Tag Archives: wine tasting

Does Wine Have a Rhythm?

07 Thursday Nov 2019

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musical notesThat sounds like a curious question at first. Rhythm refers to the placement of sounds through time. But an ordered pattern of blinking lights might also have a rhythm. Sound is not essential to the concept; anything that displays an ordered sequence through time could have a rhythm. So what is the ordered pattern through time that a wine displays? A wine’s features aren’t displayed all at once. As the wine moves across the palate we sense some of its features sequentially. Usually the fruit appears first, flavor and aroma notes emerge and disappear, at some point we begin to sense the acidity, and then the tannins, and as the wine evolves in the mouth these components expand and contract, jostling for our attention, their relative degrees of prominence fluctuating with differing degrees of duration and acceleration.

So I think wines do have rhythm. The question is does that matter. Is their some relation between rhythm and quality? Music of course has rhythm but there isn’t some type of rhythm that is preferred by listeners. What matters is not the type of rhythm but the cohesion of the rhythmic elements and especially of the musicians playing the rhythm. Yet, in any reasonable complex piece of music, the musicians are not playing the same rhythm. Cohesion is not based on sameness but on variations that seem to communicate with each other. (Listen to Ron Carter and Tony Williams on Miles Davis’ Seven Steps to Heaven for an example.)

That gives us a clue about how a wine’s rhythm matters. As the various components of a wine are displayed through time they do not appear in unison but diverge sharply and may appear to be in tension with the acidity straining to be noticed, the tannins relentlessly becoming more prominent, the fruit power trying to hold onto its dominance. Some wines display a great deal of tension; in other wines the struggle for attention is more reserved and full of finesse. But in any case, in a wine of high quality the various elements are constraining each other, working together at key moments to reign each other in, each providing an anchor that the other’s play off of. Even a display of searing acidity or chewy tannins seems to hit the mark. Wine critics used to call this the “knit” of a wine which is helpful but doesn’t describe the dynamic element. In the end, great wines have a sense of effortless resolution. All that tension finally settles on a direction with all the contrasting elements finding a balance point that seems complete. No component failed to deliver, but nothing was left exposed and the dominant elements feel properly limited by contrasting elements. The final movement settled into its pocket.

If I had to choose one property of a wine that is the most reliable indicator of quality it would be this sense of effortless, rhythmic resolution. There is no single word to describe it. “Elegance” or “gracefulness” is appropriate for some wines but there are some wild and wooly beasts—a great Amarone for instance–that nevertheless achieve this resolution.

Wine Lovers Carry On

14 Monday Oct 2019

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raising a wine glassThose of us who are fascinated by wine live in a world where we looked upon by most people as at best peculiar and at worst a total wastrel. If get your thrills tracking wine quality through variations in soil, weather, climate  and production style you’re a geek. If you provide detailed, public analysis of those variations you’re pretentious. Spending hard earned dollars on  a distinctive bottling borders on immorality. And heaven forbid if you write about wine and try to capture its complexity you’re guilty logorrhea (i.e. excessive verbosity, too much jabber jabber).

So I found Lauren Mowery’s recent article in Wine Enthusiast  to be immensely inspirational. Entitled “Pliny the Elder, the First Wine Critic and Why He Still Matters” Mowery traces some of our current practices in wine appreciation back to the ancient Romans especially the great military officer and author, Pliny, who had an interest in all things fermented.

Pliny’s extensive writings on “first growths” encompassed Falernian, the legendary wine of ancient Rome. This grape from Campania came from the slopes of Mount Massico, today the Falerno del Massico DOC.

He recorded the best sites of modern-day Lombardy, Venice, Emilia-Romagna, Marche and Tuscany. He detailed the finest vineyards south of Naples, along the Adriatic coast, where he acknowledged the high-quality estate of Mamertine from Messina, Sicily.

Pliny wrote of the healing properties of Prosecco. He recounted the rich, tannic wines of Pompeii, which was recreated recently using two ancient strains (Piedirosso and Olivella) in an experiment to taste wines of his times.

In other words, many of the preoccupations of wine lovers today have not only deep historical origins but continuity over two millennia.

The fact that a practice has such a tradition behind it does not in itself make it valuable. Some traditions are better left behind. But the fact that very different people in vastly different societies under utterly different historical conditions were serious and knowledgeable about wine appreciation shows that the allure of fine taste captures something deep in the human imagination.

Ridiculing wine tasting is a bit like ridiculing Shakespeare or great athleticism. You can do so but what you’re revealing about yourself isn’t pretty.

Wine Metaphors and Interpretation

03 Thursday Oct 2019

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wine pouredLast week I linked to several examples of what has become a favorite theme in wine media—complaints about wine language, especially the use of metaphors that make use of the features of a person to describe a wine. (See here,  here  and here for examples of the complaints)

The complaint is almost always that metaphorical attributions are too subjective and ambiguous and serve no purpose other than advertising the writer’s facility with words.

There are several things to say about these objections. One is that the problem is not unique to wine. Unless metaphors have become dead metaphors there will always be ambiguities about how to interpret them in any field. Poetic metaphors are obviously complex and difficult to parse, but even conversational metaphors such as “Bill is a bulldozer” or “Jane is a block of ice” may raise questions about which features of Bill or Jane the metaphor is highlighting. You would have to know something about Bill or Jane before being confident about what the metaphor means. All living metaphors require interpretation.

In interpreting metaphors, context is essential. To grasp what a “sinewy” wine might be, one must know something about the range of textural and tactile differences in wine and have tasted enough to sense the differences between them. To know what Robert Parker meant when he referred to the 2001 Batard-Montrachet as a “streetwalker”, you have to know that some wines are flamboyant and expressive, but unrefined, superficial and lacking substance. The complaint about ambiguity is often made from the perspective of a wine novice. But, of course, wine metaphors will be opaque to a novice. Understanding a metaphor will often require refined capacities to taste. It would be a peculiar writing practice if its most excellent examples were aimed only at novices. We don’t have such an expectation regarding the language used in art appreciation, baseball, or bird watching. Some of the vocabulary of any domain of expertise will be opaque to novices.

As to more experienced tasters, many metaphors have become so common they require only a bit of thought to figure out what they mean. Wines are routinely described as “generous”, “brooding” or “shy”. Surely, these pose no special interpretive difficulties for someone with some tasting experience and there is no reason to think these are more subjective than, for instance, aroma notes. Thus, it’s only new metaphors that have no established history of conventional use that might be troublesome. Which brings me to the most important reason why metaphor is essential. There is no off-the-shelf vocabulary for describing holistic properties that also get at a wine’s individuality without employing metaphor. Individual fruit and flower descriptors will only get you so far.

I will explain what I mean by this next week when I continue this series of posts on wine metaphors.

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.

Metaphor and the Meaning of Aroma

22 Thursday Aug 2019

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wine term cloudThe wine industry faces many immediate challenges from climate change to competition from beer and spirits. But among those challenges is one you seldom hear discussed—we live in a culture that lacks a developed sensibility for aroma. Wine educator Deborah Parker Wong’s post on this topic is especially insightful.

In his 1966 book The Hidden Dimension, anthropologist E.T. Hall states that when it comes to olfaction, Americans are culturally underdeveloped. He attributed this deficiency to the extensive use of deodorants and the suppression of odor in public places, a cultural norm that has resulted in a land of olfactory blandness….Because odors have been repressed, they’ve never been coded by our culture; there’s no model in place to organize our olfactory life experience and, as such, our response to smells is measured in terms of relative pleasure. Simply put, we only react to odor. By contrast, cultures that attach symbolic meaning to odors like the Suya people of Brazil and the Onge of the Andaman Islands are said to think in smell.

This is why it is so difficult to talk about wine in a meaningful way. We can list aroma notes but it remains just a list with no larger meaning because we lack concepts that would make the notes meaningful. As Deborah points out, it’s not just a matter of lacking words that refer to aroma. The aroma wheel and tasting grids developed by certification organizations give us a rich descriptive vocabulary. What we lack is an understanding of how aromas can acquire symbolic meaning and provoke memory, and she goes on to describe how more scent-based cultures use aroma to make sense of their experience.

If we are going to expand our appreciation of aroma we will have to make more extensive use of metaphor to organize our experience. There is compelling evidence gathered by George Lakoff and others that all cognition and conceptual innovation is based on metaphor.

Which is why I get incensed when pundits in the wine world complain as soon as someone begins to use metaphor to describe wine. I was reminded recently of the classic in this genre published in Slate in 2000 by a professor of viticulture Jon Cohen:

Whenever I read that a wine is “lush and creamy,” “elegant,” “lovely,” “graceful,” “generous,” “luscious,” or “smooth,” I gag. These days, I gag a lot.

I’ve had cheesecake that’s lush and creamy. Tequila and whiskey divide into smooth and rough. My wife is elegant, lovely, graceful, and even luscious. But contrary to what you read on the back of some bottles, these terms are meaningless when applied to wine.

This is the kind of bullshit that renders language useless in the development of meaning and threatens our ability to communicate about wine. Metaphor pervades ordinary discourse. “How do you spend your time these days?” “He immersed himself in the problem”. “The bar seems dead tonight”. These are all metaphors and they are crucial to our ability to communicate.  Obviously the list of useful metaphors is endless; what would language be like without them? The wine world cannot do without metaphor—even fruit descriptors are metaphors. There are no cherries in your Cabernet.

No doubt some metaphors are difficult to understand and some miss their mark; it takes talent to deploy them precisely. But without metaphor there would be no critical vocabulary and no way to relate disparate domains of experience.

As Parker Wong suggests, wine will acquire depth of meaning when we learn to deploy conceptual frameworks that link aroma and flavor to other domains of experience. And metaphor, symbolic meaning, will be fundamental to that process.

Wine is a Process; Forget About Consistency

10 Wednesday Jul 2019

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process metaphysicsWine statistics guru David Morrison has done great work evaluating the degree to which wine scores are consistent between critics and repeatable by the same critic when re-tasting. His data shows a lack of consistency and repeatability.

The main issue, as I see it, is the lack of repeatability of the ratings between tasters. I have previously noted (The poor mathematics of wine-quality scores): Most wine commentators’ wine-quality scores are personal to themselves. That is, the best we can expect from each commentator is that their wine scores can be compared among themselves so that we can work out which wines they liked and which ones they didn’t.

In this recent post he shows that when wines are re-tasted by the same critic there is nevertheless substantial variation in wine scores:

So, about half of the wines were better and half were the same or worse when re-tasted 2 years later, which is what might be expected from random chance. While bottle variation may be a factor here, it is unlikely to change the results (although it might determine which wines did better or worse).

His conclusion, which is almost certainly true, is that wine scores lack the mathematical precision suggested by the use of a quantitative score.

It’s good to have this statistical analysis of wine scores. But we really shouldn’t be surprised by this lack of consistency. It conforms to everything we know and generally acknowledge about wine. Wine grapes change from year to year because of weather variations. Fermentations,  barrel ageing and bottle ageing involve constant, unpredictable variation. Even once in the glass, wine continues to change and so do we as we taste it. Our impression of a wine can fluctuate depending on what else we’ve been tasting, and our preferences change over time as well. Wine is inherently a vague object, some of its features difficult to detect even with training. Unlike the clarity of objects directly in our visual field, wine gives us only hints of flavors, scents, and textures all of which can be influenced by environmental factors.

Wine will not sit still for our analysis. Understanding a wine is like tracking a ghost through fog. It’s the variation that makes wine interesting.

Anyone who has spent much time around wine knows all of this already. So why would anyone expect wine critics to be consistent? Why would we want them to be consistent? The demand for consistency and precise judgment violates everything we know about wine. Yet that demand never goes away.

In this wine, is not alone. Our civilization is based on the idea that behind the churn and flux of life there must be something stable and unchanging. Despite evidence to the contrary we still can’t get free of that assumption.

Wine’s Culture Wars are a Sign of Health

26 Wednesday Jun 2019

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wine warsI’ve spent the month of June traveling while only occasionally taking a peek at the wine news. I arrived home today to discover I’ve missed three articles that have stirred controversy and attracted much attention in the wine world.  Jancis Robinson lamented the divisiveness of controversies surrounding natural wine. Cathy Huyghe interviewed Alice Feiring, the tireless natural wine advocate, who was a recent victim of a vicious, misogynistic parody by the Hosemaster of Wine. And New York Times’ wine columnist Eric Asimov launched a broadside against the tasting note and wishes for a new form of wine criticism that … well, It’s not clear what he wishes for but he doesn’t like tasting notes.

As Jeremy Parzen noted today on his blog, the subtext in all of these articles is the influence of Robert Parker, inventor of both the 100 pt. scale and the floridly written tasting note, all in service of promoting the high-alcohol, heavily oaked monsters that natural wine lovers abhor. Even in retirement, Parker haunts our consciousness; we can’t seem to let go of him. (As an aside, I wholly agree with Jeremy that Parker’s advocacy did not launch the international style of wine, which was already in the works well before Parker came on the scene.)

I wrote about Parker recently at Three Quarks Daily. I won’t rehearse the details here but to briefly summarize, I think Parker was a hero who helped provide a much needed spark to wine quality in the 1980’s. But he had passed his “sell-by” date by the end of the 90’s. What was genuinely revolutionary at its inception became staid and conventional. The fact that his influence continued long after he had lost the ability to say something new is testimony to the peculiar tendency of the wine community to act like herd animals, petrified of straying from a well worn path.

As to the divisiveness of this debate we’re having about natural wine, that is not something lamentable; it should be celebrated. It shows that people care about wine quality; we don’t debate what we don’t care about. The controversy is the sign of a healthy aesthetic community which is gaining maturity and discarding the fear  of deviating from a conventional path.

Jeremy has his own lament, however. He laments the fact that his wine students, largely European millennials, lack someone who speaks for them:

Every June when the term comes to an end, I can’t help but think to myself: they have no model for wine writing and they lack a wine critic hero with and to whom they can identify and aspire. Where are their Feirings, Asimovs, and Lawrence Osbornes? (The three writers who inspired my own career.) Where is their Parker, for that matter?

But I’m not sure that what’s lacking is a model for wine appreciation. Perhaps it’s time to get rid of models. There is after all no model for discovering genuine creativity. Aesthetics is about experimentation and you can’t know if something is good until you try it. What is exciting about young wine lovers today is that they’re willing to thumb their nose at conventional models of wine appreciation and take a chance on something unfamiliar. This is the spirit that will sustain the industry.

Which brings me to Asimov’s article. It’s a real head scratcher. He raises legitimate questions about wine critics who taste too many wines in a day and give each only a cursory tasting. He rightfully points out that tasting a wine out of context without knowing the producer and what she is trying to achieve may not be the best way to judge a wine. This “assembly line” practice of tasting is surely less than ideal.

But his concrete suggestion is this:

Perhaps a better way of making useful recommendations to consumers is to evaluate producers rather than particular bottles. Producers can be assessed for their styles of wine, their methods of production and farming, how they think about wine and so on.

First, I should point out that evaluating producers is what many wine bloggers do. They visit wineries, interview winemakers, and report on the whole line up of wines tasted in context. Wine magazines also have feature articles that focus on producers.  So I’m not sure Asimov is proposing anything new here. But more importantly, it isn’t obvious how you can assess a winemaker’s style without tasting and reporting on individual bottles.

He goes on:

Wine writers have so much to offer beyond the bottle reviews: introducing unfamiliar regions, grapes and producers while revisiting old ones; offering critical appraisals of styles; and assessing what’s new and what’s ripe for rediscovery.

That’s all well and good but how do you introduce unfamiliar regions or new producers without discussing particular bottles from those regions or producers you want people to know about? The suggestion seems to be analogous to discussing Picasso without discussing any of Picasso’s work. I came away from Asimov’s article unsure about whether there is a real proposal there rather than merely a complaint.

The Myth of the Myth of Minerality

13 Monday May 2019

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rocks in the vineyardVicki Denig writes a balanced article on minerality despite an ambiguous headline and a misleading introduction. Entitled “Nailing the Myth of Minerality”, she introduces the post by asserting “Minerality is perhaps the wine industry’s most overused, underwhelming, and misunderstood descriptors of them all.”

What’s wrong with this? For starters, “minerality” isn’t a myth; it’s a metaphor. And it’s neither overused nor underwhelming. She gets the “misunderstood” right but it’s misunderstood in part because of headlines like this. Happily she interviews enough somms and winemakers who routinely use the term and find it useful, so in the end the post leaves the impression that minerality is “a thing” as she calls it.

“Minerality” is a general term we use to describe wines that exude aromas such as flint, crushed rock, wet stone, or sea breeze or that have textures of chalk, hard stone, gravel or a kind of electrical snap on the finish. Since it is clear from tasting notes that many, many wines have these features, and they are highly prized among some wine critics and winemakers,  I don’t see what is “overused” or “underwhelming” about the descriptor.

The whole controversy really comes from some scientists talking out of school. Scientists have definitively shown that minerals in the soil do not transfer to the vines or fruit, and many (although not all) scientists use that fact to berate wine writers who use the term to describe wine. But although the fact that soil characteristics are not transferred to the wine is an important and interesting scientific claim, it is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether the term “minerality” is a useful or accurate descriptor.

We are not literally tasting rocks in the wine anymore than we are literally tasting cherry, peach, or barnyard soil in the wine. Most wine descriptors are metaphorical. Wine literally tastes like grapes; there are no cherries, peaches, or soil in your wine. These are all metaphors. But that fact has little to do with whether these descriptors are useful or accurate.

No doubt there isn’t a precisely established definition of “minerality”—it’s a metaphor!  (Sorry for screaming) While still “living”, a metaphor will not have a precise definition. That is why metaphors are useful—they flexibly and creatively pick out properties for which there is no literal description.

Denig quotes geologist Brenna Quigley who, to her credit, actually does seem to understand the usefulness of the term.

The science is quite clear that the vine is not literally picking up minerals from the soil and transferring them into the wine,” she explains, adding that this does not mean that experiences that tasters may have and describe as minerality do not exist.

This is exactly right.

This “controversy” would go away if a few more scientists had paid attention during English class. We should listen to scientists when they talk about science. When it comes to language we should listen to people who write and talk for a living.

(I suspect, by the way that Denig’s headline, is deliberately ambiguous. Is it the association of minerality with mythology that is being nailed or the allegedly inappropriate use of the term “minerality”? It is a clever headline. Apparently, Ms. Denig paid attention in English class.)

Wine Scores are Not the Problem

09 Thursday May 2019

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wine evaluation 3Polemics against wine scores are a perennial crowd pleaser sort of like your favorite supermarket Chardonnay that gets nods of approval from any crowd you serve it to. But I’m still waiting to find an argument that is persuasive largely because wine scores tend to be an all purpose whipping boy for some problem or deficiency that is only tangentially related to the actual practice of scoring.  The recent article by Ian Cauble in The Robb Report is no exception but it’s worth going through the argument to see where it misses the mark.

The argument is as follows:

(1) An elegant, classically proportioned Cabernet gets a middling score from an influential critic.

(2) The middling score reflected the fact that the critic prefers riper, more powerful wines.

(3) The middling score will cause the classic wine to be overlooked by consumers because the critic has clout.

(4) Winemakers chase scores by making over-ripe wines that critics like thus misleading consumers about what they should be drinking.

(5) Therefore, classically proportioned wines are endangered by the practice of scoring wine.

Therefore we should stop scoring wines.

What is wrong with this argument? Well, first of all, an argument that essentially asserts that “we should stop scoring wines because a wine I like received a low score” is a bit like saying “if I can’t win I’ll take my ball and go home”. But let’s look beyond the narcissism for the sake of the argument.

The more general problem is that there is nothing inherent in the practice of giving scores that demands that ripeness  be valued over elegance. The problem (if it is a problem) is the critic’s taste in wine not the fact he/she gave it a score. If critics prefer more elegant wines (as for instance Jancis Robinson does) then they can give the more elegant wines a higher score.

Secondly, it’s worth mentioning that lots of people like ripe, powerful wines. It is a very popular wine style. The argument assumes that consumers like these wines only because critics tell them they should. But where is the evidence for this? It is not only less informed, casual consumers that like them. After all serious connoisseurs are among the customers of Napa cult wines. We might lament the taste preferences of the general public (I do) but that is not the fault of the score.

Thirdly, in the absence of a score, the critic would have had to rely solely on a verbal description to communicate his/her assessment. Would this low scoring wine have received a better assessment if it were entirely verbal. Not if the critic is honest and accurate. Why does “thin, tart and lacks expression” put the wine in a better light than the number? The score does obviate the need for a consumer to read and interpret a complex verbal description. Perhaps there is an implicit claim here that consumers would be better informed if they had to read the tasting note rather than rely on a score. That is undoubtedly true but I still don’t see how that would put the elegant Cabernet in a better light. Furthermore, I doubt that in the absence of a score, consumers would be more inclined to read and interpret the tasting note. As a professor I can tell you, reading and interpreting are neither enjoyable nor easy for most people.

Although it isn’t explicitly stated, perhaps the argument assumes that riper, more powerful wines tend to stand out in a tasting flight more readily than less powerful, more elegant wines. I hear this claim quite often. Its truth is hard to assess but it isn’t obviously true. If most wines in a flight were ripe and powerful, the spare elegant wine might stand out.  Furthermore, assuming professional critics care about their accuracy, I would think they would consciously guard against this bias by giving elegant wines more attention and consideration.

Nothing in this argument clearly points to the practice of scoring wines as the problem. One might argue the problem is the herd mentality of powerful critics beholden to a wine style that is beginning to lose its luster. Or perhaps the problem is winemakers who lack integrity and try to make a popular wine rather than the wine they want to make. Eliminating scores won’t solve either problem.

Wine scores are not going away. Both consumers and people in the trade find them to be useful. Of course they don’t begin to capture the virtues of a wine. But no one claims they do. Even Robert Parker insists that people should read the tasting note if they want to understand the quality of a wine. The score is just a convenient reference point for contextualizing the quality level of a wine.

The real problem is that wine scores are widely misunderstood. They are not measures of intrinsic quality. They are not the sum total of precisely calculated categories of quality. The only thing they could possibly measure is a subjective preference on the part of the critic at the time the wine was tasted compared to other wines in the critic’s experience. That is important information but it isn’t the word of God.

Soulful Wines and the Failure of Recognition

25 Thursday Apr 2019

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soulful winesBeing preoccupied (or perhaps obsessed is a better word) by philosophical puzzles is my occupational hazard. As I noted last week, wine importer Terry Theise’s wonderful writing on wine presents many philosophical puzzles. Great wine induces reverie, he says, which is a necessary mental state for appreciating fine wine. “Elusive, incandescent moments of meaning” are the main attraction of wine according to Theise, and wine’s personality traits offer “soulful moments” that speak to our deepest commitments and values.

It’s not that I disagree with Theise on any of this. I quite agree with him. The puzzle is how fermented grape juice manages to accomplish these expressive acts. How does wine move the mind and heart?

I think the initial experience that brings about these “incandescent moments of meaning” is a failure of recognition. Here is what I mean by that.

When experienced wine tasters taste wine, in the typical case, we use habits built up over many years, our background knowledge regarding varietals, regions, and winemaking methods, and our capacity for retrieving explicit  memories to bring order to and make sense out of what we taste and smell. As we bring all of that to bear on an analysis of the wine in front  of us, we have to deploy conceptual categories that enable us to organize that experience. Aroma descriptors, judgments about balance, intensity or length, etc. are not merely sensations but also invoke concepts. We report that the wine is tart, bold or lush. We might say it’s a good example of Marsannay or the Sonoma Coast or alternatively mention that as a Pinot Noir it is out of balance and showing too much alcohol. These are all ways of conceptualizing the wine and they involve bringing recognition skills to the tasting experience.

We use these recognition skills to “wrestle the wine to the ground” as Theise says by passing our sensations of the wine through a battery of analytic categories.

The tasting experiences that Theise extolls by contrast are tasting experiences where recognition fails. He might know that the wine he’s tasting is a Riesling from a particular producer in the Mosel and from a particular vintage, but that recognition doesn’t bring closure. There is something about the wine that escapes the conceptual categories because none of those analytical categories are capable of capturing these sensations. In other words there appears to be no way to assimilate these sensations to previous experience in a way that feels complete with no residue. He’s confronted with a unique individual for which there are no ready-made ways of understanding it.

He writes: “When a fragrance is evocative yet indistinct—when it doesn’t specify its cognate (such as lemons or peaches or salami or whatever)—it seems to bypass the analytical faculty and go straight to your imagination and from there you climb about the fugue state directly to your soul…”

That is a failure of recognition.

At that point, what does the mind do? Some people, most people perhaps, might just say “wow” and leave it at that. But that would be to miss an opportunity. Because that failure of recognition is at the very heart of creativity. For someone like Theise in his pursuit of beauty, when recognition fails he switches to a kind of interrogative attention that sends the mind cascading through a series of possibilities. That sense of je ne sais quoi poses a problem—the mind must create the connection or category that will make sense of the experience and solve the problem.

How we sort through that series of possibilities will be my next obsession after I finish this bottle of Mourvèdre.