Andrew Jefford
Are you a wine hedonist? Hedonism is ‘the pursuit of pleasure’; philosophically, it refers to the notion that pleasure is the highest good. We all drink wine for the pleasure it procures us, don’t we? So for the wine drinker, the best wines must be those that procure the most pleasure. That, surely, makes us all wine hedonists – though we may live according to different philosophical tenets in other areas of our life.
Such has been the professional credo of this year’s Hall of Fame laureate, critic Robert Parker (see p18). His notes bubble and cascade with lovingly evoked sensual delight. He has little patience with wines that do not offer palpable sensual pleasure – and even less with what he calls the ‘Pleasure Police’: health zealots, moral puritans or nanny state-ists who seek unreasonably to constrain the pleasure of others.
Throughout his career, he castigated the orthodoxies of oenology for its pleasureinhibiting aversion to risk. His criticism of ‘austerity, high acidity and herbaceousness’ in wine, and of those who attempt to make lower alcohol wines by strenuously early picking, is that such stratagems deprive drinkers of pleasure. It explains his lack of interest in terroir as a topic; it magnifies the simplicity of his message and the appeal of his scores. This simple, direct championing of the pleasure of the wine in the glass was a major element in his astonishing global success between 1983 and 2015 or so.
This poses two intriguing questions. First, do wine drinkers genuinely seek pleasure above all? Second, is there a universal ‘pleasure response’ to what is in the glass, or is this in some way culturally conditioned or specific to individual palates?
There’s no doubt in my mind that many wine drinkers do not, in fact, seek pleasure in the glass above all. For certain minds, wine is a knowledge system of magnetic appeal, and the drinking of wine is chiefly a knowledge quest (the knowledge often more intoxicating than the wine). For these drinkers, barely pleasant novelty or rarity may procure more pleasure than customary sensual generosities.
For others, wine is a kind of belief system: what matters most in wine is the moral quest, the pursuit of a certain conception of goodness. Many of those in the natural wine movement belong to this group; they accept Nicolas Joly’s strange credo ‘Avant d’être bon, un vin doit être vrai’ (before being good, a wine should be true). They taste morally, not sensually: bad virtuous wine may taste better to them than good, morally suspect wine.
Wine is also fashion, and a third group is happiest seeking out high-status wines, regardless of how they taste. Bizarre, I know, but it’s possible that those primarily seeking pleasure in the glass constitute a minority of committed and engaged wine drinkers.
It’s less easy to pronounce on the second question, since it takes us into difficult philosophical terrain of taste and aesthetics, and the eternal battle between objective and subjective. My own belief is that the bases of our tasting responses to different aromas and flavours go back millennia to our evolution as primates, and that Parker’s love of ripeness, richness, lushness and opulence in the great vintages of fine wines draws on those responses and is indeed universal.
That instinctive substrate is overlain, however, by national palates (Australians and Germans like acidity more than Americans, and French and Italians like tannin more than Australians) and ‘individual tastes’.
Those who write and talk about wine often seem to ‘taste intellectually’, favouring balances which less tutored palates find ungratifying. Parker wasn’t like that. His work tapped straight into the instinctive substrate; his tasting compass is truly that of a wine hedonist, albeit one of colossal sophistication and knowledge. Those who followed his recommendations and scores (I was one of them) found great pleasure accrued as a consequence. Thanks, Bob.
DAndrew Jefford is a Decanter contributing editor and multiple award-winning author
‘Do wine drinkers genuinely seek pleasure above all?’
Donatella Cinelli Colombini, Brunello di Montalcino 2014 (£36.67 Millésima). As ever with Brunello, this was the pleasure of the semi-mature wine: the plums and berries now in retreat in a mist of truffle, warm forest, frankincense and animal comfort, and flavours in which a warm, resonant acidity meshes seamlessly with time-ripened tannins and the glow of those remembered fruits. Great vineyards – but great cellar work, too.