Philosophically speaking... "Wine & Philosophy - A Symposium on Thinking and Drinking"

Some things that I wish I had said myself. Or not... but they have been said by these guys on the book  "Wine & Philosophy - A Symposium on Thinking and Drinking"

• "If a critic says one wine is better than another, is it "true," or rather just the expression of some subjective opinion of the critic?" - Fritz Allhoff
• "Could we like wines that are (objectively) bad wines and dislike ones that are (objectively) good wines?" - Fritz Allhoff
•  "The relationship between wine and health, though characterized by the same complexity that characterizes wine itself, is best defined by the philosophical doctrine of temperance. Temperance maybe understood as the mean between the extremes of overindulgence and abstinence" - Frederick Adolf Paola
• It would be a serious mistake to confuse the rich experimental meaning of the flavors and aromas of a wine with the purely sensory configuration of those tastes and aromas themselves. With wine as with music, it is not the sensory qualities as such, but rather what they represent - in the relevant broad, non literal sense being appealed to - that constitutes their experiencial meaning" - John Dilworth
• "Drinking a wine is not like experiencing a previously finished artwork, but instead it is an exploratory, spontaneous activity in which you yourself are the artist or creator of what you experience. In these respects it is like the fertile activity of a jazz artist as he creatively improvises on a standard jazz tune" - John Dilworth
• "Wine is just the raw material for a series of highly personal improvisational experiences" - John Dilworth
• "The tastes of wines, and how we choose to experience them, are indeed purely matters of personal imagination" - John Dilworth
• "It is clear you cannot enjoy wines to the fullest without the benefits of experience" - Kent Bach
• "You do not have to be able to label the wine's aromas and flavors in order to discern and appreciate them" - Kent Bach
• "People who talk profusely about wine are generally not put to the test. They, like many wines, can make a good impression without being all that good" - Kent Bach
• "Wine changes over time, even short periods of time, and there is pleasure in noticing these changes from one glass to the next"- Kent Bach
• "It sounds plausible to think that being able to describe how wines smell and taste (and look and feel) enhances one's pleasure in smelling and tasting them" - Kent Bach
• "Wine talk aids tracking and organizing one's experience with wine and, obviously, in sharing it. But great wines speak for themselves!" - Kent Bach
• "Wine, like objects of art, is enjoyed by the sensory experience of the object and enhanced by discourse" - Keith and Adrienne Lehrer
• "A good wine taster is one who perceives, differentiates, and attends to the complete set of properties that a wine exemplifies, bases his or her aesthetic descriptions on those perceptions, and grounds a final evaluation of the wine on these descriptions and interpretations. This is an analytic procedure and not a simple pleasure reaction. It involves acuity, attention, sensibility, sensitivity, memory, and experience. It involves objective perception" - John W. Bender
• "Wine descriptions can be precise without necessarily being subjective, but if that precision is based on the judgement of the degree to which a wine exhibits a certain property, and that reaction is a function of your particular level of physical sensitivity to the wine's various components, isn't an objectivist in trouble?" - John W. Bender
• "We would never (and logically cannot) think it appropriate to suggest that tasters with divergent sensitivities ought to be coming to the same conclusions about the same wine" - John W. Bender
• "The most interesting form of subjectivity in wine appreciation is grounded in our own objective differences" - John W. Bender
• "Fine wine as we know it grew up and developed as an aesthetic system based on the idea that it is possible to differentiate quality in wines in a way that is largely objective" - Jamie Goode
• "Parker's preferences have caused producers to change the way they make their wines, so that they will garner the all-important high scores" - Jamie Goode
• "Vision has more of an input in the wine-tasting process than most people would think" - Jamie Goode
• "Those who restrict themselves merely to naming aromas and flavors end up missing out on some of the more important aspects of the character of wines that cannot be described in this way, such as texture, structure, balance, and elegance" - Jamie Goode
• "Taste is imprecise, and shows a lot more individual-to-individual variation than other senses" - Jamie Goode
• "Wine appreciation is aesthetic: that is, it is an activity akin to listening to music or viewing a painting" - Douglas Burnham and Ole Martin Skilleas
• "Aesthetic practice aims to produce consensus on interpretation, and this is why judgement leads to 'surely you must see it that way too.'" - Douglas Burnham and Ole Martin Skilleas
• "The points system invites the notion that there is a template for excellence in wine that the wine under scrutiny measures up, to a greater or lesser degree" - Douglas Burnham and Ole Martin Skilleas
• "Taste and smell are just too susceptible to suggestion to allow any danger from outside information to intrude upon the taster's experience of the wine" - George Gale
• "Wine tasting is not an object-less pleasure; it is a realistic and imaginative encounter with a gustatory object" - Kevin W. Sweeney
• "We have a tendency to anatomize wine, to consider it as a collection of elements rahter than an indivisible whole" - Randall Grahm
• "In wine as well as in virtually every other domain, we tend to make snap judgements and not look past the blatantly obvious. We value style over substance, surface over depth" - Randall Graham
• "It is our role as winemakers to create alternative universes for our customers, to touch their souls with wines that are themselves ensouled" - Randall Graham
• "Whether we succeed or fail, the intent to make a wine with soul ennobles our own souls and we must be grateful for that precious opportunity" - Randall Graham
• "Terroir can be presented, but it cannot be proven - except by the senses" - Matt Kramer
• "It may be more important for our wine expenditures to track the pleasure the wine gives you, rather than the wine's quality, since quality and pleasure can diverge" - Justin Weinberg
• "If we were to assume, contrary to fact, that price and quality (in wine) are correlated, it is not clear why that should motivate us to make the more expensive purchase, since quality and pleasure are not correlated" - Justin Weinberg
• "As a wine lover, it is hard to imagine a time in history when it would have been better to live than now" - Justin Weinberg

Cheers,

LA

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