Barry C. Smith
QUESTIONS OF TASTE
The philosophy of wine
224pp. Signal Books Limited. £12.99.
9781904955290
In 1995, a German oenophile and dealer in fine wine called Hardy Rodenstock
hosted a magnificent tasting of rare wines in Munich. It was one of a series
of sumptuous events he has organized over the past few decades; at another,
similarly opulent occasion, held in 1998 at the Hotel Königshof in Munich,
he arranged a vertical tasting of 125 years of the legendary dessert wine
Château d’Yquem; earlier, in 1989, he had prepared a horizontal tasting of a
wide variety of wines from 1929, including a large-format bottle from
Château Ausone in Saint-Émilion, which all other collectors in the world had
forsaken as drunk and disappeared.
Although the luminaries of the wine trade frequented these feasts, the often
maligned American wine critic Robert Parker tended to avoid them. Parker,
who is disparaged by competitor critics for his market-dominating, 100-point
wine-rating scale, and reviled by status-conscious vintners whenever he
scores their offerings below the commercially magic ninety-point threshold,
saw little point in attending, since the wines served, however magnificent,
were completely inaccessible to his primary readership. Still, he did find
his way to the 1995 Munich tasting, a three-day extravaganza he later
described as “the wine event of my lifetime”. There he tasted wines that
most of us may read about but will never experience, wines where the pursuit
of perfection asymptotically approaches its limit. Just as well for us,
perhaps, since it may be a sin to drink them, akin to taking pleasure in the
exquisite taste of a species of fowl we make extinct by eating its last
known member. Then again, such musings are of little import: these wines, if
they are to be found at all, are in any case far too expensive for most of
us.
They were not too expensive for Rodenstock, who has made a handsome living
procuring and selling the world’s rarest wines; and to his guests, who were
also his clients, he was lavish beyond measure. His largesse was perhaps
understandable in that his trade depended on his reputation for purveying
the finest of the fine. Still, that commercial concern, however legitimate,
hardly exhausted his motives on that fabled weekend. Rodenstock did not shy
away from presenting himself as a connoisseur of the first rank, a man
generous and eager to share his riches with others of comparable
discernment, those best placed to extract the fullest and most articulate
pleasure from their drinking, those with palates attuned to nuance and
subtlety, those with the conceptual repertoire needed to verbalize the
affective richness of their experience. Even then, however, in the case of
Rodenstock’s 1921 Pétrus, the adjective-rich Parker was reduced to gushing,
“Out of this universe!” So that would be over 100? When Parker is derided by
competitor critics for his 100-point scale, it is often with a tinge of
disdain for the grotesqueness, the characteristically American crassness, of
the very idea that wine, the citadel of the subjective, could be quantified.
So the illustrious British critic Hugh Johnston scoffs, calling Parker’s
system “pernicious and silly”, and frets proprietorially that something so
facile and jejune “can only do harm to wine in the end”.
What harm is that? Well, perhaps next we shall have guides weighing up the
collection of the Louvre on a similar scale, so that we can slide quickly by
Hans Holbein the Younger’s “Portrait of a Young Girl Smiling”, a meagre if
respectable sixty-seven, in favour of Raphael’s “La Belle Jardinière”, which
scores a handsome ninety-two. Or is it a ninety-three? How, after all, are
such judgements made? Are they not, among other things, absurdly
fine-grained? These worries bring to the fore a point too easily overlooked
in oenological circles, that difficult questions about quantifiability and
quality are not peculiar to the wine world.
Rather, they arise from a more fundamental worry about taste: is not taste
merely subjective? Many suppose so, embracing the contention as self-evident
or, if pressed, mouthing, for its credence value, the Latin tag “de gustibus
non disputandum”. If they are right, what is the “merely” in their “merely
subjective”? If the “merely” is to mean that there is no fact of the matter
as to what makes one wine better or worse than another, that a wine is only
as good as it tastes to the subject currently quaffing it, then questions of
criticism appear largely idle. However much Parker and his detractors
squabble, in the end there is only pleasure and its enjoyment at a
particular moment by a particular subject: just as “push-pin is as good as
poetry”, in the words of Jeremy Bentham, as long as the pleasure of the
subject remains constant, so plonk is as good as Pommard.
Enter, then, the philosophers; and note, straight away, that Bentham’s often
partially quoted dictum places him on the side of the quantifiers, at least
as Mill represents him in his essay “Bentham”, writing that Bentham “says,
somewhere in his works, that, ‘quantity of pleasure being equal, push-pin is
as good as poetry’”. These philosophers see, then, a false contrast between
the unquantifiable subjective and the quantifiable objective. Plainly, for
ill or good, and as nearly any wine retailer will attest, consumers tend to
agree: they rely almost slavishly on expert scoring systems. Even as they
espouse subjectivist sentiments about taste, that is, consumers by their
actions defer to the wine-scorers as experts in the field.
Perhaps there is nothing amiss in their doing so. Consider Hume, himself an
unrepentant subjectivist, in his essay “Of the Standard of Taste”, as he
reflects on the connoisseurship and good taste of the true critic: “Strong
sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by
comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this
valuable character; and the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be
found, is the true standard of taste and beauty”. In the realm of wine,
evidently, Hume himself improved mainly by practice with claret.
The authors collected in Questions of Taste: The philosophy of wine, all like
Hume great champions of self-improvement, address themselves to questions of
subjectivity and taste, quantifiability and pleasure, perception and its
objects, the role of knowledge and judgement in perceptual discernment, and
the possibility of expertise in the arena of fine wine. They are mainly
philosophers, but also winemakers and critics, linguists and biochemists,
all participants in a conference called “Philosophy and Wine: From science
to subjectivity”, held at the Institute of Philosophy in London. One
contributor, Roger Scruton, gamely departs from the analytical orientation
of the volume in favour of an oenological matter he rightly regards as
unduly neglected by philosophical drinkers: the nature of intoxication and
its role in the cultivated life. Scruton brings welcome passion to his
inquiry, and while the reader cannot be certain that he was gathering data
on his subject matter even as he composed his chapter, we do hear him waxing
increasingly lyrical towards its end: “And what we taste in the wine is not
just the fruit and its ferment, but also the peculiar flavour of a landscape
to which the gods have been invited and where they have found a home”.
Nothing else we eat or drink, he reckons, “comes to us with such a halo of
significance, and cursed be the villains who refuse to drink it”.
While his fellow contributors are surely anything but villainous, they mainly
engage sober topics soberly, and regularly to good effect. They prove
themselves well up to the task of situating wine-centred questions within a
larger framework of questions about taste and perception, subjectivity and
objectivity, and aesthetic appraisal more generally. Several authors display
a welcome conceptual control and reflective sophistication about these
topics; and the book earns its keep if only because these are traits badly
lacking in even expert wine criticism. Wine critics, including Parker,
Johnson and the ever delightful Jancis Robinson, who recommends the volume
warmly in a brief foreword, all retreat to subjectivist cover when pressed
on the worth of their recommendations.
Need they be so shy? The wine world wants its experts; some inevitably come
forward to claim the mantle; and then expert and amateur demur, apologizing
for the hierarchy of authority on the grounds that no one can really say
that one wine is superior to another. One chapter in this book, “Wine
Epistemology”, dissects these tendencies in an illuminating way. Its author,
Gloria Origgi, a member of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique
and the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris, concerns herself with the social
epistemology of wine, by regarding the ascendancy of connoisseurs in the
wine world “as an interesting example of a more general process of epistemic
appraisal that underlies our acquisition of expertise in so many different
fields of knowledge and practice”. Along the way, she notes that whatever
his strengths of palate – and no one should doubt that they are formidable –
Parker earns his legitimacy at least in part by being an unimpeachable
champion of the proletariat drinker, a poor pleb who knows himself too often
beaten into submission by the grand tradition and price of wine, but who is
also keenly aware of his own limitations in that vast world. Parker’s wine
credentials turn out, Origgi urges, to be no less moral than oenological.
From her perspective, then, as in other domains, expertise in the wine world
proves to be more than craft knowledge alone; it is also socially sorted and
externally validated. It is primarily for this reason, left unassayed by
Origgi, that the trappings of authority make more than connoisseurship
possible: they simultaneously open a door to all manner of chicanery. This
helps explain why connoisseurs like Hardy Rodenstock tend to hold themselves
aloof from careful scrutiny of the provenance of their portfolios of fine
wine for sale. Rodenstock, or Meinhard Görke as he was called at birth, is
not only an intrepid procurer of improbably illustrious and wildly expensive
bottles – ranging from the forgotten stash of Thomas Jefferson to the lost
hoard of the Tsar – but an expert wine blender of the highest order. When
challenged to certify the authenticity of his offerings, Rodenstock grows by
turns truculent and vague. Undoubtedly possessed of a fine palate, such a
man deflates the pretensions of taste by asking those who wish to possess it
– including especially those who wish to be seen to possess it – to pay
handsomely for the privilege. Better, perhaps, to study the several
instructive and engaging essays in Questions of Taste, even while pondering
its editor’s opening assurance that “Philosophy and wine have many
connections and some similarities”.
Christopher Shields is Tutor in Philosophy, a Fellow of Lady Margaret
Hall, and a University Lecturer at the University of Oxford. He is the
author of Order in Multiplicity, 1999, and Classical Philosophy: A
contemporary introduction, 2003, and the editor of the forthcoming Oxford
Handbook on Aristotle.
