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Tag Archives: objectivity
Having your subjective cake and objectifying it
Is wine appreciation is subjective or objective? Professionals can often be difficult to tie down on that issue. For example, they often agree that opinions on wine quality are totally subjective, while at the same time claiming to be objective in their … Continue reading
Subjectivity ain’t that simple
Today we shall take as our text verse 1 of The Nine Attributes of Greatness, a section of Karen McNeil’s The Wine Bible: No one needs a wine book to tell them what they like to drink. Subjectivity in wine is pretty easy. … Continue reading
Subjectivity in wine appreciation
This is a topic dear to me, and something I have written about a fair bit on my blog. In an article recently published in The World of Fine Wine (Issue 51, 2016 Q1) , I draw together my thoughts into … Continue reading
Fooling the experts again
What We Really Taste When We Drink Wine, an article by Maria Konnikova in The New Yorker, is another journalistic take on how easy it is to be influenced by extraneous factors (those that have nothing to do with the … Continue reading
Manifesto
A few months ago Jamie Goode published his Wine Manifesto. It did a good job of encapsulating a lot of current thinking about wine. On the other hand I did not think it would stand the test of time and, … Continue reading
Fooling the experts?
An article published last week in the Observer, Wine-tasting: it’s junk science, has proved controversial. As it covers a subject that interests me greatly – how we perceive, describe and rate wines – I wanted to post about it here … Continue reading
Posted in Tasting and taste
Tagged critics, note, objectivity, science, subjectivity
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More on tasting note subjectivity
Take a look at this Scientific American blog post by Christina Agapakis. In summary, it shows how people perceive smells differently dependent on genetic makeup, age, gender, health, and other factors. They have different sensitivities to the smell of particular substances, … Continue reading
Wine scoring
Debating the merits of scoring is a well-worn topic on wine blogs and forums, but this nicely argued contribution on John M Kelly’s blog “notes from the winemaker” offers an original perspective. Do read it for yourself, but basically John describes the lengths … Continue reading
Embracing subjectivity in taste
I think a lot of wine enthusiasts, professional and amateur, might be willing to admit that taste is subjective, both at the fundamental level I discussed in my last blog post, and in the sense that we all have different preferences … Continue reading
Taste is subjective
People who know me, or who have read my blog, would hardly expect me to say anything other than that taste is subjective. But here I mean it in a very basic sense – I am not here talking about … Continue reading