Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Philosophically speaking... "Questions of Taste - The Philosophy of Wine"

Some things that I wish I had said myself. Or not... but they have been said by these guys on "Questions of Taste - The Philosophy of Wine"
  • "People who say that they can't appreciate a great wine generally haven't tasted one" - Kent Bach
  •  "Yes, expertise puts on in position to have further, cognitive pleasures, but these pleasures are distinct from the sensory pleasure of tasting wines" - Kent Bach
  • "We shouldn't confuse the pleasure of being articulate about wine, of being able to describe the distinctive features of a wine, with the non-verbal ability of remembering what they are like, or of appreciating them without being able to say why" - Kent Bach
  • "Most wine knowledge does not directly enhance the pleasures to be had in drinking wine but, rather, enhances one's ability to discover such pleasures" - Kent Bach
  • "In matters of taste your opinion is sovereign" - Barry C. Smith
  • "There is no standard of taste for evaluating the quality of wine, and if there were objective facts to get right there wouldn't be no divergence of opinion between expert wine critics" - Barry C. Smith
  • "We assume that other people see what we see and hear what we hear, when they are in the same immediate environment. So why do we not assume that other people taste what we taste?" - Barry C. Smith
  • "Visual experience enables me to see a church on the hillside. And whereas the church I see is separate from my experience of seeing it, the taste of the Chablis is not so clearly separable from the experiences I'm having when drinking it. Perhaps it is the closeness of a taste to the immediate experience of the taster that makes taste appear so irreducibly subjective. Must we think of tastes as being in us rather than in the wine? - Barry C. Smith
  • "The experience of taste occurs within me, crucially involving my conscious states. So the taste I'm having is not the taste you are having: we each taste separately. Therefore taste is subjective" - Barry C. Smith
  • "There's a difference between the quality of a wine and people's personal preferences. A wine may not be very interesting or very well made but some people may prefer drinking it to something more complex" - Barry C. Smith
  • "The critic is actually describing a conscious representation of their interaction with the wine, and therefore the score of rating is a property of that interaction and not the wine itself" - Jamie Goode
  • "Are two people drinking from the same bottle of wine having a common experience?" - Jamie Goode
  • "Our comparisons about wine are highly unreliable: most people have difficulties in distinguishing not only between many vintages but between only three glasses, not even memorized but all present and available for tasting" - Ophelia Deroy
  • "Appreciating a wine is global rather than analytic. What we smell or taste is not just the sum of distinctive smells and atomic tastes, but their integrative transformation into a whole" - Ophelia Deroy
  • "Wines, no more than people, have definite characters that we come to know about. This depends on the circumstances and their deeds" - Ophelia Deroy
  • "Burgundy tastes of red fruit to normal tasters and normal tasters are the ones to which Burgundy taste of red fruits" - Ophelia Deroy
  • "Wine is not discovered but made: it is an artifact that can be appraised that can be appraised aesthetically" - Tim Crane
  •  "The wine itself has aesthetic value; but what it is for a wine to have aesthetic value cannot be understood without making reference to the experience to tasting it" - Tim Crane
  • "Unlike art which contains a message, wine conveys nothing, it has no intellectual or cognitive content" - Tim Crane 
  •  "Wine taste is the paradigmatic case of subjective experience: it is highly variable, not only from one person to another, but also within the same individual from one particular occasion to another" - Gloria Origgi 
  • "Quality in wines is much easier to recognize than to define" - Maynard Amerine 
Cheers,
LA

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3 comments:

Dan Currie said...

These quotes perfectly capture our philosophy of wine - we love them!

Dan
@eszintel
https://eszencia.co.uk

Luiz Alberto, #winelover said...

I'm glad to hear that you enjoyed the read Dan. Cheers!

abhay said...

Very fit to wine tasting.

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