Critics and Tasters

When you taste thousands of wines in a relatively short period of time, as can happen in certain periods of the year for those who – like me – are taster-journalists, there is no time to wonder about the sense of the job you are doing. In other words, what it means to be a wine critic and a taster and whether a difference exists between the two.

Old texts of philosophy can certainly come in handy, in particular the initial part of Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit in which the father of Idealism tackles the theme of 'sense-certainty'. Hegel concluded that all the series of immediate sensations the spirit feels can only be related to a type of higher consciousness and that what appears as higher consciousness is, in reality, a lower one because it does not create a hierarchy of elements and so various sensations remain an immense series of objects without any distinction in value.

What does this all have to do with tasting wine? It matters because it helps understand how without a unifying idea, without a technical as well as esthetic notions, without a deep knowledge of the subject, one which transcends even a single tasting, it is impossible distinguish, in other words criticize. And it is here that two schools of thought, of tasting styles, emerge. They derive from different preparations, we not being Hegel's Absolute Spirit but, if anything, only his 'groups of thoughts', as Benedetto Croce defined humans.

Let me take this one step further. I believe that a simple organoleptic tasting is not enough to judge a wine. This because every wine is not just something to drink and not just the immediate pleasure it can give. It is also its history, its creators, the place it comes from, its symbolic and evocative value. These are all things that a critic has the duty to take into consideration and that constitute one of the highest forms of hedonism, which is not just sensory but also intellectual and cultural. Thus if one stops at the simple act of tasting they miss the big picture and reduce everything to a simple exercise of an ability to taste, a ''I like this, I don't like that'' which for me is simply degrading. The mystique of wine is something else, it comprises tales of people and places, as well as sensations. In this the never-to-be-forgotten Gino Veronelli was an absolute master. And now more than ever is it important to remember him for this.