Objectivity requires us to marshal evidence, shed our prejudices, preferences and idiosyncracies, and to apply standards. It asks us to reason and evaluate as anyone else might in our shoes. We rely on mechanics, surgeons, and engineers, among others, to be thoughtful in following rules and procedures and in fulfilling the dictates of objectivity; but do we, can we expect it of wine tasters? Actually, we can, according to Barry C. Smith, professor of philosophy at the University of London. As founding director of the university’s Centre for the Study of the Senses, and wine columnist for Prospect Magazine, Smith is a patient defender of objectivity in wine tasting. For him, assertions of wine tasting’s unavoidable subjectivity demand qualification because such claims change and shrink under sustained philosophical and scientific scrutiny.
As Smith tells me (in the conversation he generously made time for in 2012), he was only 14 or 15 when his father, a restaurant proprietor, served him a glass of Chateau Mouton-Rothschild with instructions on how and where to direct his attention. That epiphany-generating wine’s “aromas … seemed to rise through the top of my head,” Smith recalls, “and I just couldn’t believe anything was as hedonic and beautiful as this.” Having become a philosopher, he had to convince his less oenophilic colleagues that there was a philosophical dimension to wine. When he suggested a conference on wine and philosophy, Smith marvels a little at the memory, “they all laughed and said, that’s very good, very funny. You’re not serious, are you?” Since he was, the colleagues wondered what would be discussed, and he listed some “perfectly good philosophical questions,” such as whether we perceive the same thing in a given wine, whether determining a wine’s quality is a subjective or objective judgment, or how a novice taster differs from an expert. These, and other questions, struck him as an opportunity to teach wine drinkers about philosophy and philosophers about wine.
He found that intellectually curious winemakers were pleased to learn that philosophers were interested, happy to hear that there might be more to talk about in wine than, say, the length of the malolactic fermentation. What surprised him was the hostility of wine critics. As “the people who tell interesting stories about wine,” as Smith puts it, the critics tended to see a philosophical move on to their ground as an incursion. Not only were individual critics “rude about me in print,” Smith remembers—those critics denying, too, that the wine world needed any philosophy—but they then proceeded to display a profound philosophical confusion by stating that wine tasting was purely subjective, while, simultaneously, as critics, referring to objective standards by declaring how much less good one wine was compared to another. Some simply failed to see a contradiction. Smith says, “If the experience is just an individual, subjective matter, then you the critic are just giving us autobiography, you’re just telling us about you. Why should we care?” Smith notes, however, that the best critics, like Jancis Robinson, for example, acknowledge that they’re writers rather than philosophers, and welcome the “refreshing” news of the objective aspects of their work.
Smith draws on the work of perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson (1904-1979), recognized for his exploration of the ecology of perception, which is to say, the attunement of the animal through its senses to the environment. For Gibson, and his colleague and wife, Eleanor, perceptual learning in wine is a touchstone for perceptual discrimination in general, as indeed wine has been at least since Aristotle. In the 1955 article that Smith mentions to me in our conversation, the Gibsons deploy terms that Smith has philosophically extended and deepened. There, the Gibsons remark that the difference between a taster who discriminates one wine from another with specificity and accuracy, and a taster for whom it’s always an “undifferentiated,” generic wine, is that the skilled taster “has learned to taste and smell more of the qualities of wine, that is, he discriminates more of the variables of chemical stimulation.”
As Smith explains, “the idea is that you should be responding to certain things in the environment that are … particularly salient to you because of your needs, perceptions, and interests, and because of what’s going on in you and the apparatus you have.” Gibson’s famous concept is that of “affordances,” that the world is filled with things that “afford your interaction with them,” and flavours “are exactly that sort of thing,” in Smith’s estimation. The senses of taste and smell are “gatekeepers” for substances from the environment; they’re immediately judging the “nasty or nice” qualities of what’s being taken in so riskily from the outside world. Flavours in food and wine are thus emphatically not merely created by the brain, they aren’t subjective in that fundamental way, as wine writers, psychologists and neuroscientists are all too apt to confusedly assert today. Rather, flavours are “out there,” among the signposts or information that we use to navigate the world.
To understand this complex dance of the senses and substances, you can’t just introspect in your armchair, Smith says, because so much that’s struck us as true from that comfortable perch is false. As Smith suggests to me, and implies in his June 2012 article, ‘Complexities of Flavour,’ without philosophers communicating with perceptual scientists, the current confusions would have even less hope of being cleared away. One such problem in the study of wine perception emerges “between those who say that flavours depend on molecular compounds, and those who stress the varying perceptions of individual[s] …” Smith’s clarification, his conceptual untangling, seeks to separate the chemical compounds of particular flavours from the experience of those flavours in particular individuals, as tasks for chemists and psychologists, respectively. Both are dealing with flavours, but only the psychologist is dealing with the variation that goes with experience. “And,” Smith says to me, “that is missed again and again. You’ll often see people in books slipping from talking about perception to talking about flavours. Flavours are constructs of the brain, they say. No! Flavour perceptions or percepts are constructs of the brain.”
Thus, flavour perceptions belong to individuals who may not have the genetic makeup to sense particular compounds or faults like TCA, which causes cork taint. They may have anosmias to molecules like rotundone—20 percent of people don’t sense it—which gives pepperiness to both black pepper and Syrah. Such variations, however, often trotted out as evidence that tasting can’t be objective, prove no such thing. Rather, Smith reminds us, the “fact that there’s individual difference doesn’t mean it’s all subjective; it means we can now explain why individuals react differently, just as we could if their hearing or vision was different from ours.”
In our experience of colour in vision, Smith adds, surface reflectance properties change the colours of objects as the lighting conditions vary, and our perceptual system responds by generating colour constancy, but we lack an equivalent capacity for flavour constancy. Yet this lack is precisely what expert tasters compensate for as they taste the wine repeatedly to gauge how its taste alters, how it evolves in the glass, with temperature changes, and over the years: “It’s as if,” Smith concludes, the taster were “stepping into a stream, a river, at different moments.”
Years later, skepticism persists about tasting, with wine critics and others stubbornly holding on to the idea that we inhabit our own private taste worlds, though there’s overwhelming evidence that tasting is a species-wide potential and achievement. In fact, as Smith repeatedly points out, in noticing the distinctive flavours of wines from particular vineyards, in discerning the balance and complexity created by talented winemakers, we acknowledge the objective existence of flavours in the world, and our intermittent, hard-won ability to grasp them. And that’s, after all, what turns wine into an adventure; it’s what prevents drinking, thinking and talking about it from being mere navel gazing.
A Most Particular Taste 