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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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