Taste

"It is an amazing story. It is very funny and also captures how wine tasters can use language to assert cultural superiority. The language is so particular to a certain sort of wine taster. It is almost like a private language. Complete elite snobbery. But the joke is that the taster who is using this language is a complete fraud. Dahl had his own issues, he was very elitist himself. The character in the book is a stockbroker who has a lot of new money, and with it he is trying to acquire taste, culture and sophistication. There is this idea that if you know the name of the wine that you are blind-tasting, you become more clever and sophisticated in being able to talk about that particular wine. This brings up another interesting cultural war between the old world and the new world, and it may have to do with the geographical distance between European vineyards and our own shores. The American critics, particularly the wine critic Robert Parker, seem not to be especially interested in the provenance of a wine. Parker seems incurious about the context and culture of wine. He really just wants to know how things taste – just the facts, ma’am. European wine critics are of course interested in how wine tastes, but they are also interested in the context from which a wine arises. They look at the methodology of the winemaking, the style of the wine, what you might want to serve it with, that sort of thing. They are snobbish if you will, but they often have a lot more information. Exactly. Knowledge is very important in informing your experience of wine."