Tag Archives: wine aesthetics

Wine Tasting and Book Learning

27 Wednesday May 2020

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book learningIn the wine world there are hundreds of grape varieties used to make wine, thousands of wine regions and sub regions each providing a slightly different expression of those grape varieties, and countless methods, styles, techniques, and supporting materials also influencing what we taste in the glass.

In order to enjoy wine you don’t have to know any of that. But in order to get the most out of your wine experiences you have to know some of it, at least enough to begin to conceptualize the variations available to be tasted and set normative expectations.

The only way to learn this material is through books, podcasts, live instructors, or other cognitive aids. Sure you can taste these variations but our powers of  sensory discrimination and memory are just not up to the task of organizing and retaining the patterns of what we taste without the conceptual framework that book learning provides. You can’t note an interesting variation if you don’t know from what it is a variant. Yes, you can build this knowledge up from experience if you pay close attention, take lots of notes, and study them. But that takes decades. Of course, all that learning will not mean anything without relating it to the actual experience of the wines.

There is little evidence that expert wine tasters have greater physiological capacities to taste than non-experts or novices. What they have is book learning and experience.

What about aesthetic experience? Can wine drinkers who lack book learning have aesthetic experiences of wine? Burnham and Skilleas in their book The Aesthetics of Wine argue that the aesthetic properties of wine are unavailable to novices.

I disagree. Aesthetic experience is a matter of having a certain kind of attention—focused on the aesthetic object but searching for the widest range of properties the object can exhibit. One can approach a wine with the proper attentive attitude of wonder and fascination and thus have an aesthetic experience even if you know little of what you’re tasting. But you will miss much of what the wine has to offer because you don’t know what to look for. Novices have aesthetic experiences but they are limited to a narrow range of what a wine makes available.

In this regard, wine is like any other aesthetic object. You can enjoy a symphony by Beethoven or a song by The National without knowing anything about musical styles. But without knowledge of compositional tendencies or performance norms of the traditions in which musical artists work much of the significance of a work will pass you by.

And wine poses an additional challenge. Unlike sounds, lines, shapes and colors which are easily accessible to the senses, just there for us to see or hear, flavors and textures are much less discernible, hiding behind sensitive detection thresholds that need cognitive penetration to experience.

Wine education is essential to the health of the wine community.

Between Liking and Judging Quality

23 Thursday Apr 2020

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wine judging 2In answer to the question whether wine evaluation is fundamentally subjective, most people writing on the philosophy of wine insist on making a distinction between liking a wine and judging it’s quality. Whether one likes something depends on personal preference and that is entirely subjective. If you grew up in New York you probably prefer New York pizza. If you grew up in Chicago, deep dish is the way to go. Preferences are about our individual histories and biology. To criticize someone for their preferences is obtuse. They are what they are and no argument will change them.

But, so the argument goes, judging quality is a different matter. An experienced wine critic can judge a wine’s quality independently of whether she likes the wine or not. Thus, wine evaluation can claim some degree of objectivity.

I think the matter is more complex than this argument suggests.

With regard to basic quality level, I think the argument holds. Surely we can judge whether a wine has sufficient complexity, intensity or balance to qualify as a fine wine even though it is from a varietal or producer you don’t prefer. But with regard to more fine grained judgments, I’m not persuaded we can separate preference from quality. Judging a wine’s complexity might mean just counting up the number of aroma notes that clearly present themselves. You don’t have to like the wine to do that. But judging whether the aromas are coherent and make sense together is a different matter. If a wine’s complexity comes from oak-derived aromas and I don’t like oaky wines, how would I make an objective judgment about the quality of the aroma profile? My perceptions would tell me the wine had too much oak. I could of course make allowances for my lack of appreciation for oak by trying to imagine what someone more disposed to oak would perceive. But then my judgment is no longer based on my perception but on my ability to imagine the perceptions of someone else. How objective would such a mental exercise be?

Unless you like a wine, there are certain properties of the wine you won’t be able to discover.

There is one more standard that a wine evaluator might employ to help with objectivity. Even though she might not like a wine, an experienced judge could nevertheless determine that a wine is typical of its varietal and region. Typicity is a critical standard that helps establish a degree of objectivity for wine tasting. But obviously this will not work if one is tasting a wine that is atypical.

The conclusion to draw from this is not that wine tasting is thoroughly subjective. General quality level and typicity are important critical standards and I imagine for most critics, most wines fall into the realm of “likeable enough” so they don’t generate strong aversions.

But I doubt we can always distinguish liking a wine from evaluating its quality.

Terroir as Talisman

05 Wednesday Feb 2020

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stones in the vineyardWine writer Margaret Rand has written the best piece I’ve read on terroir in a long time. We all know that climate deeply influences what a wine is capable of. We know that because of vintage variation. We also know that soil type and drainage characteristics deeply influence how wine tastes. We know that because the same varietal and clone from the same producer from the same vintage using the same winemaking practices on sites with different soils can produce quite different wines.

But we don’t get those differences without countless decisions made in the vineyard and winery by the winemaker as well as the feedback loop between consumers, critics, and producers that influence wine styles. So Rand asks:

How much terroir expression do we really want? And, most importantly, who decides what the expression of a terroir should be?

My contention is that we want something that we can describe as terroir expression, rather than the full-on thing itself. Do we want to buy wines that are dilute from rain, suburnt from heat or mouldy from rot? Not particularly. But rain, heat and rot are part of terroir. We want the pretty face of terroir; the taste (we imagine) of stones, but not of mud. We want it tidied into perfect balance.

“Terroir” refers to the relationship between geography, geology, and the vines—the raw material that the winemaker has to work with. But even that raw material is the result of decades, in some cases centuries, of co-evolution between a wine culture and a place.

After listing the litany of decisions winemakers routinely make when getting grapes to express terroir Rand writes:

Even if you chuck the grapes into an amphora and go away for six months, that is a decision and an intervention. (And might or might not end well; we tend not to see the disasters.) There is no reason why that should give greater terroir expression, if that is your desire, than anything else. The rival claims by lovers of field blends, all picked and fermented together on the same day, and by lovers of separate parcels of separate varieties, each picked separately at optimum ripeness, to superior terroir expression, should make one wonder about what terroir expression actually is.

What we taste in wines of terroir is distinctiveness and variation. Distinctiveness and variation come from the confluence of geography, geology, the vines, the winemaker and her culture. Trying to sort out which of those factors is the main factor is like trying to figure out where the child of tone-deaf parents got her musical ability. Complex phenomena are chaotic and don’t lend themselves to simple causal explanations.

“Terroir” is a useful concept because it reminds us of the importance of geography and geology. But it is more inspirational than explanatory and a charm to ward off technocracy.

Wine and Self-Development

29 Wednesday Jan 2020

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smelling wineWine changes us. Especially when we develop enough tasting skill to perceive its subtleties. Of course, other arts change us as well. But wine requires more training and self-development than painting or music. The basic features of a painting—color, shapes, lines—can be discerned by anyone. No special effort is required to hear basic melodies or feel rhythm. The visual and auditory field is just there for us demanding little effort.

Aside from its properties as a liquid, the apprehension of a wine’s features requires more effort: deliberate focus, rituals such as swirling or sniffing to unleash aromas, and some training and experience before the flavors and aromas will appear delineated. We have to learn to individuate aromas, sense their relationships, and compare them with other wines which then becomes a storehouse of examples that deepens our ability to have further sensory experience.

We learn through sensation, our sensibility continually shaped by each new wine or new vintage. By paying attention, building skill, and communicating what we taste, we expand the possibilities of human experience and unlock more of what wine can do and be, enriching our lives through enriching that part of the world that wine occupies.

People who ignore taste cut themselves off from a whole domain of self-development and world development, and culture suffers.

What Is a Delicious Wine?

25 Monday Nov 2019

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drinking wineIn discussing his criteria for a good everyday wine, Master Sommelier Tim Gaiser writes:

But above all, a wine has to be delicious. And if I have to define the delicious-factor, it means a wine has a really good fruit-acid balance with emphasis on high natural acidity. Further, if it’s a red wine, the winemaking—as in tannin management and use of oak—also has to be good—and balanced.

I don’t disagree with this. Certainly fruit/acid/tannin balance is essential to wine quality. But is that all there is to “deliciousness”?

Many (certainly not all)  $10-$12 supermarket wines have fruit/acid balance in that they are neither flabby nor too tart. One might argue that the reds typically lack tannins since “smooth” seems to be what they aim for. But even with more backend structure I wouldn’t call most of these wines delicious.

So what more is required for a wine to be “delicious”?

To me delicious wines have vibrancy and energy. The fruit must be either juicy or rich and have clarity and precision. In the mouth, the wine should dance. It should leave an impression of movement executed with grace and have a finish that feels complete with no exposed acidity to turn the wine sour or harsh tannins to make the wine seem fragmented. These are qualities I only occasionally find for under $20. It’s almost always the finish that fails.

How would you define “delicious”?

Vitality as a Marker of Wine Quality

02 Wednesday Oct 2019

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wine vitalityI think if there is one way of summarizing what wine quality comes to, I would say quality wines exhibit vitality. What do I mean by vitality? There are three elements to tasting vitality:

1. Tasting variation in the vineyard, glass, and bottle. Darwin showed that life is creative, a continuous process of novelty and natural selection in which living beings contract, select, and harmonize the conflicting forces that affect them. Living beings make a life for themselves by using matter and energy to resist degradation. Wine, in its life span beginning in the vineyard through its years on the shelf of a wine cellar and finally in the glass,  puts this process of difference, disparity, and integration on a pedestal, glamorizing it, showing the process itself to be captivating. Tracking these life-like variations and noting the ability of wine to escape the categorical boxes we put it in–tasting the tension between stability and change, degradation and maintenance, predictability and contingency–is in part what I mean by tasting vitality. Wine tasting, at least in the modern world, has always been about this and the best wines are transparent in how they express these living processes.

2. Tasting variation and movement on the palate. Increasingly, in tasting notes, wine tasters are making reference to perceived motion on the palate, referring to a wine’s energy as lively, slow-building, deliberate, swelling, tense, light on its feet, etc. Great wines have a distinctive rhythm as they unfold in the mouth revealing many ways of being lively and energetic. This is a dimension of wine tasting that doesn’t receive enough attention and is not well represented in formal tasting models.

3. Tasting for personality and character. Living things have dispositions, what we call personality in a person—a complexity that expresses a being’s way of unfolding in time and reacting to the world in a particular way. That is why living things attract our engagement and responsiveness. Wines too, at least those that are distinctive, have dispositions, a way of unfolding in time, that contribute to their complexity. This is why metaphors based on a human personality have been used to describe such wines. Thus the degree a wine has personality and character is a measure of its vitality.

Great wines exhibit distinctive variations from the vineyard, winery, or bottle, distinctive rhythms on the palate, and a distinctive personality—all summed up as the wines vitality.

Drinking Liquid Poetry

26 Thursday Sep 2019

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pouring wine into glassI recently argued that wine writers face a daunting task. Their main job is to describe the individuality and distinctiveness of a wine. These dimensions of a wine are not easily captured using conventional categories or generalities referring to what’s typical of a region or varietal. If a wine is distinctive it can’t be typical, by definition. Yet the writer must provide that description of distinctiveness using a conventional, familiar vocabulary that readers will understand. That is the wine writer’s dilemma.

Given this daunting task and the need to describe the kinds of experiences a wine makes available, what is a wine critic to do?

What do human beings do when confronted with something that needs description and characterization for which there is no conventional category? We turn to metaphor. Wines are commonly described as brooding, assertive, playful or sexy—all are metaphors. Although it is seldom mentioned, the aromas standardly attributed to wine are usually metaphors. A Cabernet Sauvignon contains no black cherry. It may smell vaguely like a black cherry but the word “like” there is important. “Black cherry” is a likeness, a metaphor that approximates the aroma of some Cabernets. But these descriptions have become so commonplace that they are no longer treated as figurative just as “that is a deep problem” or “a road runs through my property” are considered literal even though they started out as metaphors.

It is with regard to the texture and mouthfeel of wine where metaphorical references become explicit although these too are so familiar they have become conventional elements of our wine vocabulary. We routinely speak of wines as having length, as caressing and round, as assertive or having an acid kick, as languid or soft as if these were literal descriptions. Without metaphor there would be very little to say about a wine. Of course, we are in full- blown figurative territory when tasting notes include reference to a wine’s personality as sexy, brooding, reserved or exuberant. “Wine is a person” is perhaps the most ubiquitous source of metaphor to describe the distinctiveness of a wine. It is also the sort of metaphor that is the source of the vociferous objections to contemporary winespeak that have become a staple in the press and in some academic papers.

These complaints seem to add up to the claim that metaphorical attributions are too subjective and ambiguous. When a wine is described as “a streetwalker” or “sinewy” it’s unclear to some readers what features of the wine are being described. The further inference drawn is that these are just attempts to make wine descriptions less monotonous or to call attention to the writer’s talent for verbal calisthenics without getting at something important about the wine.

I think these objections are misguided. Beginning next week in a series of posts I will show why.

Breaking the Wine Rules

05 Monday Aug 2019

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breaking rulesThere is an unwritten rule about blogging; if you want your post to be read take someone to the woodshed, be critical, or ream ‘em a new one. That will attract attention.

But I’m going to break the rules here and just agree wholeheartedly with Jamie Goode’s post about rule following. After pointing out that people accustomed to following grammatical rules that make no practical sense—rules against split infinitives, proper use of data as a plural noun, etc.—have a hard time accepting their routine violation, he claims the same could be said of wine:

The same seems to be true with wine. When people have been through wine exams, or train as winemakers, they have a fixed notion of what wine should be. This is seen most clearly when it comes to discussions on natural wines, and their supposed faultiness.

He goes on to insist that in a finished wine, minor flaws, a bit of VA, brett, or oxidation can be a virtue.

We are all different and we are all free to own our own preferences. But we should be cautious before we dismiss or criticize wines that fall outside of our normal parameters for what is ‘correct’, recognizing that we humans have a tendency to become staunch defenders of rules that we have learned.

I couldn’t agree more. If the culture of wine is going to grow and if wine is to reach its aesthetic potential there have to rule breakers and people who are willing to expand the boundaries of what counts as “normal”. As Jamie writes “beauty is not the absence of flaws”. I’ve been making a similar case about beauty (here, here and here.)

But here is where the analogy with grammatical rules breaks down. People violate arbitrary, impractical grammatical rules because it’s tedious and time consuming to follow them when they yield no gain in communicative clarity. Wine rules are not broken because they are tedious but because striving for singularity and distinctiveness demands it.