Thursday, October 25 2007

Wine, Objectivism, and Popular Taste

Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum once wrote that there is mind-independent reality; that individual persons are in contact with this reality through sensory perception; that human beings gain objective knowledge from perception. Sounds like something most high-school students could grasp, but it neglects the idea that perception is sometimes selective, and can be influenced by external factors.

I started thinking about this because I was reviewing a piece of video, and I found myself a little dismayed. It was a clip from a local news show. They did a little featurette on consumer produced wines and while it was accurate and informative, part of the feature had the wines reviewed by a taste panel of experts and sommelliers from local restaurants and a wine consultant. All of them pretty much dismissed the wine, and weren't shy about it.

I was really disappointed. Those wines were from my cellar. Made precisely to the instructions that we provide in the kit, each of them had won a gold medal in international competition, and yet the professionals and critics didn't have positive comments for them.

On the other hand, the news crew (bless their hearts!) took the last bottle to the people–a bunch of randomly selected employees from the news room–and blind-tested it against a bottle of similar commercial wine. It was unanimous: they all preferred kit wine to the commercial product.

So what happened? I have my theories, but what I think really happened was that the experts just don't like my wine. This isn't the simpleton statement it might seem at first blush. I know from personal experience when judging commercial wines for competition purposes you look for the one that pops out at you and makes an intense impression. Wines that stand out like a sore thumb at an osteopath convention are the ones that score well and get high ratings in the magazines. Those are the wines that get the high ratings from Robert Parker. They have to be over the top in intensity, with jammy fruit, extremely developed, long-chain tannins and high alcohol.

Most kit wines aren't like this (there are come exceptions, deliberately done). We formulate the majority of our wines to reflect the standards that existed BRPCT (Before Robert Parker Changed Things). Our wines have alcohol levels below 14%; they haven't been softened into amorphous fruit blobs by extended post-fermentation maceration, malolactic fermentation and micro-oxidation; they have balanced acidity, tannins and fruit.

I'm not saying the experts were full of hooey–on the contrary, they were all well qualified and thoughtful. But they are like everyone else, a product of their environment and their perceptions. The milieu they move in is commercial wine and they do a very good job with it. But not everybody is a wine judge–almost everybody is a wine drinker, instead. The kind of wines that get drank every day around the world, are good, solid, examples of the breed–the vino di tavola, the vin du pays, the table wine. It doesn't have to win competitions or leap out of the glass and slap your palate–it's meant to be drank and enjoyed, with food and with friends, summer or winter, any time that a delicious and life-affirming beverage is called for.

So, I stopped worrying about it. It's never an easy thing to be a completely objective judge on something as subjective as wine, especially if it's outside your area of expertise or normal perceptions. And I don't think that our kits deserve special treatment or favour just because they're made by consumers for their own use–hold them up to any wine you want, and if you're a wine drinker, I know you'll like 'em.

Posted by Tim AT 7:19PM

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