jamie goode's wine blog: smelling...dimly

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

smelling...dimly

The cold which had been threatening to burst at any moment has really clicked into gear, and I can no longer smell all that much. It's a myth (from my experience at least) to say that you can't smell anything when you have a cold, but the clarity of the olfactory perception is certainly much diminished at the moment.

I reckon I could still taste wine OK in my current impaired state (in terms of rough impressions), but I'd be less sure of my perception - that I was actually 'getting' the wine.

The fact that we think we are 'getting' the wine or not is one argument in favour of the idea that wine tasting is, at least in part, objective. There is something there, that is a property of the glass of wine we are drinking, that can be 'got'. Aside from inter-individual differences in perception, the assumption is that the characteristics of a wine - what it tastes like - are properties of that wine.

When I write a tasting note, I first write the name of the wine. Then I write under it the descriptive words - a selection of terms from my sadly rather impoverished vocabulary for tastes and smells - that best describe my perception of that wine. But all the time, the assumption is that the description I have given is of the wine. I am describing the wine, and my descriptive abilities (or lack of them) affect how accurately I carry out this task, but what I am describing is a wine that, if you were there tasting with me, you could experience for yourself. In this sense, the perception of the wine in question is not a private experience.

However, an argument could be made that what I am in fact describing is the interaction between me and the wine, and more specifically, a perceptual event occurring somewhere in my brain. In this sense, our potential for sharing this experience is dependent on us sharing: (1) taste and smell receptors that produce similar electrical activity for the brain to then process; (2) similar higher-level processing of this electrical information in the brain; and (3) similar experience (context) with which to review and further reflect on the perceptual experience (indeed, our experience may shape the perception itself).

It all gets very complicated, and the difficulty I have here in thinking about these issues is in trying to fit what I've learned with neuroscience into a sort of philisophical framework, without being too philosophically naive (which is something I'm prone to).

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8 Comments:

At 7:19 PM, Anonymous Robert said...

[Gallic shrug]

If you think deeply enough then you cannot talk. What is the use of that? The human project is based on "shallow", "naive" thinking: let's keep it that way....:o)

 
At 10:36 PM, Anonymous Doug said...

Is there a point in getting the wine? Understanding something is necessarily constrained by the very limited linguistic frameworks within which we operate. I do a lot of tutored tastings and I realise that although we may all use the same words in describing a wine we may mean quite different things by them. Language is an impure form of description: in tasting notes we use ten words where one will do and we never get close to the heart of the wine. Oh yes, we can anatomise every single detail and pile up the adjectives, but the words are just cold echoes of the emotions we feel when we taste the wine. If you listen to classical music do you appreciate it more by pulling it apart intellectually or do you allow yourself to be swept up in the flow and feel it on the pulses? The time I get the wine (or the picture, or the poem, or the music) is when I am least critical, least straining after meaning, then I don't "get the wine" - it "gets me". I also think, whilst we are in philosophic mode, that the wine in the glass is only one stage in a complex transformative process. The so-called objective transformations are the result of what happens to the grapes in the vineyard and in the winery. But the final transformation is the response to tasting the wine itself and where that experience takes the individual taster. It is difficult to share these responses, as I've mentioned, because language is an insufficiently sensitive instrument. I admire Parker, for example, in one major respect. When he really loves a wine his descriptive powers completely desert him and the tasting note collapses in on itself; he'll start gibbering and saying Wow! Tasting doesn't just involve the usual "perceptive" senses; our sense of excitement, our sense of pleasure and our sense of imagination brings the wine ineluctably to life. And that's something worth getting.

 
At 3:48 PM, Blogger Jamie said...

How wonderfully put! Thank you.

 
At 3:57 PM, Anonymous mambo said...

Doug, what a fantastic comment. You rock!

 
At 10:44 PM, Anonymous Alex Lake said...

"Crafted in South Africa" indeed!

>fx:dervla<This is not just South African Merrrrlow....

Sounds like M&S are stocking some quite serious wines at the moment. I wonder if I'm missing out by letting my snobbishness and suspicion of "own branding" put me off.

 
At 10:45 PM, Anonymous Alex Lake said...

Bum! Got my &gt's and lt's confused...

 
At 10:48 PM, Anonymous alex.lake said...

...oh dear it's the wrong article too. I'm going to bed...

 
At 10:22 AM, Blogger Ole Martin Skilleås said...

Lerning to taste wines is also learning to apply words and judgements to experiences, this is why we are not completely on our own when tasting wines, even if the sensory impressions of the wines are only our own. Douglas Burnham and I express this rather more fully in our article "You'll Never Drink Alone" in the forthcoming "Wine and Philosophy" volume, ed. F. Allhoff, Blackwell, US.
As to having a cold: there are colds, and there are colds. I have had ones where you're all clogged up - orthonasaly, AND retronasaly. Then wine tastes ONLY sour or sweet. It's like hearing a symphony when the whole orchestra, save the percussionist, have gone home.

 

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