Wine: great wine has no "meaning"

What does it take to understand wine? To some people the very idea will seem absurd: we can understand a play or a painting, but with wines we achieve all there is to know just by tasting them. Wine experts, they will say, may know a lot about a particular wine, its producer, the grape varieties involved, the vineyard it came from, but all of this is additional knowledge that tells us nothing about what it tastes like. This is a popular but, I think, mistaken view. What one tastes depends on how one tastes.

What expert tasters probably do not have is better perceptual equipment. Researchers from the Centre des Sciences du Goût et de l’Alimentation in Dijon have shown that experts perform no better than others in discrimination tasks such as sorting more from less acidic wines, or picking out the distinctive notes of prune or honey, once it’s been explained.

The difference is one of knowledge. The sensory discriminations tasters pick up on become more significant when they know the characteristics of the grape variety and something about the vineyard and the vintage. What would we expect to taste from a cool-climate Pinot Noir? Is this from a vineyard renowned for the quality of the wines it produces? Are we expecting some depth and earthiness? And what about the vintage? Was it a warm year with ripe fruit, or should we expect some dilution from a rainy season? Is this a maker who likes to mature the wine in new oak barrels? All of this knowledge helps to set expectations with which to probe the wine in our glass. What our sensory experience returns can confirm or undermine our expectations, and we can be pleasantly surprised. The fruit is riper than we might expect for such a poor vintage, for example. This speaks of the producer’s careful handling of the vines and skill in the cellar.

All these conclusions are the result of interpreting the wine—a way of making sense of the flavours we’re tasting. Approaching a wine in this way explains why the experienced taster gets more out of the wine than the novice.

Things may be quite different were they to taste the wine blind, knowing nothing beforehand about the liquid. But I would question how much blind tasting really tells us. There may be worries about whether what we know or expect exerts too strong an influence on what we perceive, but experienced tasters should be alive to that and attentive to what their senses of taste, smell and touch are telling them. Besides, we form our expectations about given grape varieties, vineyards, or domains from experience: by repeatedly tasting and noting similarities and differences in our sensory experience of wines.

The resistance to talk of understanding a wine may be due to a fixation on the idea that to understand a work of art, for example, is to discover its meaning. In trying to do justice to the complexity and fascination with wine, the philosopher Cain Todd fell into this trap of comparing a wine to a piece of music, seeing it as expressive and meaningful. But wine has no meaning. It’s not telling; it’s showing, and a well-made wine shows the decisions and care of the winemaker. It is a product of what nature and human endeavour can produce in any given season from this vineyard with this soil. Winemakers know what their vines are capable of; they opt for a certain style of making and together these factors govern what they strive for. Knowing the vineyard, the grape, the vintage and the aspirations of the maker helps us to recognise when the winemaker’s aims are met. To understand a great wine is not just about liking it: it is to see it as an achievement and to celebrate it as such.