Philosophy
and wine:
from
Science to Subjectivity
Jamie
Goode's Report on a one-day meeting held on Friday 10th December
2004, organised by the Philosophy Program of the School of Advanced
Study, London University (http://www.sas.ac.uk/Philosophy/Wine.htm)
Part 3: Barry
Smith - Questions of taste
Barry
Smith’s paper focused on three questions that take us
immediately to the heart of the philosophy of actually drinking
wine, and the nature of our experience. ‘My questions concern the
tricky nature of wine tasting itself: an intimate, personal
experience, part of one’s physical history, that’s part of
one’s mental life too’, he explains. ‘How can something so
personal and seemingly subjective purport to reveal aspects of how
things really are in the wines we are tasting?’ The three
questions he’s considering are:
-
Is
the taste of a wine just an immediate, and, perhaps,
incommunicable experience, for you alone?
-
Can
our experience in tasting a wine give us objective knowledge of
the wine itself?
-
Can
we rely on expert tasters to tell us what the wine’s
characteristics and qualities really are?
‘Tasting is part of perception and the function of perception is
to give us accurate knowledge of the world around us. How then does
taste work to help us know the qualities and characteristics of a
wine?’ Smith then raises what to me is a key issue: ‘We seem to
have the wine on the one hand, and how it tastes on the other. So
can the latter tell us something reliable about the former? And can
how the wine tastes to me or to you be a reliable guide to its
objective characteristics?’
Good
questions, but the next three are even better: ‘Can taste be
treated like the others senses, or has it special distinguishing
features? Does it enable us latch on to something about the world
around us, to sharable aspects of interpersonal experience, or just
to parts of our own experience? How can something so personal and
seemingly subjective purport to reveal aspects of how things really
are in the wines we are tasting?’
As
readers are probably beginning to gather, philosophers are pretty
good at asking questions. They need to be, of course, because well
framed questions are essential for developing arguments. That they
are not always so good with answers is acknowledged by Smith: ‘In
typical philosophical fashion my qualified answers to these
questions will be: “Not exactly”, “Yes” and “It
depends”’.
Before
we get to answers, there are some distinctions that need drawing.
First, ‘Taste’ has a number of meanings. These include aesthetic
appraisal (you can have good or bad taste on certain matters of
style or art). This isn’t what is under discussion here. Second,
'taste' is actually used as a term to describe a multimodal sensory
experience that involves taste, smell, vision and touch. Third, the
'taste' can be the property of the object of our experience, or it
can refer to our own experience during tasting. It’s a tricky, but
important distinction.
So,
to the questions.
1.
Is the taste of wine a private, perhaps incommunicable experience?
Is it a property of the wine or does it reside within in us, in our
own perception? Smith points out that the latter conclusion is a
tempting one. ‘Tasting presents us with an immediate modification
of our conscious experience. It is all there at once, in us, as we
take the wine in. How then can this immediately appreciable episode
be anything other than part of one’s subjectivity?’ he asks. He
argues against this flight to subjectivity on several grounds.
First, wine tasting is commonly a social experience, and we share
our perceptions in terms of words. The assumption is that we are
having a more-or-less common experience. Second, people make their
living out of writing about wines and recommending them to others.
This would be a nonsense if the perception of wine were exclusively
a private event. ‘We act as though it was possible know of one
another’s experiences, and there is something important here that
we must not miss,’ says Smith. ‘When I taste a really great
wine, something fine, elegant and hand-made, I know straightaway
that I want others to taste it too. I may even have a specific
person in mind with whom I want to this taste this wine. I know
through the experience I’ve had of tasting with that person, that
they will get what is exquisite and fine about this particular
bottle.’
Smith
maintains that this shared common experience is an important aspect
of social interaction. ‘The desire to share part ourselves with
another, to connect with people in this wordless way, through the
things that move us and give us pleasure is an important part of our
social natures, and great wine, like great music and great art,
affords us this opportunity.’ But there is a problem in sharing
these experiences when it comes to wine: this is our poverty of
language for tastes and smells. Smith discusses the different ways
that people try to share these experiences and how some are better
than others at it. He clearly likes the use of metaphor.
‘Metaphors serve particularly well in capturing aspects of
subjectivity’, he says. ‘They are sometimes worth far more than
lengthy lists of descriptors in trying to capture the experience of
drinking something extraordinarily fine.’ He points out, though,
that ‘as acts of creativity they demand skill and ingenuity, and
some will be better than others at freshly minting a metaphor for
each occasion.’ Likewise, similies can be useful.
2.
Can the subjective tasting experience yield objective knowledge of
the wine? Smith thinks it can, but to do this he has to argue that
tastes are objective properties of a wine. His point is as follows.
The fact that to ‘get’ a wine takes attention, skill and effort,
coupled with the notion that when the circumstances of tasting are
not ideal we can fail to ‘get’ a wine properly both argue that
we are striving for objectivity. ‘These factors alone make us
realise that tasting is not subjective, in one sense of that term: a
sense according to which there is nothing right or wrong about a
conscious experience but just a fully transparent part of our inner
world, independent of what else exists around us,’ he says. ‘Not
all experiences of tasting are on a par or equally valid. We know
that if we taste a wine after eating watercress that we are not
experiencing what the wine really tasted like’. This is a
convincing argument: tasting is not wholly subjective. When we
approach a wine we are attempting to uncover something intrinsic to
the wine in as accurate a way possible.
But
it is also true that wine tasting is not fully objective: Smith
raises the point about inter-individual variability in the ability
to taste and smell. He suggests that these differences can be both
cultural and physiological in their origin, but indicates that
unless one is far removed from the ‘statistically normal
perceiver’, then these differences aren’t fatal to the notion
that we are sharing a more-or-less common experience. He stands by
the notion of realism in tastes – that is, that a wine has a
quality referred to as a ‘taste’, and that while this will be
modified by the context of the tasting, it isn’t useful to see the
‘taste’ of a wine as a purely relational property. If it was,
we’d never be able to nail it down.
One
possible objection to this view of the objective nature of the taste
of wine is the way that wine critics often disagree about a wine.
The way he deals with this is to advocate that a wine may possess a
plurality of tastes, with not all being available to or detected by
each taster. ‘There may be more tastes than any given taster, or
population of tasters, can discern. All these tastes may exist in
the wine awaiting detection by a discriminating palate, say Smith.
‘Different critics may pick out different tastes, and may be more
sensitive to some than to others.’ He sums up his views on tasting
as ‘an objective exercise that relies on our subjective
responses’.
3.
Let’s turn to the third and final question. Should we allow
critics to guide us in our choice of wine? Given what we know about
tasting, is this a sensible thing to do? We’ve discussed how when
critics assess a wine they are picking out elements of the objective
‘taste’ of the wine, so the key is to find critics whose
perception closely matches ours. He points out that the common
advice that we should trust our own palate needs to be qualified by
the fact that first we need to get to know it, and this is where
critics can be very useful. ‘Having found out how we converge they
can serve as instruments, a litmus test to which wines will delight
us,’ he says. ‘Here we are not surrendering our own palate or
preferences but are using the right people to extend and develop our
personal tastes.’
Smith
finishes with a warning. ‘The danger with the reliance on others,
or just one critic, is where that set of tastes and preferences
comes to dominate the market of available wines because of
commercial pressures and financial speculation’, he says. ‘The
emergence of a super-critic, like Robert Parker, who favours big,
sweet alcoholic, over-extracted and over-oaked wines, may lead to a
simplification in measures of
quality.’ It’s not that Smith is blaming Parker, who, after all
is just doing his job – rather, he is lamenting the effect the
market’s response to Parker’s influence is having on the world
of wine. ‘When one critic, willingly or not, comes to dominate the
style of wine that is preferred by the markets and hence produced by
the wine makers they are dominating our tastes and as a result
limiting our experiences. When this is true, less and less will we
have moments of experience and lasting memories of then that evoke,
as Proust knew they could, the times we shared, the walk round the
hill of Corton, the delight in discovering three levels of taste in
the Meo-Camuzet Vosne-Romanee 1996. These we must seek out and not
lose sight of.’
see
also:
The
philosophy of wine
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