“Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever.”
This is part 3 of my ongoing series on beer and philosophy. So far we have examined two arguments that aimed to show why relativism about beer is a mistaken view. Whether one beer is better than another isn’t merely a matter of taste, reason can in fact shed light on these disputes, and in this post I will be drawing heavily upon John Bender’s What the Wine Critic Tells Us and adapting some of its arguments to the domain of beer. For those wanting to catch up, the first two posts in the series can be found here:
John Bender begins by laying out his view on what the proper role of a wine critic should be:
“a good wine taster is one who perceives, differentiates, and attends to the complete set of properties that a wine exemplifies, bases his or her aesthetic descriptions on those perceptions, and grounds a final evaluation of the wine on these descriptions and interpretations.”
Involved in this procedure is:
“acuity, attention, sensibility, sensitivity, memory, and experience. It involves objective perception.”
In essence, when an individual gives a description of a wine, that individual is reporting what is to be found in the wine. A wine description (and by extension, beer) should involve describing a set of properties that are there to be found in the particular drink in question. Of course it requires a refined palate and honed vocabulary to describe the entire spectrum of possible smells and tastes in beer and wine, and the job of the critic is to move from broad descriptions to more precise ones that will better enable a drinker to discriminate between similar brews, like say a Great Lakes Lake Eerie Monster Double IPA and Stone’s Ruination IPA. And as Bender argues, when it comes to description:
“there can be an objective fact whether this Tokaj has the aroma of tea or tobacco.”
All you need is a bit of practice. And useful to this practice are the beer aroma wheel and beer flavor wheel:
These wheels help us move from very general descriptions of wines and beers (i.e. “this beer is a bit woody”) to much more precise descriptions of the particular flavor you’re experiencing (“oak”, “cedar”, “smoky”, “coffee”, and the like). Furthermore:
“These descriptions are grounded in veridical perception and are chemically justifiable: when you smell the fierce, honeyed aroma of a Sauternes, you are smelling botrytis; when you find your Cornas a little “barnyardy,” you are detecting brettanomyces; that “corked” bottle that you sent back at the restaurant because it smelled like wet newspaper really does smell of wet newspaper because that is how 2,4,6-trichloranisole smells. You are on the mark! So a precision of a wine description does not necessarily bring along with it a degree of subjectivity.”
What’s great about this procedure is that disputes over the precise taste or aroma of a particular beer or wine can be resolved.
“Of course, just as we can be mistaken about other sorts of objective facts, tasters can be mistaken about wine facts. Simple inattention can explain many of these mistakes. Someone may say that this Rheingau has a lemony aroma when, in fact, its aroma is clearly more tangerine-like. This can be established (if one wanted to take the time!) by identifying the esters and aldehydes present. But also, discussions among wine tasters can expose mistakes. During many a tasting, I have felt that my descriptions were close but not exactly on target, when a colleague offers the spot-on description. “That’s it precisely,” is my reaction. “My initial description was wrong.”
Alright, so it seems fair to say that the descriptive component of a beer review can be settled empirically. If we so wanted to take the time and effort to do a chemical analysis on the brew or wine, we can do so. When it comes to descriptions of beer and wine it seems that we can be right or wrong, and these disputes can in principle be settled. So it’s not all relative. But what about the part we really care about, the evaluation of the drink? Sure, we may be able to empirically settle whether this Belgian Quad is yeasty or not, but can we settle whether this Westvleteren 12 is better than Allagash Brewing Company’s Allagash Four? Consider:
“The judgment that the wine is dense is based upon the perception of the levels of extract and tannin and alcohol, and these levels, of course, can be established chemically. If a taster considers one wine more tannic than another, she can be proven right or wrong. If she thinks the residual sugar in the wine is around 2 percent, this can be determined. But when the conclusion arrives that this chardonnay is too sweet, making it cloying and lacking in taste-clarity, standards have been applied. Can they be established as right or wrong? What when experts agree? Is the wine then objectively cloying?”
Notice what we’re asking now. We can settle whether or not a beer is yeasty or a wine is more tannic than another, but how can we settle the question of whether a wine is too sweet or a quad too yeasty? When we say something like “this is too yeasty” we are applying a standard that such and such beers of this type should not be this yeasty. But where does this value judgment, this “should not” come from? Are these standards themselves relative or can we give good reasons as to why some standards are preferable and more reasonable than others? The last installment of this blog series will tackle that question.
Reference:
- Allhoff, Fritz (ed.) (2009). Wine and Philosophy: A Symposium on Thinking and Drinking. Wiley-Blackwell.
About the Author: Andrés Ruiz has an M.A. in Philosophy and is working on his MSW with the goal of becoming a licensed psychotherapist. He writes on Philosophy, Psychology, and Psychiatry.
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