Dernier Cri: Much Ado

A new philosophical study of wine packs plenty of yuks.

Randy Sheahan

Things must be slow in the philosophy business. Very slow.

I say this because Oxford University Press has just published Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine, a silly, ultimately useless tome that seeks to unlock the mysteries of wine. Edited by Barry C. Smith, the book contains ten essays that grew out of a December 2004 London conference, “Philosophy and Wine: from Science to Objectivity.” Yet far from shedding new light, the essays employ mental gymnastics, questionable syntax and imponderous prose to state what most wine drinkers already know or couldn’t care less about. The result is one of the funniest books ever written on wine.

The first essayist, Roger Scruton, begins the laugh parade by asserting that “Philosophers have probably drunk more than their fair share of fine wine,” and so are presumably qualified to analyze the subject. He then goes on to discuss the dual meaning of vinous intoxication, saying there is a scientific version (as in being physically impaired) and a natural one (as in being emotionally wafted). And he sums it up by saying, “Just as the erotic kiss is neither a tame version nor a premonition of the bitter parting to which it finally leads, so the intoxicating taste of the wine is neither a tame version nor a premonition of drunkenness.” To which I can only add, “Huh?”

Kent Bach takes a different tack, offering a straight-forward essay dedicated to the obvious. We are thus told that “The best way to make wines taste better is to taste better wines”; that “People with palates and noses more developed than the rest of us don’t merely know more—they sense more”; and that “The better your memory for wine, the harder it is to be surprised by its taste—unless it has changed or you have.” Bach ends by confessing that “I drink a lot of wine but don’t talk about it a lot.” I never would have guessed.

Ophelia Deroy and Adrienne Lehrer—one a philosophy lecturer at the University of Paris, the other a professor emerita in linguistics at the University of Arizona—disguise their ignorance within prose that’s denser than any black hole. And so we have Deroy writing, “Contraditions and tensions in our images of wine may be the sign that there is something going on that has to do with the mythology of ‘totem’ worshipping Rolande Barthes pointed out in French culture”; which is later trumped by this doozy: “The image of a wine given by its smell is rather bi-dimensional and dynamic, something more like drawing a curve, than a three-dimensional picture—even if the latter may correspond to some of our experiences of perfumes or to animal orientation by olfaction.” Yet try as she might, Deroy cannot outdo Lehrer, whose essay is packed with such flummery as: “People connected by chains of respect give rise to a consensual use of words resulting from convergence toward the appropriate consensual weight to assign to wine drinkers, sellers and scientists in their use of wine descriptors.” I’ll take a copy of the United States Tax Code over this any day.

But most disappointing in this is the esteemed wine writer Jancis Robinson, who—shilling for her employer (she edits The Oxford Companion to Wine)— contributes a glowing forward to the book, calling it “hugely enjoyable and admirably and clearly written,” and adding that she found the articles “perfectly comprehensible, even quite gripping.” Come now, Jancis, what book were you reading?