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Does Wine Have a Subject Matter?
There is a long standing debate in the philosophy of art about whether art must represent something. One side argues that for an object to be a work of art it must be about something. It must present a...
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In Wine Appreciation, Why do We Ignore Conceptual Expertise?
I posted about the nature of perceptual expertise in an earlier post. In this post I want to consider what wine scientist Malfeito-Ferrera calls “conceptual expertise.” Conceptual expertise, as he is...
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What Wine Has Taught Me about Philosophy
Philosophy in its academic form has unfortunately become a forensic process of detecting flaws in someone’s ideas. Too many discussions degenerate into thinly disguised, tendentious attacks rather than...
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Must You Like a Wine in Order to Appreciate It?
In his essay in the philosophy journal Erkenntnis, David Sackris argues that in order to appreciate a wine, you must like it. He will use this claim to, among other points, call into question the view...
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On Winery Visits and the Aesthetics of Toil
Most aesthetics is dominated by an aesthetics of distance, especially distance from the origins of a work. The aesthetics of wine is no exception. Just as we learn to appreciate a finished painting, so...
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Wine and “Making Special”
In recent years there have been several important books devoted to understanding art as a product of human evolution. The art historian Ellen Dissanayake is one of the more prominent thinkers pursuing...
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The Attractions of Viticulture
Viticulture requires lots of technical know-how, efficiency, and a capacity for physical labor. But it also requires something like aesthetic sensitivity—a capacity for fine-grained perception and an...
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Millennials and La Dolce Vita
The buzz in the wine world over the past two weeks has been the grim news from Silicon Valley Bank’s annual State of the Wine Industry Report, which shows overall wine consumption is down and the...
View ArticleWine and Romance: The Eternal Connection
From the archives, reposting in celebration of Valentine’s Day Among all the alcoholic beverages we consume, wine is most often linked with romance. The Roman poet Ovid, in his 17 A.D. work “The Art of...
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Beauty for Winos
When you approach aesthetics through the appreciation of wine, you might find much of the history of Western aesthetics to be missing the point. Western aesthetics traces its origins to Plato who held...
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