Baudry Rose 2008

S

Steven Spielmann

Steven Spielmann
Saw that the 2009 was at CSW and realized that I had a last bottle of this still in my stash. Drank it before, during, and after salmon pasta and lettuce/strawberry/almond salad. A wine of beauty. Almost nothing to it but finesse until the end: thin nose so far on the light end of pink that one could almost find something similar on an inoffensive South American chardonnay - though with air and food lifted berry scents poked through; appealing but minimally characterful palate - vague hints of tanninless cabernet, again inoffensiveness. Gives a sense of being well crafted and balanced - but for what?

Then, after you swallow, the rear portion of your tongue comes alive with brilliantly delicate berry fruit. Like spring after winter, the mouth comes alive with the memory of wine. This sensation carries into the next sip, and the next, lifting one's experience of the wine itself to higher and higher - which is not to say in any overtly phenomenological way different - levels.

I don't know what fraction of wine drinkers will ever derive the enjoyment out of a wine like this that it can provide. But if you don't pay attention, you never know what you're missing.
 
originally posted by Steven Spielmann:
I don't know what fraction of wine drinkers will ever derive the enjoyment out of a wine like this that it can provide. But if you don't pay attention, you never know what you're missing.
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I've had that same thought, a time or two.
So I ordered a case of the 2009.
Best, Jim
 
originally posted by Steven Spielmann:
Baudry Rose 2008Saw that the 2009 was at CSW and realized that I had a last bottle of this still in my stash. Drank it before, during, and after salmon pasta and lettuce/strawberry/almond salad. A wine of beauty. Almost nothing to it but finesse until the end: thin nose so far on the light end of pink that one could almost find something similar on an inoffensive South American chardonnay - though with air and food lifted berry scents poked through; appealing but minimally characterful palate - vague hints of tanninless cabernet, again inoffensiveness. Gives a sense of being well crafted and balanced - but for what?

Then, after you swallow, the rear portion of your tongue comes alive with brilliantly delicate berry fruit. Like spring after winter, the mouth comes alive with the memory of wine. This sensation carries into the next sip, and the next, lifting one's experience of the wine itself to higher and higher - which is not to say in any overtly phenomenological way different - levels.

I don't know what fraction of wine drinkers will ever derive the enjoyment out of a wine like this that it can provide. But if you don't pay attention, you never know what you're missing.
Click to expand...

If I could write tasting notes like this, I might write tasting notes.
 
originally posted by Steven Spielmann:
I don't know what fraction of wine drinkers will ever derive the enjoyment out of a wine like this that it can provide. But if you don't pay attention, you never know what you're missing.
Click to expand...

The 2008 is the type of wine that is almost invisible and flits in and out of your peripheral vision.

I love it, but I can see why it's not for everyone.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
originally posted by Steven Spielmann:
Baudry Rose 2008Saw that the 2009 was at CSW and realized that I had a last bottle of this still in my stash. Drank it before, during, and after salmon pasta and lettuce/strawberry/almond salad. A wine of beauty. Almost nothing to it but finesse until the end: thin nose so far on the light end of pink that one could almost find something similar on an inoffensive South American chardonnay - though with air and food lifted berry scents poked through; appealing but minimally characterful palate - vague hints of tanninless cabernet, again inoffensiveness. Gives a sense of being well crafted and balanced - but for what?

Then, after you swallow, the rear portion of your tongue comes alive with brilliantly delicate berry fruit. Like spring after winter, the mouth comes alive with the memory of wine. This sensation carries into the next sip, and the next, lifting one's experience of the wine itself to higher and higher - which is not to say in any overtly phenomenological way different - levels.

I don't know what fraction of wine drinkers will ever derive the enjoyment out of a wine like this that it can provide. But if you don't pay attention, you never know what you're missing.
Click to expand...

If I could write tasting notes like this, I might write tasting notes.
Click to expand...

It's always amazed me that you can't. What's up with that?
 
Not precisely academic writing, but maybe something related. I find taste nearly incommunicable in its full phenomenal reality and tasting notes largely dependent on metaphors that elide differences and don't really communicate full particularity in practice (I know Thor disagrees with me, but his practice doesn't make his point for me, alas). I can write tasting notes like most people's and I have, but I am unsatisfied with them and unsatisfied with mine. I don't think I get much more real information from Stephen's above, but it had narrative and plot development. One could practically analyze it using Freytag's triangle. Robert used to write tasting notes like that. They are both in excess of tasting notes and still inadequate to the full phenomenological experience. I'm not sure whether I can't write them or don't quite connect with the point of writing them. But they are self-justifying.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
Not precisely academic writing, but maybe something related. I find taste nearly incommunicable in its full phenomenal reality and tasting notes largely dependent on metaphors that elide differences and don't really communicate full particularity in practice (I know Thor disagrees with me, but his practice doesn't make his point for me, alas). I can write tasting notes like most people's and I have, but I am unsatisfied with them and unsatisfied with mine. I don't think I get much more real information from Stephen's above, but it had narrative and plot development. One could practically analyze it using Freytag's triangle. Robert used to write tasting notes like that. They are both in excess of tasting notes and still inadequate to the full phenomenological experience. I'm not sure whether I can't write them or don't quite connect with the point of writing them. But they are self-justifying.
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Speaking of Robert, I saw him yesterday and thought he looked much better than the last time I saw him. He said that this was a mirage and that he was still doing poorly but that he was working with doctors that do research so he was hopeful of getting some help soon. Hopefully, those doctors work with PhDs so they'll know how to actually analyze what is going on. After this long, it is pretty obvious that clinical doctors cannot help him, so I'm glad he's getting involved with researchers who might.
 
This actually hooks up to the discussion of tasting notes and wine aesthetics I've been meaning to start here when I have time.

Here are some things about artworks in general that are variably important/central for different works - all of which have at certain times by certain writers been taken as the essence of the beast: representation, form, expression of emotion and thought, encoding experiences, reflecting general history/culture, developing an art-specific canon, conceptually transforming our notion of art in general or of that specific art form.

The most common form of tasting note is purely formal, with occasional adornments relating to where the wine belongs in the 'wine canon'. The kind I like to write when I can combine some formal features of the wine with a more Deweyan-phenomenological experiential account of drinking the wine.

I think that sometimes when I read Dalton, Dressner, or Weekley there is a push in yet a different direction: towards an explicit aesthetic of wine as terroir-expression. This could in principle include both 'walk through the vineyard/talk with the winemaker'-type material (which would be wine's version of an expression theory, I think, though with this theoretically interesting twist: the winemaker is conceived as a sort of handmaiden of nature, whose self-expression through the wine is held paramount) and experiential material relating to drinking the wine (perhaps ideally: in context, in the land where it was made with the food it was made to go with).

Now: there is, presumably, some total set of aesthetically relevant facts about a wine, not all of which are accessible to any given wine drinker at any given time. Some may be missed due to lack of discrimination and some may be missed due to lack of various sorts of context.

The Dressnerian objection to tasting notes might then be viewed as pointing out that the (wine-world standard) formally driven tasting note is in principle incapable of communicating some of these aesthetically relevant facts. With that I agree. What seems quite open to discussion though is whether (a) there are other forms of tasting note, including some of the missing elements as well as the formal elements, that might be more suited to some communication, and (b) whether even truncated communications about wine might not have some value for a suitably intellectually competent reader to derive some meaningful information from them.

I think that viewing the critic as communicating information about the wine in the abstract is mistaken though. Art critics don't really do this either; all the writing you'll ever read about e.g. Michelangelo's David or Beethoven's symphonies is only useful for enhancing your own experience through interrogation of the object and your reactions to it once you've seen it. "Hey, here are some things that are interesting about this object, if you're not 'getting' it you might see/hear/taste/smell it from this point of view;" or alternately, "Hey, I see you're grooving on this thing, have you noticed x, y, and z? If you haven't, pay attention to those and you might find even more things in it to enjoy." The critic as I see her guides us to greater depth of experience by sharing her own.

This is a very imprecise and hasty statement of some of the things I've been thinking about but I am so swamped with work I thought I'd throw it out there as a general 'for your consideration' kind of thing.
 
Well, I disagree that wine is an artwork or any kind of subset of artwork. Artworks are intelligible and as Kant said our judgment of them differs in that we would never say about them as we say about Canary wine, this wine tastes good to me.

I also disagree about art critics. They do do what you say they do. But as they engage in interpretation, historical contextualization, etc., etc., they do engage in the communication of information and their conclusions may be controverted at times.

Otherwise, jake by me.
 
Kant's distinction is at the level of types of judgment. Judgments of agreeability are personal and thus, for him, non-aesthetic; judgments of beauty are impersonal (appealing to the supersensible idea of a shared human nature or 'sensus communis' as a norm governing one's judgment). "I like canary wine", "I like landscape paintings," "I don't like sunsets", etc. are all judgments of agreeability rather than beauty, and plausibly none of these can be individuated by their objects except accidentally (because no-one ever claims that something of type x is beautiful rather than agreeable). Wines certainly are judged as beautiful, as better or worse than other wines in some sense that is meant to be more than a pronouncement of personal affect by at least some persons, so they seem at least to be put forward as candidate beauties in Kant's sense from time to time.

You could hold that all judgments of wine fall into the category of the merely agreeable, I suppose. I don't. But also, probably neither of us are strict Kantians (or even Kantians at all), and so the real ground of our disagreement lies elsewhere. But in any case I do think that wine is a genuine field of aesthetic endeavor and in any catholic use of the word 'art' should probably qualify as an art form. The question in my mind is how many dimensions this form could be said to legitimately possess.

Agree with you that I am oversimplifying the real social role of critics. This is just the thing they do that I think has actual value to me, since I don't care much in the end about the marketplace, and only care about the canon as a tool for appreciation. I am aware that the latter view especially marks me as a deviant among people who theorize about art.
 
originally posted by Steven Spielmann:
This actually hooks up to the discussion of tasting notes and wine aesthetics I've been meaning to start here when I have time.

Here are some things about artworks in general that are variably important/central for different works - all of which have at certain times by certain writers been taken as the essence of the beast: representation, form, expression of emotion and thought, encoding experiences, reflecting general history/culture, developing an art-specific canon, conceptually transforming our notion of art in general or of that specific art form.

The most common form of tasting note is purely formal, with occasional adornments relating to where the wine belongs in the 'wine canon'. The kind I like to write when I can combine some formal features of the wine with a more Deweyan-phenomenological experiential account of drinking the wine.

I think that sometimes when I read Dalton, Dressner, or Weekley there is a push in yet a different direction: towards an explicit aesthetic of wine as terroir-expression. This could in principle include both 'walk through the vineyard/talk with the winemaker'-type material (which would be wine's version of an expression theory, I think, though with this theoretically interesting twist: the winemaker is conceived as a sort of handmaiden of nature, whose self-expression through the wine is held paramount) and experiential material relating to drinking the wine (perhaps ideally: in context, in the land where it was made with the food it was made to go with).

Now: there is, presumably, some total set of aesthetically relevant facts about a wine, not all of which are accessible to any given wine drinker at any given time. Some may be missed due to lack of discrimination and some may be missed due to lack of various sorts of context.

The Dressnerian objection to tasting notes might then be viewed as pointing out that the (wine-world standard) formally driven tasting note is in principle incapable of communicating some of these aesthetically relevant facts. With that I agree. What seems quite open to discussion though is whether (a) there are other forms of tasting note, including some of the missing elements as well as the formal elements, that might be more suited to some communication, and (b) whether even truncated communications about wine might not have some value for a suitably intellectually competent reader to derive some meaningful information from them.

I think that viewing the critic as communicating information about the wine in the abstract is mistaken though. Art critics don't really do this either; all the writing you'll ever read about e.g. Michelangelo's David or Beethoven's symphonies is only useful for enhancing your own experience through interrogation of the object and your reactions to it once you've seen it. "Hey, here are some things that are interesting about this object, if you're not 'getting' it you might see/hear/taste/smell it from this point of view;" or alternately, "Hey, I see you're grooving on this thing, have you noticed x, y, and z? If you haven't, pay attention to those and you might find even more things in it to enjoy." The critic as I see her guides us to greater depth of experience by sharing her own.

This is a very imprecise and hasty statement of some of the things I've been thinking about but I am so swamped with work I thought I'd throw it out there as a general 'for your consideration' kind of thing.
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Personally, my all-time favorite is Yaninger's old three-stooges format.
 
originally posted by Steven Spielmann:
Kant's distinction is at the level of types of judgment. Judgments of agreeability are personal and thus, for him, non-aesthetic; judgments of beauty are impersonal (appealing to the supersensible idea of a shared human nature or 'sensus communis' as a norm governing one's judgment). "I like canary wine", "I like landscape paintings," "I don't like sunsets", etc. are all judgments of agreeability rather than beauty, and plausibly none of these can be individuated by their objects except accidentally (because no-one ever claims that something of type x is beautiful rather than agreeable). Wines certainly are judged as beautiful, as better or worse than other wines in some sense that is meant to be more than a pronouncement of personal affect by at least some persons, so they seem at least to be put forward as candidate beauties in Kant's sense from time to time.

.
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To the extent that any natural object can become the object of an aesthetic apprehension and that apprehension takes its object with indifference as to its existence, I guess you can take wine aesthetically. But you would not be judging its taste or anything else about it the sensations it emits with regard to what they are as tastes, etc. He uses the example of wine, though, because what you translate as its agreeability, in context, means the pleasure one gets from its sensual apprehension. And since pleasures are for Kant, opaque, one can't make judgments about them at all. One can only communicate one's having it or not. If, as a result of drinking a wine, one had the sense that it communicated say "joyfulness and contentment with its existence," we would be making an aesthetic judgment. But neither an evaluation of its taste, which is non-universally about pleasure or agreeability, nor a judgment that it does or does not accurately communicate terroir, which is a matter of objective cognition, would be an aesthetic judgment.

I don't know what you mean about being a "Kantian." I don't have to subscribe to all his theories to agree with his analytic of aesthetic judgments. I probably don't even have to agree with his theories of perception, though you have to understand them and would have to translate out of them to get there.
 
Artifacts, like trees, tables, and chairs, exist independent of value judgments. Labeling an artifact "art" is an established way, mostly confined the western european culture, of charging more for it. Art is like Santa Claus: a well-established concept for something that doesn't exist.
 
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
My two centsArtifacts, like trees, tables, and chairs, exist independent of value judgments. Labeling an artifact "art" is an established way, mostly confined the western european culture, of charging more for it. Art is like Santa Claus: a well-established concept for something that doesn't exist.
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You are making two different claims. One, that art is a western concept, in terms of the way we talk about it here, is true, though even that needs qualification since the fact that the concept is western doesn't prove that the concept doesn't correspond to a natural reality. Newtonian physics is a western concept too.

The second doesn't respond to an analytic as all. No one denies that trees (which are not, by the way, artifacts) or chairs and tables (which are artifacts but not artworks) exist independently of aesthetic judgments (though, again, chairs and tables may not exist independently of the purposes, which do entail judgments, for which they were made). The question is whether one can describe analytically a kind of judgment made about them. As long as you fixate on whether aesthetic judgments are objective or not, you will be arguing only to a very narrow range of aesthetic theory.
 
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