The argument seems to have been going on forever, with no resolution in sight. Is it possible to judge wine on objective standards, or is it all just a matter of what one likes and appreciates — or doesn’t?
If the former is the case, then we might expect that after 8000 years or so of living with the fermented fruit of the vine such standards would be widely acknowledged and well established. The process of becoming intimately familiar with them and developing a facility for their judicious application might prove lengthy, requiring years of study and experience, but which, once mastered, would make one a competent judge of any wine one might encounter.
Among experts, there could be quibbling about one aspect or another, but, overall, objective measures, properly applied, would settle the issue. Ideally, taste — understood as personal preference — wouldn’t come into it.
But what if no such standards exist? There would be at least two reasons why this might be so. One, it may be that wine lacks features that inhere natively to all known examples and which could be put to the kind of analysis that might attract universal assent.
Two, as a product of human imagination and craft skills, wine can never, at any point in its history, have been free from the influence of preference. To put it another way, wine cannot ever have been just wine. It must always have been this kind of wine; someone’s idea of what wine should be. Either or these propositions, if true, would put paid to objectivity as it’s generally understood.
Is wine and our experience of it irredeemably subjective, then? Not quite, since there is a third option available to us, one neither entirely objective nor wholly subjective. I’ll call this third possibility collective subjectivity for the way it puts the emphasis on wine as a social construction. Seen in this light, critical judgments about wine, what is considered acceptable and proper as well as hierarchies of quality and value all emerge in particular places and at particular times as a kind of community asset or property.
In this context, decisions about what shall be planted and where, how vines will be cultivated, how and when and under what conditions fruit will be harvested and vinified, upon what occasions and with what ceremony (or no ceremony) it will be consumed, all become matters for a community to determine as it sees fit, even if the process is largely unconscious. What emerges is what might be thought of as a canon (in the sense of a set of acknowledged rules), which becomes a basis for making judgments of desirability.
One wonders how neolithic winemakers in the Caucasus could have imagined the wine consumed by courtiers in Tutankhamen’s banqueting halls. Or what Cistercian monks in medieval Burgundy would make of late 20th century Napa Valley Cabernet or even Two-Buck Chuck. Each would only have their own canon – and their own collective subjectivity — to consult on the question. Could we do better? I doubt it.
Say, Old King Tut, what’s that in your cup?
-Stephen Meuse