The eDiTors of Wine - download.e-bookshelf.de · funding to meet, write and discuss the book at a crucial juncture of its progress. We would like to thank audiences at the Universities

ISBN 978-1-4443-3766-2

Douglas Burnham is Professor and Personal Chair of Philosophy at Staffordshire University. He has written extensively on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche and philosophy’s relation to the arts.

Ole Martin Skilleås is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bergen. He is the author of Philosophy and Literature (2001); several articles on philosophy, aesthetics, and literature; and is a regular contributor to Vinforum, a Norwegian wine magazine.

“Wines inspire us. Not just as sources of intoxicating pleasure, but as objects of aesthetic appreciation. Here, in rich and

satisfying detail, is a full-length study by philosophers of the subtle factors that influence our tasting judgments and bestow values on wines, both in the glass and beyond.”

Barry C. Smith, Director of the Institute of Philosophy

“This is an important addition to the literature of wine. As well as being a serious academic study of the aesthetics of

wine appreciation, it’s also clearly written and surprisingly accessible – a must read for any curious drinker.”

Jamie Goode

The topic of wine appreciation appears in a surprising number of seminal texts on aesthetics, those by renowned philosophers ranging from Plato to Hume and Kant. Yet in all of their writings, wine is a philosophical topic that is quickly dismissed as irrelevant, or even dangerous.

The Aesthetics of Wine questions this historic reluctance to ascribe aesthetic attributes to wine, arguing instead that an appreciation of fine wine should be afforded aesthetic consideration – and can lead to valuable aesthetic experiences. Moreover, the authors reveal how the dismissal of wine appreciation stems from certain prejudices against the ‘bodily’ senses of smell and taste, inherent biases that seriously misrepresent the nature of aesthetic perception and judgment. By tackling these prejudices utilizing a suite of philosophical strategies such as social epistemology and phenomenology, the authors reveal a unique new formulation of the very foundations of aesthetics – one that is built on concepts such as context, emergence, inter-subjectivity, practices, and trust.

For philosophers, aestheticians, and wine lovers alike, The Aesthetics of Wine offers unique philosophical insights regarding a celebrated drink with undeniable links to the foundations of Western civilization itself.

The AesTheTics of Wine

The eDiTors



Douglas Burnham and Ole Martin Skilleås

The A

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Burnham and Skilleås

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The Aesthetics of Wine

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New Directions in Aesthetics

Series editors: Dominic McIver Lopes, University of British Columbia, and Berys Gaut, University of St Andrews

Blackwell’s New Directions in Aesthetics series highlights ambitious single- and multiple-author books that confront the most intriguing and pressing problems in aesthetics and the philosophy of art today. Each book is written in a way that advances understanding of the subject at hand and is accessible to upper-undergraduate and graduate students.

1. Interpretation and Construction: Art, Speech, and the Law by Robert Stecker

2. Art as Performance by David Davies

3. The Performance of Reading: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literature by Peter Kivy

4. The Art of Theater by James R. Hamilton

5. Cultural Appropriation and the Arts by James O. Young

6. Photography and Philosophy: Essays on the Pencil of Nature ed. Scott Walden

7. Art and Ethical Criticism ed. Garry L. Hagberg

8. Mirrors to One Another: Emotion and Value in Jane Austen and David Hume by Eva Dadlez

9. Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor by John Morreall

10. The Art of Videogames by Grant Tavinor

11. Once-Told Tales: An Essay In Literary Aesthetics by Peter Kivy

12. The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach by Aaron Meskin and Roy T. Cook

13. The Aesthetics of Wine by Douglas Burnham and Ole Martin Skilleås

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The Aesthetics of Wine

DOUGLAS BURNHAM AND OLE MARTIN SKILLEÅS

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

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This edition fi rst published 2012 © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Burnham, Douglas, author. The aesthetics of wine / Douglas Burnham and Ole Martin Skilleås. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4443-3766-2 (hardback) 1. Wine–Philosophy. 2. Wine tasting. I. Skilleås, Ole Martin, author. II. Title. GT2885.B87 2012 394.1′3–dc23

2012015859

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Jacket image: © Yuri Arcurs/Shutterstock Cover design by Richard Boxall Design Associates

Set in 10/12.5pt Galliard by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India

1 2012

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For Eleanor and Catherine (Douglas Burnham)

For my children: Svein Oscar and Agnes (Ole Martin Skilleås)

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Contents

Acknowledgments viii

Introduction 1

1 Basic Concepts 8

2 Wine as a Vague and Rich Object 35

3 Wine and Cognition 64

4 Aesthetic Attributes in Wine 97

5 Taste and Expertise in Wine 140

6 The Wineworld 176

References 211 Index 220

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Acknowledgments

Telling people that we have been working on a book about the aesthetics of wine has usually brought forth quizzical smiles, lifted eyebrows, short laughs and quips about alcohol. We are therefore particularly grateful to those who have taken us seriously and provided us with the resources to carry out the work. Centre Franco-Norvegien en Sciences Sociales et Humaines in Paris funded two workshops with researchers from Norway, France and Britain, and gave us a room for a third. The Faculty of Humanities at The University of Bergen – with the indirect assistance of The Research Council of Norway – funded a conference and a workshop in Bergen. We learned a lot during those events from the participants who are too numerous all to be mentioned. However, we would like to single out and thank Ophelia Deroy, Barry C. Smith and Dominique Valentin for their well directed and fruitful criticism of our work – as well as all we have learned from them. We would also like to extend acknowledgments and thanks to each other. Writing this book has been a pleasure and the outcome better than either of us could have hoped to achieve on his own. We have both been involved in all the chapters and all the analyses, to a greater or lesser extent in each case, but certainly amounting to an equal contribution overall.

The Department of Philosophy in Bergen also provided us with the funding to meet, write and discuss the book at a crucial juncture of its progress.

We would like to thank audiences at the Universities of Bergen, Dundee, Manchester Metropolitan, Oslo, Southampton, Staffordshire and Warwick for their insights and contributions. The same goes for audiences at confer-ences: The Third International Philosophy of Wine Conference in Pollenzo (2008), The British Society of Aesthetics Annual Conference in Oxford (2008), The Nordic Society of Aesthetics Annual Conference in Lahti (2010), and the Wine and Expertise conference in Paris (2011).

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Acknowledgments ix

Gunnar Karlsen read drafts of chapters two and three, and we are grateful to him for comments and criticism.

Thanks go to special adviser of the Norwegian Wine Monopoly, Per Mæleng, for letting us draw on two articles he wrote with Ole Martin Skilleås for Vinforum , and to the editor Arne Ronold, MW (Master of Wine), for letting us draw on these and several articles written by Ole Martin Skilleås for the magazine. They were all written in Norwegian, but the two articles we have had published in The World of Fine Wine were written in English. We are grateful to the editor, Neil Beckett, for letting us use those two articles, ‘Wine as an Aesthetic Object’ and ‘Wine 2030 – Future Perfect?’. Parts of these articles have found their way into Chapters 2 and 3.

Douglas Burnham : I would like to thank students and colleagues at Staffordshire University who were very supportive, even to the point of being blind-folded for experimental purposes. I ’ d particularly like to thank my close friend David Webb, who helped me to find time and energy for the research, and my wife and daughter for endless patience.

Ole Martin Skilleås : I would like to thank the members of Vitis Bergensis where I learnt much of what I know about wine. The members are too numerous to mention, but three members nevertheless deserve special men-tion: Olav Røneid Hansen, Odd Hermod Rydland and Jostein Alme. In Oslo, Per Mæleng has generously shared his knowledge and experience of wine in coauthoring two articles with me, and the people mentioned here and many others have also shared wines from their cellars. They are models of generosity – and also models for what we have to say about the value and importance of guided perception in the appreciation of wine. My wife and children have been models of patience and understanding while I have been writing this book.

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The Aesthetics of Wine, First Edition. Douglas Burnham and Ole Martin Skilleås.© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Introduction

Let us put our cards on the table. In this book we intend to argue that wine can be an object of genuine aesthetic experience. The book will defend this claim, investigate how it is possible and pursue its implications. Some of these implications are for philosophical aesthetics more generally, some are specific to the world of wine. When in the past we have proposed such a project, often we have been met with an amused or bemused response. Since the exclusion of objects such as wine from possible aesthetic consideration has been considered, in most of the aesthetic tradition, to be simply ‘obvious,’ this initial response was perfectly understandable. Sometimes, though, the objections began before we had got past the first sentence, so let us briefly and provisionally address some of the common problems that arise when this topic is raised.

Wine is alcoholic. You cannot seriously maintain that one could judge something the effect of which is to annihilate judgment? True, if taken to excess. But that is why expert wine tasters and serious amateurs do not swallow but spit the wine out when the aim of tasting is the judgment. The wine critic is like Socrates in the Symposium : he joins the party sober, samples all its delights, discourses soaringly about beauty and love, and then leaves, sober as he arrived. However, complete sobriety may not be an ideal for many projects with wine. We are broadly in agreement with Roger Scruton and his eloquent and persuasive advocacy of mild inebriation and its beneficial effects on sociability. 1 We recognize this attraction, but despite our commitment to sociability we do not make it a theme in our book.

I like wine, true enough, but not in the way I like art . There are two issues here. First, we agree that wine is not art. However, plenty of things can be proper objects of aesthetic appreciation without being art: a person’s

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2 The Aesthetics of Wine

face, a game of football, a mountain valley. Wine appreciation may be more like these. Our claim that wine is not art means that the production of wine is not by artists, but by highly skilled artisans in cooperation with nature and tradition. It also means that wine does not contain a meaning or a discursive content that it is one job of the critic to decipher. The other issue in the objection is about liking. Sensory pleasure is one thing that wines may provide (some wines, at least); but that is different from aesthetic appreciation. The latter is (and here we follow Kant’s famous analyses 2 ) disinterested, normative for others, and communicable. We argue that these qualities are as applicable to wine appreciation as to any other aesthetic practice.

The appreciation of wine is all about wealth, class and snobbery . Fine wines remain, in the popular imagination, associated with social class. This is understandable, but largely out of date. It is understandable because, until recently, the correlation between wine and both social and economic class was clear. It happens to be the case that wine appreciation carries a fairly high financial cost, and it may involve other kinds of barriers as well. Fine wines are expensive to produce because their production requires low yields from expensive land and hand-picking of the grapes (which is much more expensive than machine harvesting). On top of this, a lot of care and attention both in the vineyards and in the cellar is required.

However, this is not the whole picture. The past few decades have seen an expansion of wine consumption and appreciation to new countries and new social groups. Something that used to be a sign of belonging to the higher strata of society is now shared and enjoyed by the masses – at least in affluent countries. With the rapid rise of living standards in populous countries like China and India, consumption as well as interest in wine has risen too. Together with this rise in consumption there is now, arguably, a strong demand for wine knowledge. Wine knowledge has also become more democratic – or ‘attainable by a wider group of people’ – than it was just a few decades ago. Numerous wine appreciation groups or even college courses are to be found, generally without conditions of membership (other than a generally modest contribution towards costs). Even the financial barrier has been lowered a little. This is due to wider distribution of wine, improved reliability and efficiency in wine production, and increased global competition. For little more than the cost of a good night out, and maybe from a convenient store near you, it is possible to acquire perfectly adequate exemplars of wine from major regions, or grape varieties. As a proportion of average expendable income, a bottle of quality wine is now markedly more affordable – and is more widely available as well, than it was not long ago. The very highest level of quality, to be sure, remains out of reach for most, given the low production and high demand enjoyed by these wines. But these wines are often bought more for investment purposes than for


Introduction 3

consumption. In all these ways, then, wine appreciation has become ‘democratised’ recently, which is certainly to be welcomed. 3

However, we should not lose sight of another important way in which wine appreciation is profoundly ‘democratic.’ Even the highest levels of wine expertise require no more than average sensory abilities – as we will argue in Chapters 2 and 5 – and there is little evidence to suggest that the requirements in the area of cognitive abilities (such as memory) are much greater – at least to reach a perfectly serviceable level. Beyond financial resources and opportunity, then, aesthetic competency in this area just requires dedication. This latter fact, more even than the economic considerations, helps us to understand the fundamental error involved in accusations of snobbery or the use of wine appreciation as a marker of class.

Let us investigate the extreme hypothesis that all instances of wine appreciation are delusional practices created to serve a project of social identification (I belong here) or exclusion (but you don’t). 4 The appreciator of wine here claims to have competencies that no one actually has. Wine appreciation is thus like the rituals of a secret society that seem to have some kind of vague magic power, but actually only serve to distinguish between those on the inside and those on the outside. Unlike such a delusional practice, aesthetic appreciation relies upon underlying knowledge and know-how, which are communicable beyond social boundaries, and which give the various practices purpose. Moreover, the ‘ritual’ of wine appreciation is not something self-contained, but issues in a judgment . The judgment may be, for example, a report on the aesthetic merits or defects of a wine. These judgments can be compared and debated. Indeed, such comparison and debate is explicitly part of the practice that is aesthetic appreciation. The level of inter-subjective agreement both cross-sectionally (i.e. among experts and critics around the world) and longitudinally (over a period of time) strongly suggests that there is ‘substance’ to these judgments. In short, in a variety of ways wine appreciation simply does not behave as one would expect if it were a socially delusional practice. In Chapter 4 we discuss the ways in which wine appreciation, like other realms of aesthetic experience, is profoundly democratic in character, while also requiring high levels of competency on the part of the taster.

Whether I like a wine is entirely subjective . We distinguished above between sensory liking and aesthetic appreciation. The former occurs with those things I happen to prefer, and there is no reason why another person should like them too. If I like blue and you like red, that is pretty much the end of the discussion. Sensory liking is ‘subjective’ in this sense. Of course, if I grew up in Provence, I would probably like anchovies more than someone from Chicago. But that is an explanation of my preferences, not a reason why someone ought to have them. With aesthetic appreciation, my conclusions



are normative. Other people, if they are judging correctly, ought to agree with me. Relatedly, my judgments are communicable: I can to some extent at least justify them to others, and seek through dialogue and debate to convince others (or be myself convinced of my error). To be sure, how this happens is not easy to explain, although this difficulty is true for all areas of aesthetics and is not unique to wine appreciation. Arguably, wine might be considered subjective for a different reason, namely that it involves the senses of taste and smell. These senses seem to be more private than sight or sound, for tastes and odours are not ‘out there’ in the public domain, but rather mingle with my individual body. This is true; and yet, tastes and smells can be identified and re-identified, by different subjects, with some degree of reliability. This suggests that it is neither unlikely nor meaningless to say “We are both tasting the same wine.” We will look at length at the science of smell and taste in Chapters 2 and 3.

If wine, then why not, say, tea? Or coffee, whiskey, hot salsa, cherry pie … In principle, there is no reason why all of these things could not be objects of a genuine aesthetic experience. However, in practice, there are reasons. Wine is an extraordinarily complex object, with hundreds of identifiable aromatic components, 5 all in varying intensities and relations, and thousands of styles, varieties, vintages, regions or properties. Wine not only changes as it ages, it matures and grows more complex, and even goes on changing as it reacts with air in the glass or in the mouth. All these things are reasonably well understood , either scientifically or in terms of the language and concepts used to describe and classify wine. This complexity, and the fact that it manifests itself in experience and is communicable, makes wine different from most other foods and drinks. Similarly, there is a long tradition of wine appreciation, and the practices and the language are highly developed. There is a lot for aesthetic experience to sink its teeth into, so to speak. So, while we believe that wine is an intrinsically more substantial object of aesthetic appreciation than most other foods or drinks (or perfumes), what really makes the difference is the context . 6 Indeed, by the end of the book, we name our overall theoretical position ‘contextual aesthetics.’

Isn’t wine trivial, by comparison with the symphonies of Shostakovich or the paintings of Picasso? What do we mean by ‘trivial,’ though? If we mean lacking in thematic, symbolic or narrative content, then we cannot but agree. As we said above, we are not going to argue that wine is art, and thus something invested with meaning by an artist. However, if by trivial we mean lacking in significance for culture or for the development of human potential, lacking the ability to bring people together and create communities, lacking anything to stimulate the exercise of higher cognitive powers, lacking a relation to the good life in a philosophically profound sense, or lacking the ability to reveal to us truths about us or about our world – then we protest in the strongest


Introduction 5

possible terms. None of these slanders is true. Partly, though, because there is so much misunderstanding to overcome, it will take us much of the book to demonstrate that even some of what we just stated in wine’s favor is plausible. Moreover, creating a symphony or a novel is not the only way to communicate emotion, struggle, peace, friendship or what have you – we can also do it through history, sociology, political science or philosophy. Wine, though, is an object primarily – but not only – of the proximal senses taste and smell which, we argue, are unjustly ignored or even forgotten in Western culture. Wine appreciation offers the integration of our animal and our rational natures to the benefit of both: the ‘bodily senses,’ reflection, integration and memory work together to make sense of a liquid that bears the sensory imprint of land, climate, history and culture. To the extent that part of wine appreciation’s significance is that it leads us towards a rich understanding and development of ourselves in these areas, and does so in a way that could not be done otherwise, wine is less trivial than art.

It remains then to sketch out, briefly, how the book to follow will, albeit obliquely at times, address the challenges above and other questions not yet mentioned. Chapter 1 sets out the key concepts that we will employ throughout in order to analyze wine appreciation. For example, we will there begin to consider the various ‘competencies’ that seem to be required in order for aesthetic appreciation of wine to happen and be communicated. We also here raise for the first time a far-reaching issue: much of the tradition of philosophical aesthetics has systematically claimed that wine could not be an object of aesthetic appreciation – Kant, again, is only the most obvious. 7 If, then, we successfully show that wine is a possible aesthetic object, this must entail changes in deeply held aesthetic concepts. Chapter 2 sets out to explore the science of smell and taste, and to what extent scientific results in these areas pose problems. It concludes with a thought experiment that turns out to show that wine is valued for contextual reasons, i.e. beyond its chemistry and the ability of that chemistry to induce experiences in me. This also demonstrates that perfection is less attractive as an aesthetic ideal than one might imagine. Chapter 3 investigates the cognitive processes involved in wine appreciation, ending with a sustained phenomenological description of the basic experiential structures. This chapter discusses also ‘blind’ tasting, and to what extent this represents an adequate account of wine appreciation. Here too we begin to discuss in detail ‘aesthetic attributes,’ such as ‘harmony,’ ‘balance,’ ‘complexity’ or ‘finesse.’ Such aesthetic language is employed across many aesthetic domains: music, the visual arts, and even literature. Traditional aesthetics would have called these attributes of ‘form.’ However, because of its visual or aural prejudices, aesthetics often takes form as something that simply exists – i.e. the arrangement of the lines or figures in a painting, the distribution of sequences of notes in music. Form is thus considered separable from my



experience of it, from the cultural context, and lying there ready for someone to come along and interpret it. Here, though, we discover that the aesthetic aspects of form mentioned above are constituted through expertise and know-how, following more or less rigorous practices, from out of comparisons and references to accumulated cultural norms and traditions, and employing cognitive construction and imagination.

Chapter 4 surveys key moments in recent philosophical aesthetics in order to understand the emergence of aesthetic attributes in wine experience and how they are related to contextual features of appreciation. Specifically, we show the necessity of a type of ‘know-how’ that we call aesthetic competency. Chapter 5 asks what it means to be an expert in wine, and how such expertise functions. This chapter contains a sustained discussion of the concepts of ‘trust’ and ‘calibration’ that we believe to be important to the functioning of aesthetic communities. Many philosophers have agreed that knowledge and experience are important in aesthetic appreciation; in Chapters 3 through 5, we show how . Likewise, in Chapter 5 we discover the interconnectedness of aesthetic realms, or in what way their normative power might reach across disciplines. Chapter 6 brings several strands of our discussion together in order to move towards a general, hermeneutic theory of wine appreciation. This shows how several key ‘prejudices’ against the possibility of aesthetic appreciation of wine are linked at a deeper philosophical level to relatively impoverished accounts of the nature of experiencing subjects, and their relation both to one another and to their wider culture and its history. It then ‘tests’ this theory against what we believe are two of the key problems in the wine world today: the relation of food and wine, and the concept of terroir . Specifically, regarding the latter, we believe that we have shown how terroir can be seen as a ‘unifying theory’ of wine appreciation. Understanding how wines come to be aesthetic objects reveals what is involved in appreciation more generally, and shows the interrelations between human capacities, what nature has to offer, and how appreciation forms our interaction with nature.

Notes

1 Scruton ( 2007 ). Todd ( 2010 ): 179 agrees. 2 Kant (1987): 43–96, sections 1–22. 3 The negative aspects of this development have also made their mark: industri-

alisation, global distribution and marketing, conglomerate ownership, tendency towards global uniformity, and the detachment of wine production from locale and tradition. Except for the last two of these – which we deal with in Chapters 5 and 6 – this book does not pursue these negatives.

4 Sometimes, the work of Pierre Bourdieu is interpreted in this quite radical way. See Bourdieu ( 1984 ).


Introduction 7

5 We recognize that tea and coffee also contain hundreds of aromatic compounds. 6 Given the centuries of tea drinking and its vast cultural importance in areas of

the Far East, we suspect that tea appreciation may be a candidate, for those who belong to that context as we belong to a context of wine.

7 Kant (1987): 55, section 7.


The Aesthetics of Wine, First Edition. Douglas Burnham and Ole Martin Skilleås.© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

1

Basic Concepts

Introduction

In our Introduction, we looked at a range of the most common debates that arise in discussions of wine tasting. This chapter will introduce several of the key concepts that define our approach. These are concepts that we will use throughout the book in order to pursue both those debates and the many others that will emerge along the way. In a single chapter, we can do little more than introduce the concepts, and suggest some of our reasons for developing them and for thinking they will be pivotal. It would be very surprising if our ambitious enterprise looks anything but sketchy at the end of the first chapter, but these concepts will be returned to and developed further in chapters to come.

In one of the most famous passages in the history of aesthetics, David Hume refers to an episode from Don Quixote concerning wine tasting. 1 In his essay, “Of the standard of taste,” he is concerned to show that there are indeed ‘standards of taste,’ where ‘taste’ means an ability to judge the quality of art and literature, beyond our individual preferences. In other words, Hume is trying to show that, beneath the surface appearance of ‘ subjectivism,’ there is indeed a type of mental activity called ‘taste.’ Moreover, he is not just trying to show that there is such an activity, but also how it is possible. He is concerned to give an analysis of how the mental activity called taste operates. Hume’s essay is a great place for us to begin, therefore, since we are trying to do the same thing here – it is just that we are no longer talking about art and literature, but about wine.

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Basic Concepts 9

In the Don Quixote passage of the essay, Hume is attempting to make plausible his thesis that a certain ‘delicacy of imagination’ is essential to someone’s proficiency in matters of taste. The competent judge needs to be able to notice subtle details, make fine distinctions and careful comparisons. The lack of these competencies is a chief reason why judgments concerning beauty seem so varied, arbitrary and subjective. Because we will be making observations concerning the detail of this passage, permit us to quote at length:

One obvious cause, why many feel not the proper sentiment of beauty, is the want of that delicacy of imagination, which is requisite to convey a sensibility of those finer emotions. This delicacy every one pretends to: Every one talks of it; and would reduce every kind of taste or sentiment to its standard. But as our intention in this essay is to mingle some light of the understanding with the feelings of sentiment, it will be proper to give a more accurate definition of delicacy, than has hitherto been attempted. And not to draw our philosophy from too profound a source, we shall have recourse to a noted story in Don Quixote .

It is with good reason, says Sancho to the squire with the great nose, that I pretend to have a judgment in wine: this is a quality hereditary in our family. Two of my kinsmen were once called to give their opinion of a hogshead, which was supposed to be excellent, being old and of a good vintage. One of them tastes it; considers it; and after mature reflection pronounces the wine to be good, were it not for a small taste of leather, which he perceived in it. The other, after using the same precautions, gives also his verdict in favour of the wine; but with the reserve of a taste of iron, which he could easily distinguish. You cannot imagine how much they were both ridiculed for their judgment. But who laughed in the end? On emptying the hogshead, there was found at the bottom, an old key with a leathern thong tied to it. 2

The evidence seemed to be pointing to the ludicrousness of making descriptive statements about wine as if they were objective. “But who laughed in the end?” reverses the force of the evidence. What previously looked like wildly arbitrary and divergent taste identifications now turns out to have been very insightful, and entirely objective. Of course, Hume does not maintain that wine tasting is in any serious way comparable to taste in art or literature. Or, rather, it does not occur to him to entertain that possibility. The story from Cervantes is just a way of introducing by analogy his notion of ‘delicacy.’ However, there is more to both Cervantes and Hume here than meets the eye.

Note that although there is ridicule concerning the two experts’ different descriptions of the out-of-place taste or smell in the wine, they both agree concerning the wine’s excellence. So, the appearance of wild divergence in taste is already within the framework of something at least akin to aesthetic

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agreement. This suggests a difference between the description of the elements of taste in a wine (taste of iron or leather), and an evaluation of the wine (those features of it that lead one to conclude its excellence). This distinction is, we believe, extremely important. Here, we will call properties that we ascribe to wine as a property, but are not just descriptions of taste or smell elements, aesthetic attributes . 3 Today, wine tasters use terms like ‘finesse,’ ‘complexity’ or ‘harmony’ in just this way. We use the evaluative terms as if they are properties of the wine, just like its sugar content or the taste of leather in Sancho’s story, but what such properties are, or to what they belong, is not entirely clear. This is because the excellences of the wine, unlike the individual tastes of iron or leather, are not subject to a revelation; inspect the wine barrel all you like, you won’t find its excellences hidden inside, at least not in the way that the key and thong were. 4 What aesthetic attributes are, and how they arise, will be a key topic throughout this book.

Notice also that the iron and leather are proclaimed to be weaknesses of the wine, which is otherwise excellent. So, in fact, it is not just a question of Sancho’s kinsmen exhibiting a straightforward delicacy in the tasting or smelling of this particular wine. Rather, the two must already be experts to some degree, who know a great deal about the possible range of tastes that wines could have, and the various ways in which a wine can be excellent, or can fail to be so. It is only because of that knowledge, and the ability to put it into practice in actual acts of tasting, that they have any reason to remark on iron or leather. Sancho’s kinsmen possess a number of what we will call competencies in wine tasting. For this reason, presumably, they were chosen to evaluate the wine in the first place. In Don Quixote Sancho uses the story to explain his ability to identify a wine’s origin, as if these competencies are hereditary like, say, the color of his eyes. However, knowledge of grape varieties, wine regions or styles certainly is not encoded in your genes, nor is experience of different kinds of wine. Such competencies must involve both knowledge and some form of training. 5

Moreover, it is worth comparing Hume’s retelling of the story with Cervantes’ original. Hume’s is different in five details. First of all, Hume’s version has the two tasters following the “same precautions.” That is, they go through the same procedure of tasting. But, as Sancho tells it, one only tasted the wine, while the other only sniffed it. Second, Hume’s version seems to suggest that the hogshead was emptied, and the tasters vindicated by the discovery of the key and thong, more or less straightaway. Sancho though insists that this happened much later, after the barrel had been sold, drunk and cleaned. Third, the laughter or ridicule from bystanders is not in Sancho’s version. Instead, the only conflict is between the owner of the barrel, who insists it contains no impurities, and the tasters. Fourth, it would be consistent with Hume’s story that, since they followed the same

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Basic Concepts 11

procedure, the two tasters laugh and ridicule each other . However, this is not consistent with the story as told in Don Quixote: again, they stand together, in disagreement with the wine’s owner. The final difference between the two versions is that Hume leaves out most of the context of the episode in the novel. The story is told by Sancho to the ‘squire with the great nose’ in the context of a late-night eating and drinking session. Unlike his kinsmen, whose activity of evaluation is quite pure (just the tip of the tongue, or just a sniff), Sancho is not drinking primarily in order to evaluate the wine. He is up to many things. He is drinking to slate his thirst (that’s how the episode begins), to get drunk (so drunk that he falls asleep with food still in his mouth) and as part of a conversation with the squire. Along the way he does also evaluate the wine (with a comic bit of winespeak: “Ah, whoreson rogue, how catholic it is!” 6 ), and also identifies it accurately as a “Ciudad Real.”

Now, it is not our purpose here to give a literary-style close reading of Cervantes and Hume. Nor are we accusing Hume of changing the story to suit his purpose – it is, after all, a fictional story to begin with. It is just that these points of difference happen to highlight three further ideas that we consider important. First, the procedures undertaken in tasting matter: what the tasters know in advance and bring to bear on the tasting, what they do (taste or sniff, and reflect), and what they say to each other and to third parties. The two tasters in Cervantes’ story each perform a part of a wine-tasting practice. Wine tasting, then, does not consist exclusively of the set of immediate sensations that one has. We call this set of various procedures an aesthetic practice , and we claim that implementation of such practices requires certain competencies (for example, what Hume calls “delicacy”). Of course, it may be that there are hereditary factors to the physiological potential for such “delicacy,” as Sancho insists. However, we shall argue below that physiology turns out to be less important than the cultural and practical competencies acquired through experience and training.

Second, despite their differing descriptions, and despite the fact that no unveiling of the objective truth happens there and then, the two tasters do not enter into a fruitless argument with each other. They evidently understand each other, accept the merit of each others’ methods and descrip-tions, agree entirely on the wine’s merits (the truth of which could never simply be ‘unveiled’) and generally show that their disagreement is based on a fundamental agreement about procedure and evaluation. There is a moral to be drawn here about the independence of the critic, the fact that in Sancho’s version they are quite unmoved by the protestations of the owner of the wine who is also their employer in the tasting. However, our point here is to describe the level of validity that these judgments aspire to. We agree with Hume that this validity is not to be termed ‘subjective’ in the

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sense of having no validity for anyone except the individual making it. But, insofar as it cannot be reduced to description that (ideally at least) could have its validity ratified by an examination of the contents of the barrel, we shall be unable to think of it as ‘objective’ in the ordinary sense either. There must, then, be a third alternative in the old subjective/objective debate. The validity that their judgments have, for the tasters themselves and for others, we shall call inter-subjective . That is to say, they are valid with reference to a group of tasters who share competencies and experiences. Some authors, such as Barry C. Smith and Cain Todd, 7 recognize that the complexities of the situation are difficult to capture given the metaphysical baggage that generally accompanies the distinction between subjective and objective. However they nevertheless persist with the term ‘objective.’ We believe a new term is warranted, in order to draw attention to the original social and cultural aspect of wine appreciation, to the ‘emergent’ 8 qualities of aesthetic attributes, and to the decisive significance of competencies, among other factors. We will of course discuss this idea further, first below and then in later chapters.

Third, in observing the contrast between Sancho’s complex set of activities with the wine and the pure activity of evaluation undertaken by his kinsmen, we notice what should have been obvious all along: that one can do many things with wine. One can identify it, describe it or evaluate it; one can also drink it as part of the pleasure of good company, impress someone with it (as the squire does Sancho) or just drink to get drunk. Speaking in an Aristotelian vein for a moment, each of these undertakings has a set of subordinate activities that generally belong to it, and each has an end or purpose. Let us call the activities, the competencies one needs in advance to carry them out, together with the end that one has in mind, the project . What one thinks or says about the wine obviously depends upon the project, and we maintain that aesthetic judging is a distinct type of project.

Our discussion of Cervantes’ story and Hume’s use of it has raised five basic concepts. The five are competency , aesthetic practice , inter-subjective validity , project and aesthetic attribute . The purpose of this chapter is to provide an initial or provisional discussion of the first four of these. Aesthetic attribute gets a mention below under competency but otherwise will have to wait until Chapter 2 and especially Chapter 3 for a full treatment. Although we will be primarily concerned with exploring these ideas with respect to the nature of wine tasting, our wider thesis should be borne in mind through-out: such wine tasting can be aesthetic in nature, is thus strongly analogous to our appreciation of the arts, and thus our conclusions concerning wine appreciation may have important implications for philosophical aesthetics more generally.

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