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Are
reductionist approaches useful for understanding wine? Reductionism, the splitting
down of a system into its component parts, and then studying these in
isolation, has been a tremendously useful way of doing science. Most
science is in fact done this way, but researchers are now beginning to
realise that what the philosophers of science have been saying for a
while – that there are limits to reductionism – is actually true.
Reductionist science has allowed biologists to unravel the human
genome. But making sense of this genetic code is another matter
altogether, a process that will require more than reductionist
approaches. And while neurobiologists have uncovered in minute details
the working of the nerve cells in the brain, how much does this tell
us about consciousness? In a similar vein, how
useful are reductionist approaches in yielding understanding about
wine? Advances in wine flavour chemistry mean that we now have a large
body of knowledge about many of the specific chemical components that
are important in wine flavour. However, doubts are being expressed in
certain quarters about the usefulness of this knowledge, and whether
this is a fruitful avenue of research for improving wine quality. Why is this? It is because
wine quality is what is known as an ‘emergent’ property. It is a
characteristic of the whole system—all the various components of the
wine working together to yield a sensory experience that is not
evident from studying these components in isolation. Let’s imagine
you have spent years honing your analytical skills and are expert in
identifying specific aroma and taste sensations in wine. You could
write a list for me of all the compounds you can spot in a particular
wine, and demonstrate that they are actually there by analytical
chemistry techniques. But does this really tell me much about this
wine, and the experience I will have with it? Bear in mind that the
sensory experience of wine depends on both that nature of the wine and
the physiological and mental response of the taster to this wine. The
understanding of wine yielded by chemical analysis is just one part of
a complex picture, and our brains don’t work in a similar way to
analytic chemistry devices such as a gas chromatograph or mass
spectrometer. When we taste wine we are doing much, much more than
chemical analysis. This is quite a complicated concept, but it is an
important one. Trained sensory analysis of
wine is useful in that it facilitates a way of measuring, in a
scientific and statistically analysable way, some of the properties of
wine. But in reality it is rather crude and there is noise in the
system, introduced by inter-individual variance in perception, taster
skill and the difficulty of expressing flavour sensations in words.
Sensory analysis is a vital tool for wine research, but it is a blunt,
limited tool when it comes to telling us useful information about what
really matters in a wine.
One of the problems has been
that scientists notions of ‘improving wine quality’ have been at
odds with those of people who make and drink the stuff. Consider the
following scenario. One by one, scientists identify a series of wine
faults – brettanomyces, reduction, poor sulphur dioxide usage,
‘green’ flavours and aromas, and so on. They set about instructing
winemakers about how to correct these faults. They also identify
flavour molecules that have a positive effect, and instruct winemakers
how to maximize these by, for example, vineyard interventions,
maceration techniques or the use of specific yeast strains. The result
is often a perfect, fault free wine, but one which doesn’t excite
the senses; which fails to thrill. The weakness of the reductionist,
analytical approach is that, in Smith’s words, ‘It does not by
itself contain the tools for a sophisticated appreciation of wines as
a whole’. There are concepts that relate to the properties of wine
as a whole that are important for wine quality, or
‘deliciousness’, but which cannot be understood by a reductionist
approach. If wine science is to progress properly in aiding out
understanding of wine quality, then it will have to break free of the
shackles of a purely reductionist, analytic approach and seek to
integrate this with a holistic view of the wine experience. Easier
said than done! The philosophy of wine
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In the mid-1990s
Vinovation’s