What are these guys on about?

originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
Jonathan: If everyone had the same alleles then we might be able to define terroir a little more precisely. But, as we all have different "tools" to use, it's no surprise that scientific methods don't give the expected result.
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It is for this reason that I have argued that wine evaluation is irreducibly subjective. Before one gets to the evaluation, it turns out that the actual taste information is irreducibly subjective.

But the issue with blind tasting is slightly different since I was suggesting that our abilities to match up our tastes with our memories of tastes is also less than mistake proof. In other words, even if we established that we could develop an absolute evaluative taxonomy of terroirs--or even some reasonably limited version of it--and we could establish that the taxonomy held even taking into account the range of physiological variation in tasting among human beings, our ability to identify the terriors in question through our tastes--again assuming that we already knew how it tasted to us--is still less than wonderful. None of those proves or even comes close to proving that terroir differences that go to significant wine differences don't exist. But, as I siad at first, it does suggest we should hold our own views on the issue somewhat loosely.
 
As one who has proven over decades to be less than mistake-proof at any kind of tasting--blind or otherwise--I am definitely a subscriber to the "loosely held views" philosophy.

In any discussion that raises the issue of the competence of wine critics, I still find it useful to refer back to Adam Gopnik's story from September 2004 (seems like a very long time ago).

Through A Glass Darkly

Sample quote:

The real question is not whether wine snobs and wine writers are big phonies but whether they are any bigger phonies than, say, book reviewers or art critics. For with those things, too, context effects are overwhelming. All description is impressionistic, and all impressions are interpretive. Colors and shapes don’t emerge from pictures in neat, particulate packages to strike the eye, either, any more than plots and themes come direct to the mind from the pages of books. Everything is framed by something.

Anyway, no elaborate rhetoric of compliments is meant to be “accurate”; it is meant to be complimentary. When Shakespeare compares his lover to a summer’s day, he doesn’t really mean that she (or he) is like a summer’s day in that she is hotter in the middle and cooler in the end—though, then again, he might. Wine writing is of the same type: a series of elaborately plausible compliments paid to wines. When the French wine writer Eric Glatre declares, say, that in the aroma of a bottle of Krug “intense empyreumatic fragrances of toasted milk bread, fresh butter, café au lait, and afterthoughts of linden join in a harmonious chorus with generous notes of acacia honey, mocha, and vanilla,” he is suggesting that, of all the analogies out there, this might be one that expands our minds, opens our horizons, delights our imaginations. He is offering a metaphor, not an account book.
 
An interesting piece, but I cannot get behind this (and think about a wine that's really enchanted your palate lately and tell me you don't agree):

"For it is not wine that makes us happy for no reason; it is alcohol that makes us happy for no reason. Wine is what gives us a reason to let alcohol make us happy without one. Without wine lore, and wine tasting, and wine talk, and wine labels, and, yes, wine writing and rating—the whole elaborate idea of wine—we would still get drunk, but we would be merely drunk. The language of wine appreciation is there not because wine is such a special subtle challenge to our discernment but because without the elaborate language—without the idea of wine, held up and regularly polished—it would all be about the same, or taste that way."

Yes, the '88 Lafarge Ducs is making me drunk, but that's not why I have this smile on my face.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
Jonathan: If everyone had the same alleles then we might be able to define terroir a little more precisely. But, as we all have different "tools" to use, it's no surprise that scientific methods don't give the expected result.
Click to expand...

It is for this reason that I have argued that wine evaluation is irreducibly subjective. Before one gets to the evaluation, it turns out that the actual taste information is irreducibly subjective.

But the issue with blind tasting is slightly different since I was suggesting that our abilities to match up our tastes with our memories of tastes is also less than mistake proof. In other words, even if we established that we could develop an absolute evaluative taxonomy of terroirs--or even some reasonably limited version of it--and we could establish that the taxonomy held even taking into account the range of physiological variation in tasting among human beings, our ability to identify the terriors in question through our tastes--again assuming that we already knew how it tasted to us--is still less than wonderful. None of those proves or even comes close to proving that terroir differences that go to significant wine differences don't exist. But, as I siad at first, it does suggest we should hold our own views on the issue somewhat loosely.
Click to expand...

Isn't all individual perception irreducibly subjective? We have more confidence in our opinions about things seen than things tasted, because we have enormously more corroborative data from other humans, expressed in a much more finely graded vocabulary, regarding things seen than things tasted. This corroborative (or, more often, anti-corroborative) feedback limits the range of idiosyncratic variation within which individuals can express themselves without substantial contradiction. Taste experiences are much, much less frequently compared in fine detail among groups of people than visual experiences.

In this interpretation, the objective-subjective dichotomy would be a continuum of implicit individual Bayesian estimates of what expressions will fail to be contradicted; the objective end of the spectrum representing those views for which correct evaluation of relatively large data sets reduces the probability of contradiction to small orders.
 
originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
Jonathan: If everyone had the same alleles then we might be able to define terroir a little more precisely. But, as we all have different "tools" to use, it's no surprise that scientific methods don't give the expected result.
Click to expand...

It is for this reason that I have argued that wine evaluation is irreducibly subjective. Before one gets to the evaluation, it turns out that the actual taste information is irreducibly subjective.

But the issue with blind tasting is slightly different since I was suggesting that our abilities to match up our tastes with our memories of tastes is also less than mistake proof. In other words, even if we established that we could develop an absolute evaluative taxonomy of terroirs--or even some reasonably limited version of it--and we could establish that the taxonomy held even taking into account the range of physiological variation in tasting among human beings, our ability to identify the terriors in question through our tastes--again assuming that we already knew how it tasted to us--is still less than wonderful. None of those proves or even comes close to proving that terroir differences that go to significant wine differences don't exist. But, as I siad at first, it does suggest we should hold our own views on the issue somewhat loosely.
Click to expand...

Isn't all individual perception irreducibly subjective? We have more confidence in our opinions about things seen than things tasted, because we have enormously more corroborative data from other humans, expressed in a much more finely graded vocabulary, regarding things seen than things tasted. This corroborative (or, more often, anti-corroborative) feedback limits the range of idiosyncratic variation within which individuals can express themselves without substantial contradiction. Taste experiences are much, much less frequently compared in fine detail among groups of people than visual experiences.

In this interpretation, the objective-subjective dichotomy would be a continuum of implicit individual Bayesian estimates of what expressions will fail to be contradicted; the objective end of the spectrum representing those views for which correct evaluation of relatively large data sets reduces the probability of contradiction to small orders.
Click to expand...

It has been usually thought and is frequently thought still that human beings are basically, so to speak, constructed the same, and in the presence of stimulus a, they will receive sensation b (as in, eat sugar, taste sweetness, which sweetness, although we cannot prove it,is identical to the sweetness that others taste). THere have always been philosoophers--Kant, for instance--who have disputed this surety as one on which any important principles can be based, though even Kant accepted it as an empirical fact, at least for most cases (and no one accepts it for all--some people have red/green colorblindness). Jeff's point, I believe, was that this widely held belief is, in fact empirically inaccurate, by which I mean one can test for its inaccuracy. As I understand it, though I happily speak under correction, differences correlate strongly to cuisines specific to different cultures,which induce sensitivity and lack of same to certain taste sensations. On top of that, however, there are, or may be, human beings with much more sensitive taste receptors. Those human beings would be the last people to be wine geeks or foodies, however. Given their heightened sensitivities they prefer food that we normal drudges would consider bland. In any case, I took Jeff to be referring to these differences, which I take to be more destructive of the notion of objective evaluation than normal nineteenth century metaphysical notions of subjectivity.
 
And what of the evolutionary biological angle? It is easy to accept that threat analysis and group protection makes the need for standardized vocalization of unified sensory perceptions critical. We quickly disperse information about what we see and hear, because it helps the tribe. Our ability to utilize linguistics with respect to smell would be logically be better ("whatever you do, man, don't put that in your mouth. It's spoiled") than for taste. I buy the argument that the shortest sensory neural pathway is the one from the olfactory epithelium to the PC and on through the amygdala, because it is the last defense system before you poison yourself. Even the pathway all the way through to the hippocampus is short compared to the other senses. Smell goes directly to long term and emotional memory.

By the time you taste food or wine, it's already in your mouth, and has cleared all the other threat detection systems. Being beyond your last best defense, taste would logically be more subjective and less likely to have as well connected a vernacular. We cannot uniformly describe taste, because we don't need to. The neural pathways from taste reception to language formulation are pretty damn convoluted. You're either dead, or you're not. No point yapping about it.

Sharon, a rose, by any other name, would smell as drunk.

And I am red/green deficient.
 
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
An interesting piece, but I cannot get behind this (and think about a wine that's really enchanted your palate lately and tell me you don't agree):

"For it is not wine that makes us happy for no reason; it is alcohol that makes us happy for no reason. Wine is what gives us a reason to let alcohol make us happy without one. Without wine lore, and wine tasting, and wine talk, and wine labels, and, yes, wine writing and rating—the whole elaborate idea of wine—we would still get drunk, but we would be merely drunk. The language of wine appreciation is there not because wine is such a special subtle challenge to our discernment but because without the elaborate language—without the idea of wine, held up and regularly polished—it would all be about the same, or taste that way."

Yes, the '88 Lafarge Ducs is making me drunk, but that's not why I have this smile on my face.
Click to expand...

Thanks, that one got by me. That's Gopnik being a "regular guy." He's making inebriation the primary motive, which is bullshit. If all I wanted was to get drunk, vodka is far more economical and efficient.

...and now to uncork a bottle of this "Hannibal" stuff I got at Bouchard Finlayson. Couldn't believe anyone was growing sangiovese in Walker Bay.
 
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