Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine

Abstract

SINCE the early 1990s there has been a striking expansion of philosophical interest in matters of food, drink, and taste. This collection adds an engaging set of voices to the conversation with ten nicely matched essays on wine. The authors include philosophers, wine experts, and a linguist. Their approaches converge on a selected set of issues, making the essays usefully complementary. The interest that unites most of the entries concerns the status of the properties ascribed to wine. Some of those, such as ‘sweet’ or ‘red’, have fairly obvious application. The more subtle descriptors that identify ‘notes of blackberry and pepper’ or ‘robust, brawny undertones’ pre-reflectively might seem to be fanciful products of idiosyncratic taste—veritable paradigms of ‘subjective’ opinions. But just what is meant by ‘subjective’? What kinds of ‘objective’ properties does wine have? Are these limited to chemical properties, or can phenomenological descriptors also claim objective standing? Such issues are usefully framed by the introduction provided by the editor, Barry Smith. He poses cogent questions about the sense of taste, the properties of wine, and the complexities packed into the determination of objectivity and subjectivity in judgments about taste experiences. He makes persuasively clear why wine is a proper subject of philosophy—particularly on epistemic grounds. What is more, the epistemic issues (how is one able to perceive taste qualities, on what grounds one may claim to know and assess wine) are themselves fully aesthetic issues as well, not least because, as Smith notes, ‘we seem to take wine as an end and not a means: a worthy object for contemplation’ (p. xi).

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