Tag Archives: wine tasting

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.

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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.

Does Great Wine Mix with Great Friends?

15 Monday Apr 2019

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wine and friendsIt is an article of faith in the wine community that wine is meant to be served with food and should always be shared among friends. It is certainly true that wine enhances most meals and brings life and conviviality to social occasions. But I’m not sure all wines are destined for the communal table. I’ve been reading through Terry Theise’s recent book What Makes a Wine Worth Drinking: In Praise of the Sublime, and I find lots to agree with in this quote:

One evening I served a wine to several guests and wished I hadn’t. Not because they were unworthy of that wine—they were more worthy than I was if it came to that—but because the wine was so noble and galvanic I wanted to be led away into its reverie. But a host has obligations, not least among them not to be vacant and pre-occupied.  (Sometimes I wonder if great wine is inimical to socializing,  but follow  that idea where it takes you and you risk sounding misanthropic.)

Really great wines provoke thought and stimulate the imagination. They demand concentration over an extended time and flourish within silence. Too much commotion means you miss much of what such a wine has to offer. When I’m opening a special bottle at home, I want the bustle of me getting dinner on the table to be out of the way. Of course sharing a great wine with family or friends is also a consummate pleasure but especially so in a small group of like-minded devotees who will not be offended by me being “vacant and pre-occupied”.

Last night I had the pleasure of sharing several gorgeous wines with my tasting group of about 20 friends at a restaurant. It was a glorious evening, the wines were extraordinary, and the conversation delightful. The job of hosting the event was widely shared but I’m still expected to describe and comment on the wines. With only a few minutes to ponder a tasting pour and come up with comments I felt like at the end of the evening I needed to apologize to each wine for being too brusque and ungracious. So much beauty was lost in the press of time management and social obligation. They each deserved more of my attention.

This is of course a problem with no solution. The point of a tasting group is to share the experience. It is much worse to be unfair to friends than to be unfair to a wine. But there was nevertheless something sacrificed that should not go unheeded.

The Greek word for human is anthropos and misein means “to hate”, so to be misanthropic is to hate humans. The Greek word for wine is “oinos”. Is “misoinoic” a word? Perhaps it should be.

Metaphor is Indispensible to Wine Criticism

03 Wednesday Apr 2019

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flying fruitPeople who write about wine, especially people who write wine reviews, are often derided for their flowery, elaborate flavor and texture descriptors. Some of the complainants are consumers baffled by what descriptors such as “big-boned” or “flamboyant” might mean. Other complainants are experts of some sort who wish wine language had the precision of scientific discourse. The Journal of Wine Economists went so far as to call wine writers “bullshit artists”. (Since I call economists bullshit artists rather often, I’ll take that as a compliment)

The problem with all these complaints is that they are tilting at windmills. Although we have a rich and highly developed vocabulary for talking about wine it is thoroughly metaphorical. That is because there is no literal vocabulary for describing wine. Even the fruit, vegetal and earth aromas that have become commonplace in wine descriptions are metaphors. A Cabernet Sauvignon is not literally a black cherry. It may smell vaguely like a black cherry but the word “like” there is the tell. “Black cherry” is a likeness, a metaphor useful for approximating the aroma of some Cabernets. No fruit descriptor we use to describe wine is close enough to its source, i.e. the actual fruits, to count as a literal description.

We compare wine aromas to fruits and other edible substances because we have no alternative.

And, no, a scientific vocabulary will not come close to usefully describing a wine outside the laboratory or winery where technical discussions need such a vocabulary. It’s fine to point out that a wine has a distinct odor of pyrazines laced with hints of thiols if you like. But pyrazines can smell like bell pepper or olive, thiols like grapefruit or gooseberry. And those differences matter.To claim that a Sauvignon Blanc contains pyrazines is almost tautological. Of course it does; that aroma is part of what defines Sauvignon Blanc. That is far too generic a description to be useful to readers of wine reviews.

What the reader needs to know is how the aroma and flavor notes are working together to create an overall impression of the wine. No list of chemical compounds or esters will give you that. Chemical compounds don’t exist in isolation; they interact with other compounds to form emergent properties such as harmony, explosiveness, finesse and flamboyance, that are not reducible to the underlying chemical properties. It is those emergent properties that we enjoy and any description that leaves them out will be misleading.

What we do need to investigate is how well metaphors serve the goals of wine criticism. To answer that we need an account of what the goals of wine criticism are, a topic I’ve been covering recently in several posts, as well as an account of how metaphor works to advance those goals. Are some metaphors better than others? What makes them so? How do readers know what wine metaphors mean? And how best can we teach them what they mean.

That sounds like the start of another series of posts.

Confusion Over Reduction in Wines

28 Thursday Mar 2019

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confusedVicki Denig performs a valuable service by explaining one of the new wine buzzwords—reduction. Unfortunately, the winemakers she interviewed weren’t quite on the same page.

“Reduction” is not really a new term. Reduction refers to a wine that has been protected from oxygen exposure. The phenomenon has been around since winemakers have been adding sulfur or leaving wine on the lees without racking. (It’s called reduction because the wine or juice molecules in the absence of oxygen are gaining an election thus making the overall charge more negative.)

Winemakers now use the term frequently because more and more winemakers are practicing reductive winemaking as a way of preserving fresh fruit expression, and so it has crept into the wine lexicon as a way of explaining what is going on with a wine.

It had always been my assumption that wines in a reductive stage smell like garlic, matchsticks, or in extreme cases rotten eggs or burnt rubber. (Happily the effect usually goes away when oxygen is introduced so we typically don’t get rotten eggs in our Chardonnay)

Unfortunately, winemakers themselves (at least the ones quoted in the article) seem to be confused about which aromas indicate reduction.

Rajit Parr of Sandhi Wines says,

Reduction happens due to fermentation, it’s a byproduct. So minerals can make an affect on it, but it’s not a smell of minerals. When people say ‘Oh yeah, this wine has a lot of minerality’ because it has reduction, that’s an incorrect statement.”

But then:

In Central Otago, Francis Hutt, winemaker at Carrick Winery, also supports positive reduction. For him, great examples tend to show stone, flint, and “semi-industrial” flavors.

Hmm. Stone and flint are rather common descriptions of mineral aromas at least as that troubled term “minerality” has been used recently. [Most minerals don’t have an aroma; it’s a general term used to indicate anything rock or gravel-like in a wine]

And Abe Schoener winemaker at Red Hook Winery and founder of the Scholium Project reports:

On the positive side, for Schoener, notes of roasted coffee, chocolate, dark and savory notes, to notes of rocks, hot stony surfaces, ocean, and even notes of animal excrement, can bring positive, layered characteristics to a wine.

Coffee and chocolate I thought were oak derived aromas. Animal excrement, aka “barnyard,” is a “brett” derivative. Rocks and sea breeze, again, we’ve been classifying as minerality.

So is the take home point that we should be using the term “reduction” instead of “minerality”?  That won’t fly because lots of wines smell of rocks that are conventionally made, without reduction.

So after reading this article I am more confused than ever. It’s the job of philosophy to confuse readers; not journalism.

Six Types of Wine Tasting Experiences

27 Wednesday Mar 2019

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wine tastingWe drink wine in a variety of situations. Almost all wine drinkers drink wine to accompany meals, loosen inhibitions at a party, relax after work or to savor while cooking dinner. Many share wines with family and friends, visit wineries on weekends or attend tastings where education is part of the agenda.  Some wine lovers study a wine and savor it over several hours; others taste wine professionally. In most cases there is something else going on when the wine is poured; distracted drinking is unavoidable.

Given this diversity of situations in which wine is consumed, we need a variety of approaches to wine tasting in order for our level of attention to fit the situation. In fact for many people, their wine drinking is stuck at one of these levels.

It seems to me there are 6 such categories that organize our level of attention and type of focus.

Background Tasting

Background tasting involves tasting when there is something else going on that requires your nearly full attention. At best you can occasionally steal a moment to taste and think about the wine, but your attentiveness to the wine dips in and out and you can find yourself consuming a glass without ever having focused on it. Dinner parties, if you’re the conversational type, usually require background tasting. People who drink wine out of habit or because it’s there may never taste any other way.

Whimsical Tasting

In whimsical tasting there is some opportunity and  willingness to savor but our attention to the wine consists of intermittent moments of seeking aroma notes or enjoying the finish. We taste whatever we feel like, with attention bouncing around like a jar fly,  but there is no attempt to organize our experience or gather thoughts about the wine. I would imagine this category to be typical of most wine drinkers who are neither connoisseurs, students of wine, nor industry people

Atomistic Tasting

In this category one sees wine appreciation as something to aspire to and the taster may have learned a bit about varietals or wine regions. But the focus is on what is widely accepted and discussed as something to be noticed about a wine. There is searching behavior going on as the taster tries to identify aroma or flavor notes but at best only isolated parts of the wine are identified without attending to how they fit together or what they mean. In some cases this kind of tasting experience may be more about appearing sophisticated or hip with no effort to genuinely comprehend the wine. But usually this is just an early stage in acquiring genuine expertise. Focusing on what other people say is part of learning how to taste.

Narcissistic Tasting

The narcissistic taster is a genuine connoisseur with experience and good taste. But her response to the wine never gets beyond I like or I don’t like it. There is no attempt to understand why the wine is good or bad or to communicate reasons for her judgments based on features of the wine. The wine itself is seldom the focus of attention—the attention is directed at her own reactions.

Prismatic Tasting

Prisms reveal the complexity of light by refracting light rays that display colors not seem without the prism. There is a kind of wine tasting experience that functions like a prism. No one can engage all the features of a wine at once. Wines are too complex for one-off sampling and only a series of tastes over time, with attention systematically focused on various dimensions of the wine, will get the whole wine into view. For instance, you can’t seek obscure aroma notes while at the same time allowing the wine to induce an imaginative state. The former act of attention requires intense focus while the imaginative state requires relaxed, diffuse focus. Yet, like a prism, that search for aromas can put you in an imaginative state. It can send the mind on a journey enabling you to think of metaphorical attributions that help get the whole wine into view. This is where we get wine descriptors like “brooding”, “a street walker”, or  “the parry and thrust of acidity”. Unfortunately, there are many in the industry who think prismatic tasting should not exist.

Performance Tasting

This is the kind of tasting required to pass difficult certification exams and used by professionals to converse about wine. It is the self-conscious scrutiny of aroma notes and structural characteristics, a narrow field of attention compared to prismatic tasting, which aims to objectively and accurately identify features of the wine that have a bearing on quality and typicity.

The question of which of these types of tasting experiences are genuine aesthetic experiences is important but will have to wait for another day.

This taxonomy was inspired by the taxonomy of listening experiences developed by John T. Lysaker in his very fine book entitled Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports. The term “prismatic listening” was coined by him.