Wine
and beauty
Beauty. It’s a rather complex concept, once you start
unpacking it. Objects, people, ideas and actions can all possess
it, yet we can’t measure it or define it terribly well. It’s
also something that is of immense importance in our lives. Can you
imagine a life devoid of beauty? And how much time and energy do
we spend pursuing it?
So, the key question. Why is it that beauty is so
important to us? Why is it that we find a sunset viewed from the
quiet stillness of a beach after a warm summers day particularly
beautiful, and a grey February day on a litter-strewn 70s concrete
tower block council estate particularly ugly? Or, tying this to
wine, why are hilly vineyard areas such as the Douro (right)
so much more beautiful than large, flat, industrial vineyards on
the plains?
It seems that beauty is not entirely in the eye of the
beholder. Scientists studying how we perceive faces have confirmed
what most of us already assume to be the case. Some people are
more ‘beautiful’ than others; it seems we can define
beauty as it relates to the human face, at least in part. This
raises a whole set of questions, which largely fall outside the
scope of a piece like this. Evidently, if we have a natural
propensity to all like the same faces, how come we seem to have
rather different tastes when it comes to selecting our significant
others?
There are clearly many factors influencing choice of
partner other than just an innately programmed sense of
attractiveness. After all, we don’t marry faces, we marry
people. And we don’t choose partners from a catalogue (unless,
of course, you are planning to pick up a Russian bride from the
internet, which I am told is now possible), and marriages tend to
work better when there’s at least a degree of mutual attraction.
There are also explanations from evolutionary
psychologists about what sort of landscapes we find appealing,
defining features that we are likely to consider pleasant at an
innate aesthetic level. So it seems that, at least in part, our
sense of beauty – at least in certain realms – is biologically
determined, to a degree. I keep having to put all these qualifiers
in, simply because this is a complicated subject and we are
dealing with many unknowns. Besides, I don’t want to come across
as some nutty biological determinist. It makes sense, though, that
something so important to us and which we invest so many of our
resources in pursuing should be there for a reason.
Most often we think of beauty as relating to visual
experiences – probably because vision is our dominant sense –
but it also applies to other sensory modalities. A concept,
thought or act can be described as beautiful or ugly, as can a
piece of music, or a meal. Most intriguingly, beauty can exist in
the absence of any external cues. I remember having a
post-operative shot of something mind-altering after day surgery:
I felt a strong internal sense of beauty that then attached itself
to my rather dull surroundings. Everything was beautiful, for a
while.
Can a wine be beautiful? We make aesthetic judgments
about wines all the time, and while it’s not all that common to
hear a wine described as beautiful, I don’t see a reason why
this shouldn’t be the case.
Frequently, our aesthetic appraisals of wine involve a
sort of continuum, according to the relative niceness of the wines
being tasted, and often other factors such as how well they
reflect their origins (how typical are they?), in terms of both
terroir (e.g. ‘a great Gevrey-Chambertin’) and varietal
expression (e.g. ‘this is a really good Cabernet’). But
occasionally, I will drink a wine that I might describe as
‘beautiful’. Interestingly, some wines can be rated very
highly, and be immensely enjoyable, but not be beautiful. I’d
probably be more likely to describe a perfumed wine as beautiful
than a structured one. Of course, related terms such as 'pretty'
and 'sexy' are also used to describe wines, each with a subtly
different emphasis. Robert Parker has used on at least one
occasion the phrase 'a whore of a wine'. Strangely, I think this
was complimentary.
So continuing this theme, how de we decide whether a
wine is beautiful or ugly? Is there any logic to our aesthetic
appreciation of wine? Is it an instinctive, more-or-less automatic
response that follows the tasting act, or is it more a more
considered, intellectual assessment? I think it’s a bit of both.
When I have a wine in my mouth, there’s an immediate hedonic
response ('hmmm, nice', or 'uh, yuk', for example). This is then
followed by a procedure where I attend to the wine, I examine it,
I think about its various components, I compare it to the
templates of previously drunk wines stored somewhere in my memory.
This results in a more considered response, which no doubt has its
origins in the instinctive ‘gut reaction’ phase of tasting.
Of course, not all people are looking for beauty in
their wine. They want just a glass of wine. The wine might, at
best, elicit a response of ‘tasty’, or ‘nice’, but
that’s it. It’s like someone leafing through a catalogue of
paintings, as opposed to taking the time to stand in front of them
in a gallery. To a degree, if we want to find beauty in a wine, we
have to look for it. We also have to know what we are looking for
– learning and context are very important in wine tasting.
Related to this is the subjective element; we each find different
wines appealing. This brings me back to a familiar theme: in
tasting, our response to the wine is as important as the
properties of the wine itself. To conclude, then, I’ll state
that I think wines can be beautiful, but it’s the combination of
our understanding, our perceptive abilities and the
characteristics of the wine that can create that beauty.
The
philosophy of wine
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