On the hegemony of descriptors and Neglect of aesthetic terms

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A VINOUS polemic

For everyone and no one

20min read.

If you are short on time or nerves, or both, do yourself a favor and jump right away to the conclusion.

I gently invite you though, to fight your damn way through this article!

Berlin, Lockdown - April 2021

Now, admittedly, the title isn’t exactly juicy.

So what do I attempt in this polemic?

A rethinking on how we engage with wine

Celebrating meaning, sensuality and existential Angst — Courage wants to laugh!

Most importantly, I hope to show that this ‘new-found engagement with wine’ is a metaphor for an ‘engagement with life as a whole’. An integration of instincts, mood, errors, art and beauty.

Human, All Too Human

Even though, or maybe exactly because I successfully absolved my formal wine education,

I believe that wine has no essence, only existence.

Personally, there seems to be something profound about Satre’s perspective that existence precedes essence. In my reading, it implies that there is no objective and publicly available truth to be revealed. Neither in music, wine, movies, poems, philosophy, espresso tamping techniques, or life for that matter.

Concretely, in wine that means, there is no objectivity to be found as often encouraged: ‘medium-minus-alcohol, high tannins, violet flowers, candied orange or dried sage leaves etc.’

Instead there’s only a path,

A spur of phenomena to be subjectively experienced,

And consequently, valued

While lending a sense of safety, descriptive type of grammar and vocabulary, is based on forgone conclusions. As I already pointed out in the About-page, either you smell the ‘green figs’ or you don’t. The engagement itself is binary in character.

To me, wine is an experience.

It is a becoming if you will, it is neither static nor encapsulated.

Usually the wine experience is downright personal and arrantly ambiguous.

It is a relationship extending beyond objectifying measurements of flavor, aroma and points.

Evidently, wine is fluid, so you cannot step into the same wine twice.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

What are wine descriptors and what’s your damn problem, Max?!

Descriptive terms are for instance:

‘green’, ‘lemon’, ‘square’, ‘long’, ‘weighs 300grams’, ‘dry’, ‘medium acidity’ or even more potently ‘medium-plus acidity’.

These terms apply on the basis of public criteria everyone sort of accepts. As the term suggests, they are descriptive in nature. Descriptors omit evaluation. As in ‘omit giving value’ to the phenomena which is being experienced.

Now, let me describe the mature sweet wine’s apparence as ranging from “straw-yellow to deep-amber, hints of blood orange reflections and - of course - the oily legs.”

Yep, a proper description.

But so what? What now? Move on, to dutifully describe the nose, the palate to then start allover?

Maybe point out the varietal’s name? The day(s) of harvest? The exact altitude of the vinyard? The precise percentage of the assemblage or even better, the duration and percentage of contact with oak? How about the varietal’s clones? The exact level of phenolic ripeness on the day of harvest?

How much does the wine reveal itself and how much does the experiencing person reveal herself to you?

Sure, I grant that there is utility for these type of questions and answers when it comes to food pairing, sommelier certification, or technical analysis i.e. fragrances for instance. In that case, I can highly recommend ‘Nose Dive’ by Harold McGee.

But not at a table surrounded by friends or strangers alike, damn it.

Hold on. One powerful exception comes to mind.

In 1975, William Gass published “On Being Blue”, yep, you’ve guessed it: an entire book about the color blue.

In my mind, he does accomplish to invigorate the descriptive word ‘blue’ with plenty of depth and all-too-human value-heavy associations, a rare exception:

“Blue, the word and the condition, the color and the act, contrive to contain one another, as if the bottle of the genie were its belly, the lamp’s breath, the smoke of the wraith. There is that lead-like look. There is the lead itself, and all those blue hunters, thieves, those pigeon flyers who relieve roofs of the metal, and steal the pipes too. There’s the blue pill that is the bullet’s end, the nose, the plum, the blue whistler, and there are all the hues of death.”

What’s my approach of discussing wine then?

Well, I’d like to engage in a conversation. A conversation with wine, rather than of wine.

Descriptive type of grammar generates very little or no disagreement at all.

The music, artwork and wines I personally find most exiting and continously strike me to this day, are the ones which resist some form of closure. Think ‘Gustav Mahler’s 5th Symphony in C Sharp Minor’, ‘Jon Hopkin’s Emerald Rush’, ‘James Turrell’s lightgames found in nature, ‘Manet’s Olympia’, the aforementioned 'Gran Enemigo - Gualtallary’, ‘Tout Pres - By Farr’, ‘Haute-Lemblée’ by ‘Roses de Jeanne’, and many more.

They are open-ended in character, giving space for interpretation, containing a mystery of depths and causing a multitude of harmonious as well as contradicting emotionality.

Descriptors sort of dethrone the phenomenon’s vitality, not because they are not sufficently complex but because - by definition - they omit a sense of vitality arising from the forgone process of ‘giving value to things’.

And what about these so-called ‘aesthetic terms’? What does that even mean ‘aesthetic’?

Good question! Next question?

Let me try to put forth a few examples of aesthetic terms:

‘elegant, lightfooted, graceful, feisty, energetic, warm, temperamental, soothing, delicate, garish’.

Admittedly, as these terms are normative in character (contain a value judgement), what seems delicate to me, might simply be bleak to you. That’s where the danger lies! But concurrently also where the saving power grows — how convenient, aye. (Friedrich Hölderlin and Lord Shiva could have been truly good friends.)

These aesthetic terms might generate disagreements, potentially impossible to resolve. We are not able to determine delicacy in the way we establish size, age, duration, perception of citrus fruits, and so on.

Against that background, you might turn to the argument, ‘de gustibus non est disputandum’, that one cannot (usefully) fight about taste. Well, let me resolve it with a quick quote by Alexander Nehamas: “taste is not a faculty, but simply the ability to address some things aesthetically - and no one is without it”. It does take some patience paired with a strong will to look beyond the safety-net of fully transparent or less nobly articulated - empty descriptors.

It’s like when I tell you a joke, it should matter to me whether you will laugh, as I implictly invite you to join a community to whom humor, and particularily the humor exemplified in this joke matters. Growing up in Germany - tough luck I know right - I haven’t built up much experience, so I’m overcompensating on this webpage. Take it or leave it.

'A man who believes himself to be a kernel of grain is taken to a mental institution where the doctors do their best to convince him that he is not a kernel of grain but a man. When he is cured (convinced that he is not a kernel of grain but a man) and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back, trembling and scared. “There’s a chicken outside the door, and I’m afraid it will eat me”. “My dear fellow,” says his doctor, “you know very well that you are not a kernel of grain but a man.” “Of course I know,” replies the patient, “but does the chicken?”’

“It is not enough to convince the patient about the unconscious truth of his symptoms; the unconscious itself must be brought to assume this truth.” (Zizek feat. Jacques Lacan)

You still there? Great. As a reward let us dig deeper and draw out the difference between aesthetic terms and descriptors, until they are rooted deeply into your unconscious. So please don’t chicken out.

As an example, let’s take the ‘color 'green’ or for this matter ‘Bordeaux-style wines’, ‘juicy wines’, ‘high-acid wines’ and ‘natural wines’. Affirming a taste for the color green or affirming / declining these implicit wine descriptors, doesn’t reveal anything interesting about the people who share it, don’t you think? However, the kind of humor people find hilarious, does in a way give us quite some insight into their character and personality.

Aesthetic terms just like jokes, allow for individual interpretation, creating a conversation with wine and not of wine.

With the experience, and not of the experience.

Near Guilin in southern China’s Guangxi region. Mesmerizing landscapes along River Li, tropical climate, incredibly delicious chili sauces, no wifi, plenty of silence. What does it have to do with biases and limitations? Nothing, but it’s soothing to look at - and you deserve it.

It is important here to point out that my aim is not to arrive at an ultimate truth, but rather at a fluidity of internally coherent associations brought to the surface. While they might not be true objectively (however you would like to determine this), they feel true to yourself.

To illustrate that point,

Please imagine the last moment you described an artwork, depicting a forest landscape or quietscient ocean as ‘peaceful’.

Would it be possible, that in part it has rather been your inner well-being projected into the artwork? You might have felt peaceful within and mirrored it out into the world. As you felt peaceful, you were attracted to an artpiece or musical piece which resonantes to you.

Feeling attuned brings out the respective mood.

So while we can’t claim that the artpiece is ‘peaceful’ in itself, in an ultimately true way, listening to ourselves and coherently articulating a feeling with the help of aestethic terms, yield a form of truth, seems indeed convincing.

It feels to be true to you. An embrace of subjectivity.

(Not to be confused with blinding dogma)

Same goes for calling a wine ‘energetic’ or ‘temperamental’, your feeling may have been co-authored by your excitement about the wine in the first place. In this regard at least, Kant remains right: the wine in itself seems to remain untouchable.

Yet, we volatile spirits seem to deeply resonate with the perceived world, only through the limitations and biases set upon us.

To me,

Humanity being limited in becoming fully whole, hale, hail, holy, and divine, is rather an opening.

Human’s transformation into mortals through an exposure to something beyond us.

A chessboard entirely filled with figures, becomes futile.

It’s the space and opacity between the figures which allowes the game to unfold, to unravel.

An opening allowing us to relate; to be concerned with the world.

Attunement is precisely a feeling to this fragile openness.

Mood its expression.

Expression an entry gate to ‘meaning’.

Aesthetic terms help to radiate, gleam and shine beyond the surface and limit set by descriptors, feeding into the openess, the ‘free’ realm of opaque associations.

It induces a seductive engagement with our mood, creating the basis for a meaningful conversation through and with wine. An approach not only limited to wine, an approach to building meaning.

And btw, as recent studies indicate, in its last instance ‘existent meaning’ provides a positive and significant predictor for physical and mental health.

Read more here, here and here. If this isn’t a killer argument for the deployment of aesthetic terms, I don’t know what is..

Little side quest: Do you know what the German word for ‘mood or attunement’ is? Bingo, it’s “Stimmung”.

It comes from ‘voice’ (Stimme) and also the verb ‘to tune’ (stimmen) an instrument for example. ‘Stimmen’ also means ‘right’ as in ‘correct’. I’m not entirely sure about it, but ‘es stimmt’ (that’s right) could imply ‘the sound is correct / is attuned). Nevermind, let’s stick to what I at least seem to understand:

Sound - whether voice or instrument - is expressed in sound waves, a movement in a wider sense, and I would even argue rests on the literal notion of physicality. It is a bodily experience. Mood first strikes your body. Thus, mood precedes and primes your entire thinking aparatus!

Mood is the underlying context through which any life experience is filtered and arguably, depending on.

As I’m already on a roll, let me draw out my ace: Heidegger! I haven’t had much success with Heidegger in conversations before but luckily enough, this is defined as a polemic and not a conversation.

There is always a mood, a mood that "assails us" in our unreflecting devotion to the world. A mood comes neither from the "outside" nor from the "inside," but arises from being-in-the-world. One may turn away from a mood but that is only to another mood; it is part of our facticity. Only with a mood are we permitted to encounter things in the world.

Being and Time, 1927, 29: 176

If you share my love for the word “attunement”, and wonder where the heck it all comes from, then you might wanna dig into my experience at “Asador Etxebarri”

That being said, as the earlier example about peacefulness indicates, not only descriptors but also aesthetic terms come with their own set of limitations since their nature is deeply rooted in ambiguity

The limitation being: the demand for some form of interpretation.

Yet, strikingly enough, aesthetic terms only claim to justify their legitimacy - you guessed it - in aesthetic terms. This is contrary to descriptors, which connotate some form of entitlement or demand over validity.

It is the graspable demand over validity versus the difficult demand of interpretation which enables the hegemony of descriptors and the neglect of aesthetic terms. Makes sense?

Sure, I get the difference, but why is the interpretation of wine, music and art a ‘difficult demand’?

Cause “aesthetic evaluation obeys no principles” (that Kant strikes again), infering that there is no clear structure, and guidelines available to dermine the range of good to bad interpretations.

Quite the opposite when describing the wine this way:

“95% Syrah and 5% Viognier. Two-year old 600-litre french oak barrels. Firm acidity. Supple tannins. Dark cherries. Bramble. Black pepper notes. Dried violets.”

‘But dude, it’s only 4% Viognier this year and I must also point out: it’s not only dark cherries but also sour cherries, suggesting actually quite high acidity. So, focus please. And by the way, don’t you recognize the unmistaken Patagonian character of the violets in their proximity to glacial terroir?’

Fair enough, though neither comments suggest anything about the value of / you ascribe to the painting or wine. Both comments are descriptive in nature, and far from (aesthetically) engaging.

In some situations, there is nothing wrong with pure descriptions. In fact, I cant appreciate enough the few winemakers who publish comprehensive fact sheets about their wines! I’m excited to discuss the impact of ‘dry extract’, ‘tartaric acid’, ‘levels of ph’, the geographic exposure of the vinyard, rainfall and so on. A great example is the term ‘oak’.

The term Oak is constantly dropped in conversations (mainly as a form of percentage), but rarely qualified.

Something along those lines, you hear frequently: “Can you also smell the vanilla and cloves? Probably, the wine was made with 3/4 American oak!”

What kind of oak family are the barrels made from? From which continent, country, region exactly? How old were the trees when harvested? How were the staves cut, along the grain or against the grain? How were they dried? How long were the staves toasted then? With which intensity? Was the wine fermented in oak? If Yes at what temperature? And when in elevage, were the barrels constantly topped up? What were the humidity and temperature levels around the casks?

I love to go down that road, but please, then let’s do it properly, not sticking to futile exclamations about unqualifying percentages.

So I hope to have made clear, that I don’t have a problem engaging with ‘scientific’ inquiries and its demand to rigorously examine the specificities of the wine. But when it comes to a conversation in the bigger sense of the word, does it suffice? Not sure.

In this light, my aim is to creat conversations which enable a mood through and with wine, which we tend to miss out on, when moving toward descriptions while being outside the realm of ‘objectivity at all costs’, i.e. a lab or the Max Planck Institutes..

… It ain’t easy though. I’d say that’s a real stuck fermentation right here.

Let me see what I can find in my little pandora’s box..no more Heidegger, I promise.

Artwork: Prinsesamusang

To understand how these lackluster descriptors have managed to envelop that many discourses about wine, arts and even music, I'd like to first shed light on the historic origin of their modus operandi.

If you are not into the Middle Ages, easy: just dont open the box.

Long story short

Through secularization and aforementioned refinement of methods, the trend of pursuing sobering and objective thought, culminated in the victory of science in 19th century Europe. Or to be more precise: “the victory of scientific method over science” (thank you Nietzsche for clarifying).

This new paradigm — there is a scientific explanation for everything! — in turn helps filling the diverging fault-lines of meaning, left fallow by the Western World’s increasingly atheistic societies.

Before I get swatted, let me be crystal clear: I love science.

As far as I’m concerned, more power to the scientific communities with their will for scientific rigor, precision and truth. Nothing wrong with it. I was steeped in scienctific methods at Uni. The exposure to our professors and especially literature from Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, molded my life trajectory equally incisively as the muses of art. No doubt about it.

But do we really need to see everything through the lens of scientific methods?

Let me ask you, frankly: Does the engagement with wine originate or belong to the scientific community?

Video clip: Travis Ruskus

So, how about we strike a balance or at least aim and struggle for a balance?

While it is totally fine to use the following descriptors:

“Rostaing’s 2015 Côte-Rôtie is full bodied, has good freshness and a very long finish”

how about an aesthetic judgment:

“I find Rostaing’s 2015 Côte-Rôtie enticingly fresh, sprawling and vibrant.”

One could go even a step further, concluding with overall aesthetic verdicts:

“Rostaing’s 2015 Côte-Rôtie strikes me as wonderously magnificent, temperamental yet arrestingly lightfooted character”.

See, it wouldn’t become entirely clear what I mean when saying this last sentence. One could argue, precision is lost gradually, when moving away from the first sentence. But why would you want to be precise?

Aren’t our most exciting experiences in life invariably and utterly imprecise?

Isn’t precisely their nature sui generis, neither repeatable nor reproducible?

Why can’t this apply to wine experience as well?

Regarding the aesthetic judgments or verdicts,

It’s up to you, up to your association, up to your willingness to put it into context, and how interested you are in the development of the conversation and want to find out what one means by temperamental or lightfooted for instance..

There is a hint of reciprocal responsibility hidden beneath the genuine use of aesthetic terms; a thought-process which constantly starts anew and claims your opinion intermingled with emotions - by design.

If you buy into this, you might rightfully ask:

Then what enables or motivates this process embarking from descriptive criticsm toward aesthetic verdicts, in the first place? What justifies your polemic, mad Max?

It’s complicated.

But when in doubt — ask the old Greeks — I shall reply - as they have plenty to say ha

“Zeus has led us on to know,

the gods lay it down as law

that we must suffer, suffer into truth.

We cannot sleep, and drop by drop at the heart

the pain of pain remembered comes again,

and we resist, but ripeness comes as well.

From the gods enthroned

there comes a violent love”

From Aeschylus’ Oresteia: Agamemnon (Lines 177-184), 5 BC

Sure, there are a few ways to interprete these lines. What I get is, that rather than sterility and approximating absolute certainty through sobering knowledge, one shall arrive at mastering the phenomena in the world through active exposure:

A process which requires ones life to become an experiment in itself. Life as a means to discovering knowledge.

“To suffer into truth!” —

Experimenting with thoughts, feelings, words; where both success and failure are answers above all.

Of course context matters. This is not open-heart surgery or medical research. My polemic refers to the world of art, music and wine, so why would I choose a mode of thinking and conversing, approximating a scientific method when we are clearly not in its realm, as the drinker, the listener, the audience, the perceiver and perceived?

And that’s where the crux is, sometimes we tend to absorb the value of science unnoticeably into our lived experience to the extend it becomes unitary and an inevitable duty.

Obviously, there are many ways of experimenting in life to find one’s own truths and I’m not here to dictate anything. Though I’m hoping to inspire by pointing toward a incredibly reverberating poem I came across during the very first lockdown, right in spring 2020.

The words were composed by Pierre Charles Roy in 1754; and if you are waiting for that final push to start learning French — look no further — here it is.

« Sur un mince cristal, l’hiver conduit leurs pas:

Le précipice est sous la glace;

Telle est de nos plaisirs la légère surface.

Glissez, mortels, n’appuyez pas. »

—

"On a thin crystal, winter leads your steps:

The cliff is below the ice;

Such is the light surface of our pleasures.

Glide, mortals, don't push."

Concluding thoughts

Or in other words: What the hell do you want, Max?

Hmm … First I could tell you, that I don’t mean to convince you of : my historical interpretation, teutonic jokes and riffs on Heidegger.

However, by focussing and thinking through descriptors, only a fraction of the world’s potential magic including wine, music, and art seems to be actualized.

As an alternative, I propose engaging with wine, as the engagement with life.

Not by demanding an objective birds-eye-perspective but by embracing ones very own facticity, personal associations, emotions and thoughts, may they at times be bewildering, raw and objectively ‘untrue’. A start of a dance. An embrace of becoming.

Ultimately, I’m invoking you to live dangerously, building your future houses on the foot of Vesuvius!

Experimenting with wine, thoughts, your relationship outward, reaching unknown heights and unforseen depths.

Not all experiments can be a success, otherwise they wouldn’t be experiments. Experimenting means failure, living with failure, incorporating failure - not having to win all the time.

It’s a process yielding a transformation into opportunities, rather than outcome.

Utilizing and thinking in aesthetic terms opens up new beautiful trajetories, affecting not only our intellectual cognition but strikingly also our mood — Being as a whole.

Think for yourself

‘Elegant, lightfooted, graceful, feisty, energetic, warm, temperamental, soothing, delicate, garish’

These words don’t lead to conclusions

They are spurs

Their “evaluation settles nothing, but a commitment to the future!” (Nehamas, 2017)

Verily my searchers, seekers, tempters and researchers, give aesthetic terms a chance on your swirling journey and let them be your new found friends of levity;

A twilight and poised support in becoming of who you are.

Experiment as little or as much as you want — but resist closure gracefully, beholding the fragile moment from which a magic wine, art and music experience might arise.

Bon Courage

 

“Glissez, mortels, n’appuyez pas.”

“Glide, Mortals, DoN’T PUSH.”