Wine & Spirits - Winter 2016 - 16
2016 Book of the Year
Bottoms Up
Jamie Goode and his scientific
exploration of wine tasting
by Joshua Greene
Do they really make this wine with blueberries? It's a question
that comes up when people read tasting notes on shelf talkers
in retail shops, or surf past a wine blog. And it's not necessarily
new. Communicating about what we taste when we taste wine has
been a challenge for centuries, brought to a head by new markets
for wine exploding here in the US, in China and in other countries
where wine was once the beverage of a small elite.
Jamie Goode, the author of I Taste Red: The Science of Tasting Wine,
trained as a scientist, earning a PhD in plant biology and working for
years as an editor of scientific books before establishing wineanorak.
com and writing The Science of Wine in 2005. (Goode is also a regular
contributor to this magazine.) Dogged by what must have been
persistent nips from the scientific community about the absurdity
of tasting notes, the subjectivity of the sense of taste and smell, and
the practical matter of his role as a wine critic, Goode set out to
investigate just what it is that's happening when he, or anyone else,
tastes a glass of wine.
He starts with synesthesia, the phenomenon some people
experience of their senses being crossed-hearing the taste of yogurt
in a hard g, or tasting the color red-then relates it to the crossmodal perception we all employ when tasting wine.
The book expands into an analysis of how our senses function
and how we have, as a culture, treated the senses of smell, touch
and taste, exploring why we are comfortable, philosophically, with
criticism based on sight and sound (visual arts and music), and less
certain about endeavors like wine criticism. Goode attempts to
present the neuroscience in lay terms; he succeeds in some places
more than others, but overall, this is not as hard going as a purely
scientific text. Anyone who has struggled to understand what's
happening when they react with joy or disgust to a glass of wine
(or to a plate of food, for that matter) will find it well worth the
concentration required to understand contemporary research on
taste and scent perception.
Part of the current thinking about scent is that we construct our
reality around odor objects, just as we build a visual reality around
objects we recognize-like cars, trees and houses. Goode starts
off the book investigating this idea, then dives into the opposing
argument, that we perceive the odors through individual chemicals.
For the student of wine (or, in my personal case, the wine critic)
there is plenty of fodder in Goode's discussion of how we taste,
whether top down, as prescribed by academic courses that teach
16
WINE & SPIRITS
BUYING GUIDE 2017
I Taste Red: The Science of
Tasting Wine, by Jamie Goode
(UC Press, 2016; $29.95)
students to dissect their taste perceptions by ticking them off in
boxes, or bottom up, just drinking the stuff and saying "yuck" or
"yum." When Goode is not caught up in the discussion of objectivity
in wine tasting, he brings out some brilliant concepts, such as
considering what we call subjectivity as the "improvisatory element
that is highly individual," a work of the imagination as described
by John Dilworth, a professor of philosophy at Western Michigan
University. Dilworth objects to the widely taught two-part process of
wine tasting. Here's how Goode describes his argument: "First, we
have the analytical part, where we actually perceive what is there.
Then we have the bit where we interpret what is there, and react to
it, bringing our perceptions into the equation. Dilworth argues that
this is wrong: Wine tasting is a single, imaginative experience that
includes all the flavors and aromas, and their enjoyment." First we
have to allow ourselves to experience the wine; only then is it worth
reflecting on what we might just have experienced.
Where Goode's argument may need expansion, if it is possible
to expand without the use of artificial intelligence or our brains
blowing up, is in his focus on the act of tasting one individual wine,
and whether or not that is a subjective or objective experience. Most
people who disagree on how individual wines taste may, in fact,
agree when comparing the tastes of two different wines. Is one more
bitter than the other, is one sweeter, or fruitier, or does the flavor last
longer? Are the answers to these questions more consistent, and are
they the building blocks of how we come to understand wine, how
some scientists now believe we build odor objects in our memories,
and how we communicate about them? While there's nothing simple
about the research in Goode's compendium on the state of our
senses, adding this comparative approach to perception might enrich
the conversation, even if it might double the complexity.
The scientific understanding of the joy we experience in a great
glass of wine is still in its infancy. But by the end of this fascinating
book, a reader may well see, smell and taste the world with a
completely different perspective. ■
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Wine & Spirits - Winter 2016
Contents
Wine & Spirits - Winter 2016 - Cover1
Wine & Spirits - Winter 2016 - Cover2
Wine & Spirits - Winter 2016 - 1
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Wine & Spirits - Winter 2016 - Contents
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