The Taste of Wine

"Peynaud is the grandfather of oenology — the science of winemaking and of wine assessment. Peynaud is revered in the world of wine as the grandmaster who really put thinking about winemaking and thinking of all of the factors that are involved in creating a better wine on a scientific standing. Émile Peynaud in this book, The Taste of Wine, is daring to do something which you think science would fight shy of: talking of the experience of taste. As a philosopher and as a philosopher of perception, it’s intriguing to get somebody who is — though he doesn’t see himself as a philosopher — addressing something very much like what we call the mind-body problem. He was a winemaker — he consulted for properties in Bordeaux and in Burgundy and he was working with some of the best winemaking houses — he knows about the of winemaking and he knows what factors go into improving a wine and making a wine better. But all of that science is producing a number of decisions and complex interventions to craft and create a perfect wine, and he knows it’s in the service of a particular subjective experience of the taster who then benefits from this and experiences it. He wants us to pay attention to what happens as we’re tasting wine, and he became one of the leading masters teaching people about how to taste wine — wine-tasting as a practice of discrimination and not just as something we do by simply sipping or glugging what’s in our glass. Peynaud believes that what we taste depends on how we taste and that you have to slow down and pay attention to the processes and you have to get the conditions right around you for tasting. But he also talks about whether that degree of attention and complexity of detail should go into every experience of wine-tasting, and his answer is no, not every experience: there are hectolitres of shapeless, formless wines of no interest at all, he said, which are not worth wasting your time thinking about. So, he’s interested in those cases where a wine has properties that we might discover and that we might explore. As a philosopher the important point that I get out of reading that book is the idea that what we get from tasting something like a complex and beautiful wine is not given all at once. We might think that as soon as wine makes contact with the mouth we’re just tasting it as it is, and here he’s saying no, there’s such a thing as a reflection, rather like a second look at a painting; there’s a way of paying attention and assessing what’s happening in your own experience to get more and more out of what’s happening in the wine. There probably isn’t just one right way to taste wine, but I think it’s sad if an enormous amount of effort, thought, and judgement has gone into creating a wine, and it’s taken a year’s worth of work to harvest the grapes from the fields, to decide exactly when you’re picking them, how you’re pressing them, how long they might stand in barrels, and when to bottle them, a huge amount of decision making that goes into creating this beautiful liquid which you pass over to someone for their appreciation, and if all they get is ‘I like/I don’t like this’ then you’ve missed the point of what’s going on in the wine. So, Peynaud and others sensitised me, and sensitised others, to finding out what’s going in a wine, what’s happening there. You spend less time just attending to your thumbs up/thumbs down approach, and more time thinking about the wine itself. That’s a way in which wine-tasting requires attention: attention to something and away from something — away from yourself and to the wine itself. I think it’s opaque for some philosophically interesting reasons. We talk of ‘red’ wine and ‘white’ wine and of course they’re neither white nor red. The colours you get in the wines that we’re talking about are not exhausted by these two colour labels that don’t accurately describe what we see. Also, when you taste the wine and say ‘Oh there’s some cherry or there’s some raspberry here or I get notes of fig or a little bit of leather,’ notice how difficult it is to come up with those judgements given that the thing in front of you doesn’t look like the fruit, or doesn’t have the colour of leather, or doesn’t actually have the texture and the feel of it. So, in a way, you’re getting sensory cues that are counter to the identifications of the aromas that we’re trying to latch on to. That’s why I think identifying aromas and flavours is a quite complicated activity, because you’ve got to discard some of the sensory cues: you’re putting away some of the things that don’t fit to find out what this is most like. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The might be, certainly to food. But what’s great about Peynaud is that he understands that we should approach this topic of tasting in its own right. It’s got its own logic, and it’s got its own methods, and to study it you’ve got to understand a lot of the chemistry that’s interacting with you, and also a lot of your own physiology, and then there’s the experiential level, and then there;s some of the artistry and craft that you’re trying to assess on the basis of knowing these factors. So, he’s giving it its own due instead of saying, as a lot of philosophers do: ‘Well, let’s take art or music as a primary case and then we can cast a little bit of beneficent light on those other lower art forms which engage the senses.’ Peynaud’s ultimate aim, in my view, is to encourage you to assess the quality and merit of what you’re tasting. You will get pleasure from this. If we weren’t getting pleasure then we probably wouldn’t do this. Why would we? Pleasure is a good guide, but it’s not the only thing. We’re really also trying to see if we’re getting an extraordinary degree of pleasure. If something happens that’s a little out of the ordinary, what is it that’s going on in the glass and in the wine that merits that response in us? Peynaud helps us understand how it was put together and how we might get clues about how it was made from our own experience of it, and also from understanding the wine-maker, what they’re aiming for in trying to deliver something of exceptional note and pleasure and interest."