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I judge wine for a living. Can someone be wrong about what tastes good?

Bec Doyle Contributor
· 6 replies · 298 views
Food & tasteIndianModern EuropeanEmpiricismBharataDavid Hume#expertise#standard-of-taste#subjectivism#wine
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I make small-batch wine in the Adelaide Hills and judge at regional shows, so this question pays my bills. Twice a year I sit at a table with three other judges and we give medals. Every year someone at the cellar door tells me taste is subjective and my medals are just my opinion with a ribbon on it.

Hume's essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ is pinned to my shed wall. I love it for the story he borrows from Don Quixote: two of Sancho's kinsmen are asked to judge a hogshead of wine. One says it is good but tastes faintly of iron; the other says good, but with a note of leather. Everyone laughs at them. When the barrel is emptied, there's an old key on a leather thong at the bottom.

That is my whole job in one anecdote. Delicacy of taste is real, it can be trained, and it can be checked against the world.

But I can feel the weak point. Detecting the leather is one thing. Saying that a wine is better because of how its flavours sit together is another. Two trained judges can agree on every component and still disagree on the verdict. Is that disagreement one of us being wrong, or is there a point where expertise runs out and preference takes over? Where would you draw that line, and is it the same line for food as for wine?

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6 answers

  1. Joel D'Souza

    Contributor

    Chef, twenty-two cooks, nine countries. I'd draw it in two places. You can be wrong about what is there: salt, acid, whether the fish is fresh. You can be wrong about whether a dish does what it is trying to do, because a dish has an intention. A Goan xacuti that tastes like a Thai curry has failed, however pleasant it is. Where expertise runs out is comparing across intentions. I can't tell you whether the xacuti is better than a bouillabaisse. That's where preference lives.

    Helpful · 3
    1. Bec Doyle

      Contributor

      Joel, that's a useful split. Show judging works within classes for exactly that reason: we judge a cool-climate shiraz against other cool-climate shiraz.

  2. Kavya Menon

    Fellow

    The Sanskrit word for aesthetic experience, rasa, literally means juice or flavour. The Nāṭyaśāstra explains how a rasa arises from many ingredients combined, the way a flavour arises from spices. So in the Indian theory food is not the poor relation of art, it is the model for it. I like that Bharata simply assumed you could have trained tasters of drama the way you have trained cooks.

    Helpful · 1
  3. Hetal Shah

    Contributor

    I think your critics at the cellar door are mixing up two claims. ‘I don't like this’ cannot be wrong. ‘This is good’ can. Hume says the true judge has strong sense, delicate sentiment, practice, comparison and freedom from prejudice. The last one is where I'd push you. A judge who has drunk mostly one region's wines for thirty years may be refined and parochial. Prejudice in Hume's sense isn't only personal bias, it's the habits of your own tradition.

    Helpful · 2
    1. Bec Doyle

      Contributor

      Hetal's point stings a little and I'll take it. The best thing that has happened to my palate was a year judging alongside a woman who'd made wine in Georgia, in clay qvevri. I marked her favourite wines down at first for faults that, as she explained, were the style. Hume would say I was correcting a prejudice. I'd say I was finding out where my expertise stopped.

  4. Pieter de Jong

    Fellow

    Software engineer, enthusiastic amateur eater. One empirical check: blind tastings among experts show more agreement on detection than on ranking, at least in the studies I've seen discussed. That supports Bec's suspicion that expertise is strongest at the level of components and weakest at the level of overall verdict. It doesn't follow that the verdict is arbitrary, only that it's less constrained.

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