Someone reminded yesterday of a wonderful critique of the modern system of wine tasting and evaluation. I hadn't read it for a long time, and it was refreshing to check it out again today. It is Joe Dressner's astute take on the whole analytical approach to wine evaluation. He published it in 2005, and I must quote a passage that struck me as especially good:
How boring the world of Points/Tasting notes has become! I even see my
friends, people I like, writing endless tasting notes with endless
useless fruit/wood/earth analogies that are of no possible use to
anyone. Yes, they drop off the points, but they are still using the
same methodology. Furthermore, modern oenology has learned how to
manipulate wine to create manufactured aromas and flavors that fit into
the "tasting palates" artificial construct.
Has anyone besides me noticed that the methodology Joe criticizes is exactly parallel to the New Criticism in literature? This misguided movement sprang up in the 1940s as an effort to be less subjective and impressionistic in evaluating a poem or novel or, I suppose, the copy on a box of Rice Krispies. The injunction was to consider only what is in the text, as if the sacred Text in question had been dropped from above by Neoplatonic angels. Forbidden was consideration of cultural, personal, economic, political, etc., etc., factors which may have contributed to the conception and development of the text.
Fake scientism. In litteras, in vino.
Let's leave all that behind. Please.
Allegedly Joe Dressner
New criticism? now you're pressing MY buttons.
Nietzsche said G-d was dead...
Barthes said the author was dead...
Allen said Marx was dead (and that he wasn't feeling so good himself)...
A propos Allen, the Italian press said that Freud was dead...
Not that I wish the man ill, but will it be in our lifetime that the Emperor dies?
Great post, great analogy... I used to head-to-head with those critical theory folks back in my grad days (me, the philologist, that is)...
Posted by: Jeremy Parzen | January 31, 2008 at 07:48 PM
Emperor, and don't forget his Rasputin.
A propos New Crit, it was at its peak of sinewy strength when I was an undergrad, lo those many years ago [SFX: wind moaning under eaves]. I was but a lowly scholarship boy, but even I realized those people were zealots and wrong.
Calls to mind an analogy with another field, journalism, where "objectivity," a point of view neutral doctrine of reporting, was worshiped. I didn't see how that was possible. Now the very idea seems as quaint as dunking witches.
Posted by: Terence Dominic Hughes, Jr. | February 01, 2008 at 01:35 PM
Dressner almost looks like a young Dennis Hopper.
Posted by: Marco | February 01, 2008 at 03:18 PM
Not to take this too far, but here goes...
what if wine writers approached the subject like Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas... is that what wine writing is? writing (read self-fashioning) autobiography by writing biography as faux-auto-biography? uh oh, I feel a post coming on...
Posted by: Jeremy Parzen | February 01, 2008 at 03:30 PM
Don't forget that the New Criticism evolved not only in reaction to "impressionistic" or "psychological" criticism but to the strict Marxist critical theories of the 1930s and '40s, a stance that refused to see literature as anything but social and political and ignored artistic and narrative concerns. If you go back and read some of the seminal works of New Criticism, like the essays in Cleanth Brooks' "The Well-Wrought Urn," they're still exhilerating and chastening. Think of double blind tasting as the New Criticism of the wine world; it's just you and a glass of wine and no clues except for the color, nothing about place, climate, people or tradition; no context. That's the situation where real learning (and humbling) occur. Not that I don't think that place, climate, people and tradition aren't important; you know that I esteem those qualities highly. The ultimate test, though, occurs at the most basic level: a glass of wine and the taster's senses, intellect and experience.
Posted by: Fredric Koeppel | February 01, 2008 at 04:21 PM
Marco, it would be as you say if JD ever showed his own mug. I think he's hiding something.
FK, I had forgotten that - cue SFX again - and Cleanth Brooks...! In the Wayback machine. Grazie, professore.
Posted by: TH | February 01, 2008 at 04:51 PM
Dr J,
Was that Woody Allen saying tha Groucho Marx is dead?
Posted by: Marco | February 02, 2008 at 09:59 AM
I prefer "its good shit" to represent a high score.
Posted by: Richard | February 02, 2008 at 01:28 PM
Well, that isn't any worse than the old "It's an amusing little wine, full of pretension" and other such nonsense that wine snobs were known for in bygone times.
Maybe we ought to go with:
I lika
If really lika, just add the appropriate number of pluses:
I lika +++++
(Could be 100 pointer)
I no lika
I no lika ----
(This is real crap)
Etc.
Eh?
Posted by: TH | February 02, 2008 at 02:03 PM