A matter of taste

One of my favorite adult short stories by Roald Dahl is about a dinner party where a family (father, mother, teenage daughter) invites their good friend, a wine connoisseur and famous gustatory snob, who prizes himself on his ability to recognize any wine. The father greets his guest, saying proudly, "I've got a wonderful bottle of wine, and it's so rare that you'll never be able to guess it!" In response the wine snob offers a bet: his country house in France against the hand in marriage of the host's teenage daughter, to be determined by the accuracy of his tasting. The man's wife and daughter gasp at this, since the wine snob is a pudgy, greasy, thoroughly repulsive specimen of a human being - but the father shakes on it, with the proviso: "You've got to guess, not just the year and the vintage, but the particular small village where this wine was made."

As they walk into the dining room the mother hisses at the father, "You bastard! How could you do this to our daughter!" and he replies, "You don't understand, dear. There's no danger at all! There are ten thousand tiny wineries in France, making different types of wine every year. It's impossible for anyone to identify just by tasting - the general area, maybe, but the individual village? Inconceivable! Our daughter is safe, and now she'll have a French country house for a dowry!"

The wine snob takes his glass and makes a gigantic rigmarole out of swirling it, sniffing it with a huge snort, sipping it with his gross fat lips, and sloshing it around his mouth, all the while murmuring to himself: "That slight metallic taste...lots of iron in the soil...grapes must have been grown on the shady side of the soil...it's a flirtatious wine, little kick in the hips...quite a bit of sunshine that year but only medium rain...a good year but not a great year, not a truly great year...either 1976 or 1965...oh! do I detect hail? Must be 1976..." In fact, the bulk of this short story in terms of pages is the wine snob's drawn out taste deliberations, which Roald Dahl describes with his virtuoso attention to grotesque detail and suspense, as the family listens: the father with increasing chagrin, the daughter with increasing horror. You'd never have imagined that five pages of wine aficionado bullshit could be so enthralling.

At the end the wine snob guesses right. And just as the daughter is about to fling a dinner-plate at her father's head, the family maid sweeps into the room with a look of icy triumph and hands a pair of spectacles to the wine snob guest. "You left these behind, sir, in the drawing room... on the table where Mr. B left the bottle of wine out to breathe."

I love the story, not so much for the punchline at the end, or even for the character of the snob (one of my favorite Dahl monstrosities - who would have thought a description of oversized nose quivering over a wine glass could make your skin crawl?), as for the delicicious skewering of the rituals of wine connoisseurship. Because, let's face it, it's really hard to identify wines, and in fact most famous wine critics refuse to subject themselves to completely blind taste tests aimed at testing their identification powers. The potential for embarassment is just too high. I know that at the consulting company where I used to work, we'd have a wine critic come in every year to give a lecture, and he'd serve us six different wines that we'd rank. The last time we did it, one of our VPs - self-confessedly wine mad - ranked at #1 the box of plonk, and #4 the $50 red.

The point is NOT that there's no difference between the box of plonk and the bottle of sunshine, just that critical distinction is very hard for a human being to make in a vacuum, without other supporting factors. The long run average of a lot of human beings' critical judgements may be extremely accurate - ask the author of "The Wisdom of Crowds" - but in terms of a one-time, snap judgement you have to make, on a day when you're distracted by the gurgle in your stomach, and that noise over there, or perhaps you're in a particularly good mood because that girl called you back, and everything tastes sweeter - well, maybe it's a tossup.

If you are smiling patronizingly at this line of argument, I'd like you to reflect upon how many independent critical judgements you make (and I'm not just talking about wine, now, of course): judgements without reading the review, without knowing the reputation, without looking at the label, without watching the other peoples' faces. If you were shown a closeup of Rembrandt and Vermeer brushstrokes could you tell the difference every time? If I read you two poems, one by a nobody and one by a Nobel-prize winning genius, could you pick out which was which? If you heard a recording of two violins would you know the Stradivarius?

And it's not just these sort of esoteric aesthetic matters, either; we make all kinds of terribly important, and very particular, critical distinctions about politics, about lifestyle, personal ethical philosophy, friends, enemies - and yet did we arrive at these distinctions through a drawn-out subtle tasting process, or by peeking at the bottle in the drawing room? This is not necessarily a bad thing, I suppose. It's convenient to have brands, and lots of experts, so that you can have the best without needing the expertise to pick it yourself.

I suppose there are a few responses to this dilemma.

One is to "pshaw" at the whole notion of anything gourmet that cannot be personally verified by a blind taste test; you drink the box o' plonk, you buy the store brand, you read trashy thrillers and you mock the fools who pay more for stuff even though they can't even tell the difference. I think that people who follow this philosophy like to pat themselves on the back for their integrity and lack of pretension, and rightly so. It also seems to have a certain element of squatting in the mud because it's warm.

Another is to throw up your hands, subsume any individual judgement, and rely on the experts. You eat at the busy restaurants, you read the movie reviews first, you drink the most expensive wine - relying on the market's knowledge - and you buy the classics. The most cultured gourmet wouldn't have a nit to pick with your taste; but your genuine appreciation of it is another story. Independent critical judgement muscles atrophy like any others not in use, and it's possible you just like Picasso for the pretty colours, not ever actually having chosen him. Perhaps the most atrocious example of this tactic - going back to ole vino - is the story of the investment bankers who were fired for running up a $62,580 wine tab. By the time those dudes ordered their sixth $13,000 bottle, they must have been so drunk that if I'd been the waiter, I would have swopped labels with the house wine and they never would have known the difference.

And another tactic, practiced by my dad (a colourful character, tales of whom my friends are familiar with) is to relentlessly hone your taste, by reading the experts, subjecting yourself to blind taste test experiments, meditating on your artistic experiences, and generally trying to make every single aspect of life into a gourmet experience, from the architecture that surrounds you, to the style of the furniture you sit in, the delicious food you eat, the wine you savor, the luxury stereo system playing you the best recordings of the best classical music, etcetera, etcetera... This strategy does have many advantages; my dad has a lot of energy, he gets a lot of enjoyment out of life, and he has genuine knowledge of these various artistic experiences. The danger is that your sense become so fine-tuned that any sort of ugliness causes you acute pain. My dad can no longer stay in a hotel that's not clean; he's oppressed by a badly designed room; bad music playing in the background makes him go stark raving bonkers.

In practice I guess we all follow a combination of these various tactics. If a particular sensory experience doesn't matter much to us, we ignore its gourmet potential and settle for the basics; sometimes we try to educate ourselves by reading the classics even if they don't particularly appeal to us, and in some areas of life that we have a genuine passion for, we develop a discriminating taste, although perhaps never enough to guess a 1976 second-pressing burgundy from the shady side of the northwest hill in Chateau Leblanc's little vineyard.