What’s the Objective, Anyway?
As I’ve been blogging about wine rating systems and whatnot, I’ve also been thinking about the pointlessness of many textual wine reviews. I mean, really, why do we need a score and a sentence or two? Why not just a score telling us how that wine stacks up against similar wines made from the same grape varietals? Or why bother with the score when you can just describe the wine in words?
Well, one problem with textual descriptions is the subjectivity of each reviewer. Mike over at the Shiraz blog has an interesting post on the subject of palate uniformity and the calibration of your palate to that of a wine critic. Actually, I guess it’s a series of posts on palate uniformity and the calibration of your palate to that of a wine critic. These posts relate strongly to the subjectivity of personal taste.
Mike also points to the sort of study that I love (albeit a bit different from my idea of a single person tasting the same wine repeatedly): Tom Cannavan conducted a study in 2001 of a specific wine tasted and rated by many different people…and again in 2004 he conducted the same study with a different wine.
I think the idea of palate uniformity is interesting for a few reasons. First, I think one of the problems with writing a wine review is that pro reviewers feel the need to branch out and get creative. You can only use fruit names so many times before every wine you review starts to sound the same (”raspberry,” “cherry,” and “blackberry” and their variants seem to be the most common fruit flavors). So I think many reviewers take some artistic liberties with the things they smell and taste in a glass of wine. I remember seeing “wet chalkboard” as a flavor description. I could vaguely imagine a wine that smells like a wet chalkboard, but a wine that tastes like a wet chalkboard implies, in my opinion, that the reviewer has licked a wet chalkboard. Was there chalk on the board, or was it clean when the licking occurred? I wonder…because the answer might determine whether I want to buy that particular wine.
Second, I think it would be tricky to find a reviewer with whom my palate matches closely enough that I can trust him/her to be correct most of the time. I don’t have the money to spend on even one or two bottles of $30-$100 wine, so if one critic I trust rates a bottle at 95 points and another trustworthy critic rates the same bottle at 87 points. This is the problem: If you associate your palate too closely with one reviewer, you may miss a whole bunch of wines that the particular reviewer dislikes because, for example, he hates southern Australia and loves Napa. Or something similar. So why would I want to make some other reviewer’s biases my own?
Third, from the perspective of aesthetic philosophy, uniformity of palate is about as likely as uniformity of appreciate for, say, Jackson Pollock or Led Zeppelin. Plus, tastes change over time, both for an individual and for a culture. So my palate might match closely with Robert Parker today, but next week I might prefer another reviewer’s personal taste. It’s the same with art: Ingres was big in his day until the Impressionists took over, and then he became a didactic old misanthrope. Same with Pat Boone. But then not everyone liked Ingres or Boone to begin with.
Finally, I read a lot of comments on blogs that declare the uniqueness of individual palates. I’m not sure about that…I think there are many similarities between people’s palates. The difference occurs in taste preference, not in what we taste, at least among novices. Some people like the dark plum flavors of Torbreck’s Woodcutter Shiraz. Some don’t. But is it uniformity of palate if those two people both taste the same dark plum flavor? Hard to say….