means by “totally”. But I’ve found choosing the wrong music, so there is a perceived conflict between the music and the wine, will substantially diminish your enjoyment of the wine. You can of course tune the music out and the effect will go away.

The researcher Spence also notes that “… what you can do is use the music to draw people’s attention to something in their tasting experience.”

This suggests that the pairing works because the music draws your attention to the congruent feature of the wine.The high pitched, lighter sounds of clarinets and flutes will draw your attention to the floral, fruity notes in a white wine.

I think this is part of the picture of how the pairing works. But a wine’s movement on the palate is another feature that can be matched with music. Drawing on the work of Daniel Stern, a psychologist who discovered the vitality forms that enable us to grasp the motion of anything that moves, through music we can experience a congruence between the rhythm and pace of the music and the movement of the wine on the palate, enhancing the wine’s mouth feel and sense of harmony. (Here is more complete account of how vitality forms work.)

Spence continues to do great work on this issue transforming what would be a speculative relationship into one with solid empirical support.

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

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Replica Wine

04 Thursday Oct 2018

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replica wineI have to think more about this article by MW Christy Canterbury before commenting but I just wanted to flag it as important. The main issue is what to make of replica wines. Replica wines have been reverse engineered through chromatography and mass spectrometry to duplicate the flavor of a more expensive wine that would be otherwise less available to ordinary wine consumers.

Analyze the liquid in an array of bottles that you want to replicate, access a long list of vineyard sources, work with a talented palate or two alongside a skilled winemaker, and you can make what is apparently an excellent “replica” of a highly successful wine….Replica is the name of a wine brand that does just that. Replica aims to recreate the taste of some of the most popular wine brands in the world. Their targets are large, not limited – as is often the case with fine wine fakes, production items. The company proudly claims that its labels are almost indistinguishable from the “real” bottlings. (I have not tasted them.) Replica makes all of its wines by homing in on a wine’s chemical profile then painstakingly tweaking wines assembled from a variety of sources then further refined in their winery. Replica uses nothing but widely accepted and entirely legal winemaking techniques to create its array of “master forgeries”, as its website calls them.

Canterbury goes through the benefits and potential problems with this concept and is rightly concerned:

Now and with haste, we (and especially prestigious brand holders) need to address these admittedly creative and innovative, yet highly worrisome approaches to crafting a beverage. While certain positive outcomes could come from these two methods of reverse engineering, the horizon looks fuzzy. How the scenery turns out will depend on how these reverse engineering methodologies are used in the longer term.

The wine industry has sold the public on the idea that wine is in part made by nature and the unique characteristics of regions and vineyards matter. Replica wines threaten these assumptions.

My immediate response is that we tend to value originals more than copies and it’s not obvious that wine  that has been reverse engineered will taste like the original. I have not tasted these wines and neither has Ms. Canterbury. No doubt wine is a solution of chemicals but when and how the chemical bonds occur matters. Wine making is a process and what is being replicated is not a process but only the outcome of a process.

But it surely is worth thinking about and addressing.

The Vitality of Wine

26 Wednesday Sep 2018

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pexels-photo-225229Tasting notes often attribute emotions or personality characteristics to wine. Is there a foundation for such talk or is it just nonsense? In my Three Quarks Daily column, I use recent developments in psychology to show there is in fact a foundation for describing wines as aggressive, brooding, fierce or dignified.

Wine and Imagination

24 Monday Sep 2018

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imaginationWe usually think of wine tasting as a perceptual experience which then produces an experience of pleasure or displeasure depending on your reaction to the wine. It can also be a cognitive experience in which you employ knowledge and memory assess whether a wine is typical of its type, similar or different from other wines you’ve tasted, etc. But I think this picture of wine tasting is not quite right because it leaves imagination out of the picture.

There is a good deal of disagreement among philosophers and psychologists about what the imagination is but there is some consensus that imagination is a speculative mental state that allows us to consider situations that are not immediately in front of us in the here and now.

It’s obvious that wine tasting involves the imagination. Although it may be true that appreciating and identifying aromas of cassis, mushroom, and cedar is a largely perceptual experience, assessing whether a wine is balanced or not requires holding an image of the various components of the wine in mind while assessing their relative intensity. All of the refined assessments of wine—finesse, nuance, harmony, distinctiveness, and development on the palate require  creating and holding  that image in mind and that requires imagination. In fact any holistic assessment would be impossible without forming an image of how the component fit together in one’s mind.

But imagination can play a more extensive role in wine appreciation. Wine can provoke images of places and things.  The salinity of a good Chablis may evoke images of the seashore, the smell of rosemary and lavender in a Rhone blend may make you imagine the south of France. Since wine reflects features of the place in which the grapes were grown it naturally evokes images of those sources. This is one of the pleasures of wine.

John Dilworth in his article in Wine and Philosophy argues for a more creative use of the imagination.

Drinking a glass or more of a wine, I claim, involves a series of related imaginative improvisations, in which the common theme of the sensory qualities of the wine is subject to a variety of spontaneous variations, each involving a different kind or kinds of sophisticated imaginative processing of the same sensory data. On this view, drinking a wine is not like experiencing a previously finished artwork, but instead it is an exploratory, spontaneous activity in which you yourself are the artist or creator of what you experience. In these respects it is like the fertile activity of a jazz artist as he creatively improvises on a standard jazz tune, or, more specifically, like the spontaneous, try-anything creativity of an actor in an improvisatory theater production, who decides herself what to say at any moment rather than following a pre-existing script.

Because of the “mildly hallucinogenic” influence of the alcohol which loosens inhibitions and makes this “imaginative improvisatory theater” available to us, Dilworth argues that wine provides us with “sensory themes” that we use to engage in imaginative play. He is not explicit about what form this takes—that is apparently up to each individual–and he admits that many people may not engage with wine in this way. However, he suggests if we don’t do so we aren’t getting the full experience of what wine has to offer.

I am broadly sympathetic to Dilworth’s argument. In my wine reviews I use sensory features of the wine to suggest emotions and personality traits that can be attributed to the wine. Wine is expressive and we are missing important aesthetic features of the wine if we ignore it. But I have one reservation. Dilworth suggests there need be no constraints on the imagination when engaging in this “improvisatory theater”. He calls it “spontaneous, try-anything creativity” and at one point asserts “the drinker’s improvisatory freedom in experiencing the wine has no restrictions beyond his own spontaneous current preferences.”

Of course, people are free to play with wine as they see fit. But if you’re interested in exploring the wine, its nuances, and potential for aesthetic engagement the imaginative play must be about the wine, not some thoroughly private fantasy unrelated to the wine. Dilworth is right that wines have sensory themes, but it’s that sensory theme that constrains one’s creative interpretations.

Consider an analogy. The meaning of song lyrics is often obscure and notoriously difficult to interpret. You could take a song , for instance, the Beatle’s I am a Walrus, to mean anything you want it to mean, without regard for the actual lyrics. But then you are no longer interpreting the song and the whole enterprise seems pointless.

Interpreting what a wine is expressing would similarly be pointless if you ignore the sensory theme and simply make stuff up. Legitimate interpretation must reveal something about the object being interpreted, not the mental state of the interpreter.

But aside from that disagreement, Dilworth is right. There is an ample role for the imagination when reading a wine.

What is the Matter with Wine Metaphors?

27 Monday Aug 2018

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prophet in a caveThere are many distinct species of the “I’m just an ordinary guy, not a wine snob” poseurs in the press. Right alongside articles about “wine tasting is nonsense/wine quality doesn’t exist” are articles whining about tasting notes and obscure wine descriptions.

Food and drinks writer John Mariani is one of the more reliable producers of the genre who can always be counted on to sneer at anyone who takes wine seriously. In “Some Things Wine Should Never Be” he takes wine writers to task for their outlandish descriptors:

And in the silly 2013 documentary movie SOMM, which follows four candidates studying to pass the Master Sommelier exams, one of them swirls and sniffs his wine, then pronounces, “I’m getting a whiff of . . . freshly cut garden hose.” One has to wonder if freshly cut garden hose is something a wine should or should not smell like.

Indeed, wine should not smell like a garden hose, freshly cut or not. In fact I’ve come across wines that smell like a garden hose—rubber-like with chemical notes—it’s not a compliment. The problem is with the wine, not the description. If a wine smells like garden hose why not say so?

He goes on to rant about descriptions from fiction—James Thurber and Evelyn Waugh—that no one has used since, well, Waugh in 1945 and Thurber in 1937. Thurber famously published a cartoon with the caption:

It’s a naïve domestic little Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.

The problem with this is not that wines can’t be poorly cultivated or from lesser known producers. It’s that we don’t talk about breeding anymore as a general synonym for cultivation and we no longer think something lacking aristocratic origins is presumptuous. Come to think of it, we probably didn’t think that way in 1937 which is in part why Thurber’s caption is funny.

As to Waugh in Brideshead Revisited, even in 1945 when the book was published these would be metaphors suffering and near death:

It is a little, shy wine, like a gazelle.”

“Like a leprechaun.”

“Dappled, in a tapestry meadow.”

“Like a flute by still water.”

“And this is a wise old wine.”

“A prophet in a cave.”

“And this is a necklace of pearls on a white neck.”

“Like a swan.”

“Like a unicorn.

Leprechauns, prophets in a cave, a necklace of pearls on a white neck? Which century are we in? They work in the novel because Brideshead is about nostalgia for the landed gentry of the 19th Century. It’s not a critique of the use of metaphor.

Mariani really needs to update his material.

He gets a little closer to currency when he complains about musical metaphors:

There used to be a wine magazine in which each bottling was compared to a rock-and-roll performer, album or song—a big zinfandel to Muddy Waters’s “Hoochie Koochie Man,” a red Burgundy to Sade’s “Smooth Operator” and a California Chardonnay to the Eagles’s “Peaceful Easy Feeling.” The magazine lasted about four issues.

As you might imagine, these seem like perfectly good metaphors to me. Wines have textures, weight, and movement on the palate that can easily be compared to musical compositions. There is after all substantial scientific evidence for cross-modal perception—that is, a capacity to recognize similar qualities in different sensory modalities. In fact many cognitive psychologists think cross-modal metaphors are crucial to the way our brains function. There is ample evidence that wine and music pairing is a real phenomenon.  He never explains what makes wine and music comparisons inapt. I guess if you have to ask….

As to what sort of wine descriptions Mariani prefers it isn’t clear. He seems to prefer insults:

The best were succinct, like Bette Davis, who once said, “Never, never trust anyone who asks for white wine. It means they’re phonies.” Some were blunt, like D. H. Lawrence, who said, “The Spanish wine, My God, it is foul, catpiss is champagne compared, this is the sulpherous urination of some aged horse.”

It isn’t obvious why “horse urine” is preferable to “wise old wine” as a descriptor.  But since he’s so fond of insults let me add that “prophet in a cave” is a good metaphor for Mariani’s musings.

Metaphor is one of the most powerful means of communicating that we have. Why wine writers are uniquely forbidden to use it is beyond me.

Myths of the Wine World #2: No Wine is Worth More than $100

23 Thursday Aug 2018

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romanee contiIf you just want a really good bottle of wine, this is true. You can get really good wine for much less.

If you’re thinking purely in terms of production costs and a reasonable profit margin this is usually true. (Although the production costs of a bottle of Napa Cabernet Sauvignon from a very small producer who uses all new French Oak might send the price over that benchmark.)

However, wine pricing is not determined by production costs alone, and wine connoisseurs are not looking for just “really good”.

If what matters to you is distinctiveness, a wine that has a unique flavor profile, and lots of other people share your tastes, and the wine you love is in short supply you must pay for it.

Fall in love with the taste of Burgundy or Bordeaux, especially if your love interest happens to be the distinctive flavor of a particular vineyard or style such as Château Margaux or Romanée-Conti, and you will pay and pay and pay some more.

We have a tendency to think of wine quality in terms of some absolute scale of deliciousness in which, after a certain quality level is attained, wine can’t get much better. Based on that idea extremely high prices are about fashion and showing off, not intrinsic quality. There is certainly a lot of that in the wine world.

But that point of view ignores what really matters in wine aesthetics—distinctiveness and originality. Not everyone with deep pockets is an ignorant blowhard trying to show off for his side squeeze. Some connoisseurs really do know wine and have very particular tastes. If you fall in with that crowd it’s a good idea to have several homes to mortgage.

Choosing one’s friends is a perilous task.

Myths of the Wine World #1 is here.

Why (some) Wines are Works of Art

02 Thursday Aug 2018

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

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Lart of wineast week in response to my commentary on Jon Bonne’s article, which had a brief discussion of wine flaws, commenter Eric, who is apparently a winemaker, took issue with the notion that wine is an art. His comment was interesting enough that, instead of a quick comment, I decided to respond via a more extended post.

Here is Eric’s comment:

Wine flaws are like a box of chocolates. If you’re sensitive to bitter compounds then an 80% cacao chocolate is going to taste flawed. Someone who tolerates high bitterness might claim that the 80% cacao is more authentic and true and therefore the chocolate maker and the chocolate are more artistic. (Apply your own wine analogy.) Making a chocolate more bitter, like making a wine flavored with Bourbon barrels, does not make its creator artistic. The chocolatier or winemaker is just adjusting the character of their product to fill a consumer niche. It’s marketing, sales and hopefully profiteering and fame. We made wine in the 1980s using Bourbon barrels because they were easy to obtain. We determined they made inferior wine. Returning to whiskey barrels is not a brilliant, artistic notion but a retread on a discarded idea in an effort to distinguish a product and create media in an oversaturated wine market. To survive in the wine industry, even if you are a yeast salesman, there seems to be a hyped-up requirement to focus on art. We’re constantly trying to tag wine as art and the mere fact that we debate this (no one ever asks if music is art) tells me that if wine is an art and not a craft then it’s a very low and base form of art. Though wine may taste great and make you feel good and gladden your heart, it is still a trifle when compared to a Van Gough. This lightness is a truth and a disappointment and why the industry, especially wine writers and those of us who’ve invested so much of our lives in wine, are continuously searching to prove and sell the concept that there is fine art in wine. This hubristic fixation to perpetuate a highbrow illusion keeps us away from many realities that surround wine.

Let me start by thanking Eric for the comment; it raises several interesting points worth discussing.

Eric is right that the perception of flaws in wine is sometimes dependent on sensitivity to compounds. If you’re really sensitive to brett or volatile acidity so it overwhelms other dimensions of the wine, you will think the wine flawed. Someone less sensitive won’t have that response. The same is true of chocolate with 80% cacao if you’re very sensitive to bitterness, although I think it is still not known to what degree we can adjust these sensitivities via learning.

I also agree that the choice to make a chocolate of 80% cacao does not make that batch of chocolate “more artistic”. If the choice to make 80% chocolate was a decision about a particular batch of raw materials to bring out certain features of the chocolate that would produce an aesthetic experience, and if the decision exhibited the kind of creativity and originality we associate with art, then perhaps that might be “more artistic”.  I don’t know enough about making chocolate to have a view on it. But 80% is so routine, I’m not sure I see the originality there.

The same is true of the use of bourbon barrels in winemaking. But not because it is an old idea. Painters and musicians employ old ideas and techniques routinely. If bourbon barrels do not contribute anything to the positive aesthetic character of the wine then it’s just a failed experiment. And if it was done with the motive solely to “distinguish a product and create media” with no other intention then it’s claim to be art is suspect. Of course artists and musicians often take steps to distinguish their product and create media. But if that is all they do, if they have no other over-riding intention, then their claim to be artists cannot be taken seriously. They lack the intention to create art.

However, if the dominant intention of a winemaker is to produce an aesthetic experience for people who drink their wine, and if their winemaking displays the degree of creativity we associate with the arts, then I see no reason why wine cannot be art. By “aesthetic experience” I mean an experience in which the aim is to seek out and be open to the widest range of aesthetic properties such as elegance, finesse, beauty, power, intensity, etc. The question of “degree of creativity” is of course difficult. It is a threshold, a matter of degree, but involves the intention to recognize when their wine is developing something unique and distinctive and act on that recognition. It is obviously a collaboration between the winemaking team and nature, a form of environmental art.

Ice cream tastes good and makes me feel good. It isn’t art. It doesn’t produce a wide range of aesthetic properties and it usually is not original although I suppose it could be in the right hands.

As to the comparison with Van Gogh, I’m not sure why wine would be a trifle in comparison. Perhaps Eric has in mind that paintings by talents such as Van Gogh tell stories and have a rich set of meanings to be interpreted. But great wines do tell stories albeit not about war and peace. A wine is an interpretation of a vineyard and the winemaker’s materials. It is also an interpretation and extension of the narrative of the winemaking tradition in which the winemaker is working. What some paintings do have that wine perhaps lacks is semantic richness. They can be about a wide variety of subjects—war, loneliness, love, evil, God, etc.  But much art has no great thematic character. Abstract art and instrumental music are not about any of those themes except in a highly metaphorical sense. But wine can function as metaphor as well.

As to people in the industry seeking “to prove and sell the concept” that wine is art, I really haven’t seen it that much. Some winemakers think it’s art, some do not. Few have a well-developed notion of what art is. (which is my job to figure out in any case)

Surely most wines are not art. Most wine is an industrial product designed to serve a market niche and make a profit. And for most wine drinkers it’s just an alcohol delivery system or a boost to conviviality. That’s fine. Nothing wrong with that. But there are many, many winemakers who are more concerned to do something aesthetically interesting and create something distinctive whether that distinction comes from their vineyards or their imagination. And there are many wine lovers who get a rich, aesthetic experience from drinking wine and appreciate originality when they find it.

There is great danger in treating wine as nothing but a commodity. If it is a commodity like orange juice then we only need three or four companies making wine. That won’t support the well over 9000 wineries in the U.S. alone that struggle to stay afloat.

It’s the search for distinction that is the beating heart of the wine industry and when it’s achieved I see no reason why it is not art.

It’s Time to Let Go of the Idea that Wine Makes Itself

23 Monday Apr 2018

Posted by in Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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fermenting wineThis recent article by Zachary Sussman in Punch provides a much needed  corrective to what has become a cliché that winemakers do nothing except let the grapes express themselves.

Even those of us who prefer our wines to be made with a lo-fi approach know full well that wine doesn’t make itself. Even the most minimally invasive scenario still involves skillful mediation. David Lillie, of New York’s Chambers Street Wines, sums this up well, recalling a quote from the Jura winemaker Pierre Overnoy: “Making natural wine isn’t so easy—you don’t just decide not to add sulfur and then go take a vacation.

The ideology that a winemaker is nothing but a custodian was useful in drawing a contrast with mass-produced, industrial wines or wines made according to a recipe intended to get big scores. What goes on in the vineyard is crucial to making good wine. But that vineyard work requires a lot of understanding and expertise. And once the grapes arrive in the winery making good wine requires meticulous care and watchfulness. If you’re not going to use chemicals and whiz bang filtration technologies to correct flaws then you better make sure you understand what’s going on in your fermentation tanks.

There are countless decisions that have to be made in the vineyard and in the winery about how to process the grapes, when to move on to the next stage, and about when those processes are complete that mean every wine has the stamp of the winemaker on it, if only because it’s their personal taste that governs these decisions.

Jason Brandt of Berkeley’s Donkey and Goat digs into just one aspect of winemaking, how the grapes are pressed:

First off, before we even load the grapes into the press, we sort them, which not everyone chooses to do, and then you have a slew of decisions on how to use the press, which are all really impactful, especially on the whites,” Brandt explains. He continues to describe “the various programs you can use to increase the pressure on the grapes,” specifying his preferred method of “slowly increasing the pressure, holding it for five minutes and then increasing it again, which is one way to get the extraction you want.” Then there’s the matter of how many turns the press should complete—“I’m not a big fan of having to press-turn, actually, since I think you get flavors that aren’t as interesting or consistent with what we want”—and how long to run it.

This is before we get to issues such as fermentation temperatures, macerations, wine stability, battonage, and aging decisions all governed by the tasting acuity and preferences of the winemaker. The physical activity of winemaking is basically about carrying out logistical strategies, racking wine, moving barrels around and freeing up space. But the intellectual component is really about taste and that involves a creative interpretation of the grapes, vineyard, winemaking equipment and consumer preference.

Without that interpretation you have plonk or vinegar.

The Problems With Wine Scores Episode 489

18 Wednesday Apr 2018

Posted by in Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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wine scoresStats wizard David Morrison has a compelling argument that scores between wine critics cannot be compared except in the rare case in which two critics use the same objective scoring scheme. I actually think the situation is worse than David suggests, but more on that in a moment.

His reasoning is as follows.

I have finally concluded that there are two fundamentally different sorts of wine-quality scores in use: (1) what we might call an objective score, based on explicitly assigning points to a series of pre-defined wine characteristics, and then summing them to get the wine score; and (2) subjective (but expert) scores, where the overall score comes from whatever characteristics the scorer wants to express.

David is not referring to the way the scores are expressed via a 100 pt. scale vs a 20 pt. scale. Rather he is referring to the underlying method by which the scores are created.  With objective scoring there is only one scoring scheme so a disagreement among critics would be a genuine disagreement about wine quality. But when critics choose their own idiosyncratic scoring system a disagreement about scores may reflect a different scoring method or different interpretation of the method  rather than a difference in wine quality.

The same scores could mean different qualities (because the scoring schemes are different), and different scores could mean the same quality (because the scoring schemes are different). How on earth are we to know? We can’t!

I think David is exactly right about subjective scores. But I also think what he calls objective scores are also subject to varying interpretations. For example, suppose we develop an objective scoring scheme based on the following pre-defined characteristics with a numerical scale for each characteristic.

We will assess wines for intensity, complexity, balance, length, typicity, and mouthfeel. We will assess every wine using a numerical scale from 0-9 and sum the results producing a score at the end.  These characteristics don’t begin to capture wine quality but adding a more complicated scheme will only increase the problem I want to identify.

The problem is, in this scheme, all the criteria are assigned equal weight—intensity counts the same as balance, etc. But why assume each criterion is of equal value especially across all wines and all varietals? Pinot Noir will not have the length of most Cabernets. A shorter finish may not damage Pinot Noir in the way it would disappoint in the Cab.  A wine even slightly out of balance will suffer in quality despite making up for that deficit in its intensity and complexity. Typicity is important for some purposes but to give it equal weight in every case would disadvantage wines designed to be atypical.  A young, old-school Barolo will have mouth ripping tannins undermining mouthfeel so we would be forced to discount mouthfeel or make a guess about how it will develop.

For a meaningful objective scoring scheme we would have to find some objective way of weighting the various criteria but that would have to be specific to varietal, region, and style since these all require different values.

Even if we were to manage to develop such a scheme, the most important factor in wine quality at least according some critics—the degree to which a wine expresses the distinctive features of the vineyard—is not and could not be in the picture. There is no objective measure of such a quality.

The whole idea of an objective scoring system is hopeless.

So why do I use scores in my reviews you might ask? Because they are useful in assessing how much a critic enjoyed the wine. But they mean nothing more than that. They are a subjective measure of the degree of quality I found in a wine when compared to other wines I’ve tasted. Nothing more, but nothing less. This information is meaningful to the degree you find a particular critic’s palate trustworthy.

A wine score is an invitation to try the wine, not a data point in a competition.