The Philosophy of Wine by Todd Cain;

Author:Todd, Cain;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1886843
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

As Smith emphasizes, therefore, tasting is not a passive experience, but requires attention, concentration and training, and he is clearly right about this, as anybody who has ever tried to taste wine in the analytical way required to judge it will know. The judging is essentially experiential but not reducible to simple sensory experience, the unmediated “feeling” of taste and smell sensations. The experiences, that is to say, are cognitively penetrable, as I suggested in Chapter 1. Expertise affects what one perceptually experiences, in virtue of the various assumptions and expectations that form the background framework that structures one’s tasting. Experienced tasters will learn more from their sensations about the nature of the wine than non-experienced tasters, and blind tasting with knowledge will allow one to experience a jumble of different chemical compounds as possessing a structure that can be appreciated and understood. As such, as we noted earlier, only fine wines will, in virtue of their complexity, reward the attention we pay to them – the better the quality of the wine, the better the quality of the experience of drinking it.

Arguably the greatest difficulty facing this kind of account is explaining disagreement in judgements, particularly among experts, for, after all, if tastes are really in the wine, we should expect some sort of convergence in judgement among the experts. Part of a response to this would be to play down the extent of these disagreements. However, just how much agreement or disagreement there is among experts is in part an empirical claim, and to that extent clear evidence on one side or another is difficult to procure. A more satisfying philosophical response is to point to the nature of perceived disagreements and try to explain them away. This, in effect, is Smith’s strategy.

Taking his cue from one of Hume’s examples, the first part of Smith’s response consists in defending the idea that wines may contain many different tastes; that is, he supports pluralism about tastes. Certain apparent disagreements may then be resolved by pointing out that different judgers are sensitive to different tastes in the wine. You say the Savennières smells of ripe apples; I say it smells of under-ripe pears. We both may be right, for the wine may indeed possess both smells, neither of which is incompatible with the other. Here, therefore, there is in fact no genuine conflict.

The second part of Smith’s response consists in making a distinction – as we can in the case of judging art – between subjective preferences and real wine quality, a distinction that readily follows from his realist account and is a crucial piece of the objectivist’s toolkit.

If a wine offers a perfectly balanced expression of the uniqueness of its terroir and the lush lychee taste typical of the Gewürz-traminer varietal, this may redound to the winemaker’s credit and constitute the reason for the critic’s judgement that it is a good wine; whether the critic iikes it, however, is another matter entirely: or not quite entirely, as we shall see later.

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