My contention is that a person is not tasting wine; s/he is tasting a perceptual entity, a gestalt which includes many memories. If recognition of a label is part of that gestalt, then a person tasting a Lafite with knowledge that s/he is tasting a Lafite is actually tasting a separate and different entity than a bloke tasting the same Lafite blind. The person with knowledge might be drinking the equivalent of a First Growth, while the blind taster might be tasting a Fifth Growth. The tasting is the perception, not the third party observed act, so to speak—the objective act of imbibing a liquid.
Taking this thread to the next step, I must consider, as Clark Smith suggested, that experiencing a great wine is akin to listening to a great piece of music—and by extension, viewing a great work of art. This being said, I must also consider the involvement of the unconscious mind.
Critics of art often point out that the role of an artist is to bring unspoken truths from the vast total psyche into a form that can be grokked, not just understood in the normal way we think of understanding, i.e. making logical interpretations. The greater understanding evades the tunnel vision of the logical mind. After all, our cerebral cortex, which makes “sense” of it all, is a very recent addition to the psyche. The total psyche also groks life through the eye of a salamander in a primordial swamp, our biological ancestor. It is this larger awareness, this re-linking (re-ligion), which can bring a man to tears when he sips that 1947 Cheval Blanc. The conscious mind is as about as comprehensive as a yarmulke atop a fat Rabbi.
Just like a young executive making his first trip through the Louvre, some of us sip a great wine without fully appreciating it. I have certainly done it at parties: sipped a majestic First Growth but not been in the right mood to appreciate it. This can happen at a blind wine tasting.
When Thomas Jefferson and other early adopters deemed four wines to be of First Growth quality, it was a raw interpretation, - a profound, earth breaking recognition. They had no label to alert them that they were about to be wowed. But today, in our over communicated din, we sometimes have to be settled down and reminded that there is more to life and being. Enter the “foolery” of a label, which isn’t a foolery, but sometimes a signpost to majesty.
The work of art in a great bottle, whose recognition largely comes from the unconscious mind, can be better appreciated when the work of the unconscious mind is brought into the evaluation by the reminder of the label.
So, to conclude, tasting with label recognition can permit a bloke to more fully appreciate the majesty that he might have otherwise skipped over. (A formidable blind taster such as Parker probably possesses his own signposts and thus isn’t helped as much by a label.) A person looking at a great label is actually tasting a different and better wine than another person tasting the same liquid with a blindfold on. The label guy brings more memories to the table.
Tim, are you still with me?
TimMc wrote:
Covert wrote:
TimMc wrote:
He never said the wine somehow morphs into this wonderful glass of grape juice....the reporter did
Tim,
You are an educator, and from your responses on this thread, I have the feeling that you might get something in the way I get it that I used to argue on this forum to no avail. It seems that the prevailing idea about perception is that it only comes into play when someone is being “fooled” by a label, or unduly influenced by a particularly nice mood—or music, in this case. Otherwise, it seems, most wine drinkers think that they are directly in touch with “the flavor” of a wine one to one. In other words, if a person is not with a particularly charming woman or listening to Beethoven, he will pretty much be tasting a wine “for what it is.” And if the person is tasting blind, then he is really in touch with the flavor, and not having his perception fooled.
My understanding is that we are tasting through individual perception any time we taste. That “taste” is a physiological sensation and experienced consciously only through perception. If the person is tasting blind, he is really not blind at all, he has all kinds of assumptions and guesses about the wine, and other things, which cause the wine to taste a certain way.
My point is that a wine isn’t anything other than whatever an individual perceives to be. People because they are genetically similar perceive in generally the same way, so it seems like what they are perceiving is a constant rather than a relative entity. For this reason, I conclude that the “truth” of a wine lies closest to the thing that a person perceives; that a person tasting a Lafite while looking at the label is “tasting” a different entity than a person tasting liquid from the same bottle blind, and not a false entity. Because the entity is the perception, not what is in the bottle. The entity is the result of the individual group of neurons firing when tasting, rather than what is in the bottle.
When wine drinkers speak of how someone would get a false idea of the taste of a wine while looking at the label, they are making the same error that Thomas is making, albeit more subtly. They, like Thomas, assume that a wine has a “real” taste or flavor independent of perception, which can be gotten at by tasting blind. Or they assume that a blind taste is more honest than an open eyed taste, rather than just a product of a different set of assumptions coming from longer term memories following looking at a label. There is a perceptual lag in the brain after viewing a label which puts the perception of the label into the same "other-than-direct" neurological memory field that a person has with his eyes closed. Every perception is a memory clouded by countless other memories, regardles of whether eyes are open or shut.
Do you see it differently?
Covert
TimMc:
Not at all...that is exactly the way I understand how perception works.