Categories and conventions

The best place to begin is with a closer examination of some of the issues alighted on in the second chapter concerning the nature and role of conventions in establishing the various norms for wine language and judgement, and the role of expertise therein.

The first thing that really needs to be emphasized here, a theme we have touched on already at various points, is that what we perceive and experience in wine is not anchored solely in basic “unmediated” or “un-interpreted” perceptual properties – the bare sensations – of taste and smell. For it can be contoured and coloured by a range of background factors, including education, knowledge, culture, imagination, categorization, comparison, intention and so on. That is, our taste and smell experiences of wine are to some degree cognitively penetrable, as we noted in Chapter 1. What we think, know and imagine can affect what we pay attention to and focus on, what we expect to taste, what we taste, and even our liking for what we taste. We need now to assess the respects in which this is so, and try to locate the thresholds governing such penetration. Again, the model we can use is taken from the realm of aesthetic judgement and appreciation.

In a now classic paper, the philosopher Kendall Walton (1970) famously demonstrated that what aesthetic properties a work of art is perceived to have depends on which of its non-aesthetic properties are standard, variable and contra-standard relative to the categories in which it is perceived.