I have endeavoured, throughout the course of this book, to show that wine can be an object of serious philosophical reflection and serious appreciative attention. I began, in Chapter 1, by rejecting sceptical claims – arising from common-sense intuitions, philosophical speculations and scientific study – about the inability of tastes and smells to provide us with genuine knowledge of objects. Such knowledge, in the case of wine, requires a certain level of training and expertise, and we saw that much of the empirical evidence frequently called on to undermine the existence of expertise actually instead supports it. It does so primarily in demonstrating that taste and smell perception is crucially affected and shaped by background knowledge and experience, and that this plays a key role in wine tasting.

We have seen that wine, as an object of appreciation, can be conceived as both an ordinary physical object consisting of perceptible chemical compounds in the external world, and as an imaginative, interpreted, experiential object that arises as a relation between us and this physical reality. In Chapter 2 we examined this connection between physical object and experience through the language used to describe and evaluate wine. We discovered that even some of the more extravagant flights of metaphorical fancy indulged by experts could be grounded in certain norms and conventions that established the relevant criteria of meaning and truth for wine judgements.