The Table Comes First

by Adam Gopnik

  According to scientists who study smell and taste, that’s just the beginning: the duplicity reaches from the organizing mind deep into the experiencing senses themselves. Rachel Herz, a professor of psychology at Brown, conducts research into the effects of “frames”—context—on the perception of smells. (Wine tasters are “noses” first of all.) Smells, she reports, “are so malleable when it comes to verbal context that when reasonable verbal information is available it will override and even replace the olfactory information.” The effect is pronounced when the smells are, in some way, ambiguous—tell people that they’re smelling vomit, and they’ll smell vomit; tell them that the same smell is Parmesan cheese, and they’ll smell Parmesan cheese. With wine, the most basic verbal categories (it comes from France, it comes from America, it’s cheap, it’s expensive) seem to be able to throw even an educated nose off track. The illusions, Herz suggests, “work the way, in a familiar illusion, arrowheads either going in or feathering out extend or shorten straight lines. Word labels on smells are the same kind of context effect, and these context effects are markedly more powerful with nose sensations than they are with other kinds.”

  To make things worse, the nose turns out to have the shortest memory of all the sense organs. A simple experiment, Herz suggests, shows just how powerful nose amnesia is: Think of a familiar tune—say, “Yesterday.” Now think of a familiar picture—say, the Mona Lisa. Now think of the smell of a tuna-fish sandwich. You can do the last, of course, but where the other sensory memories are strong, clear, and sharp, the tuna-fish sandwich smell is general and vague. What the nose knows, in effect, is not much, and that soon forgotten. (Wine lovers protest violently when they are told this, but their protest, from the academic point of view, is a bit like the protest of eyewitnesses who are sure they saw what they say they saw, even if they didn’t.) Yet to accept this is not to say that the elaborate language of wine evaluation is necessarily or even remotely phony. It is exactly because smells are so labile and hard to grasp that they need more help from words than other sensations. When it comes to wine, we are all like early-Alzheimer’s patients who have to be coaxed into memory and appreciation. (“Remember, Dad—that’s the woman we saw on the beach at Wellfleet.” “Oh, yes! Her.”)

  The real question is not whether wine snobs and wine writers are big phonies but whether they are any bigger phonies than, say, book reviewers or art critics. For with those things, too, context effects are overwhelming. All description is impressionistic, and all impressions are interpretive. Colors and shapes don’t emerge from pictures in neat packages to strike the eye, either, any more than plots and themes come direct to the mind from the pages of books. Everything is framed by something. Once again, the essential dialogue between the frame of our expectations and the experience of our senses is not the thing to be defeated when we talk about our hungers, but the thing to be celebrated: it is what gives shape to our sensorium.

  It is perfectly possible—in fact, almost certainly true—that given the wrong frame, or no frame at all, all of our responses to wine would vanish into one big buzzing confusion. If all the grape juice in Bordeaux or Napa were poured into vats, without labels or corkscrews or prior knowledge, it really might all taste the same. Anyway, no elaborate rhetoric of compliments is meant to be “accurate”; it is meant to be complimentary. When Shakespeare compares his lover to a summer’s day, he doesn’t really mean that she (or he) is like a summer’s day in that she is hotter in the middle and cooler at the ends—though, then again, he might. Wine writing is of the same type: a series of elaborately plausible compliments paid to wines. When the French wine writer Eric Glatre declares, say, that in the aroma of a bottle of Krug “intense empyreumatic fragrances of toasted milk bread, fresh butter, café au lait, and afterthoughts of linden join in a harmonious chorus with generous notes of acacia honey, mocha, and vanilla,” he is suggesting that, of all the analogies out there, this might be one that expands our minds, opens our horizons, delights our imaginations. He is offering a metaphor, not an account book.

  In this way, the intersection of French sensibility and modern science suggests not so much the limits of Parker as the limits of naïve American empiricism: numbers and honesty and transparency only get you so far in the world. Our experiences of everything are too mediated—by contexts and intentions and likeness—to be summed up in a number. It is exactly the disputable quality of the compliments we pay to wine that makes them touch the lower edge of art. Once again, De gustibus solum est disputandum. Only matters of taste are worth arguing over.

  Between the rhetorical and the real lies ritual. And wine is a ritual thing before it is any other kind of thing. The history of wine provides the not surprising but always reassuring news that there is, from the very beginning of viniculture, no sorting out the need for intoxication from the necessity of ritual, the desire to drink from the debt to structure. The story of wine seems to begin someplace out in the “Transcaucasus”—today’s Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan—when the first Vitis viniferas grapes got grown. The astonishing thing about wines is that they are like dogs: there is endless apparent variety we can squeeze from what is, in the end, one species. Had Darwin been a wine-drinker, instead of an English port man, he might have chosen to use the varieties of wine, shaped by man from one unchanging grape into a thousand terroirs, to make his point about variation produced under selective pressure. (Actually, Darwin did do important work in the history of wine, and not just because he was one of the first Englishmen to taste New Zealand reds. He made the essential point that the grapevine will produce tendrils, to climb with, or grapes, to reproduce with, and that this is a vestige of the vine’s ancient forest habitat, where it could “choose” either to climb higher to reach sunlight, or stop where it was and make fruit. And, not coincidentally, he helped save French wine. It was Darwinian evolutionary principles that helped French biologists discover, at the time of the great phyloxera crisis of the late nineteenth century, the one thing that might save French wine. They realized that, since the root louse causing the plague was American, the American vines on which it must once have lived must surely have evolved resistance to it—and it was the grafting of New World roots onto Old World vines that saved Burgundy and Bordeaux. Before Darwin, it seems likely that the last thing vintners would have done is go back to the same vines that had carried the plague to supply the cure.)

  What we find in all the ancient wine cultures is not a slow growth from a disorganized Bacchanalia to an evolved ritual practice, from simple intoxication to information system. On the contrary, wine ritual and wine-drinking seem to have been inseparable from the very first. Wine, after all, though a natural product, isn’t a simple one: even the plainest garage wines demand a complex grasp of a multipart process; leave it in the vat and let it rot doesn’t work very well. You have to think it even as you drink it. So it’s no surprise that everywhere we turn, even in the most ancient wine writing, we find gods and demigods, vessels and special glasses—the absurd paraphernalia of the wine lover, with his tasting glasses and little fridge, stretches back to the beginning of time.

  From the beginning, wine and wine culture has been a halfway house between the sacramental and the social. In Neolithic cultures there are already inscriptions and decorations on wine vessels. As the scholar Patrick McGovern tells us, at the end of Old Kingdom Egypt, around 2200 B.C., there is already a system of “AOC,” appellation contrôlée, designations of the kind that France arrived at only in the nineteenth century: wines in mortuary tablets seem to be grouped around the names of well-known wineries in the Nile Delta. They are called Northern wine, abesh wine, and sunu wine. In New Kingdom pottery inscriptions, referred to as ostraca and dated to around 1350 B.C., wines are rated as “genuine,” “good,” “very good,” and even “very, very good”—a blunter and more useful system, in its way, than the French “Grand Cru Classé” and our own regional markings. “Wine snobbery” of this sort, a compulsive need to rate and class and comp
are, far from being a late invention, seems inseparable from the activity itself. It is as if from the start wine-drinkers grasped that without a mental frame of comparison, without words to structure tastes, the pleasures of wine drinking would be lessened. Egyptian wine-drinkers wanted to know if they were drinking abesh or sunu, and they wanted to know if it was merely genuine or very good—and doubtless they then turned toward each other in profile and said, “They’re calling this abesh ‘very, very good’—but then, Parker always overrates abesh.”

  The question about such judgments, mixing snobbishness and sense, is not whether they exist—they exist in the minds of the people who feel them; that’s enough—but what they are about. For the true wine snob, they are about the ability to make them, and this is just sad. For the French wine critic—a generalized type, but one who exists—they are about the ability to make a map inside your mind: to taste tastes and see places. For the American wine critic, they are about the ability to offer consumers a quality beverage. What they rarely seem to be about is drinking wine. Paul Draper, the great winemaker from Ridge Vineyards in California, has had the honesty to say that he wishes there were more drinkers in the wine world and less tasting. He means by this not that more people should get drunk, but that more people should accept the totality of the experience of wine as it really is, instead of amputating one bit of the whole activity and fetishizing it.

  Remarkably, nowhere in wine writing, including Parker’s, would a Martian learn that the first reason people drink wine is to get drunk. To read wine writing, one would think that wine is simply another luxury food, like smoked salmon or caviar or chocolate; the one idea that is banished is that it is a powerful drug, which can wash away, in a few minutes, the ability to discriminate at all. The end of food writing is to turn eating into a metaphor for wanting, of all kinds. The end of wine writing is to turn drinking into a metaphor for judging. Since we know that this is false, we feel the falsity, and the pathos of the falsity.

  For it is not wine that makes us happy for no reason; it is alcohol that makes us happy for no reason. Wine is what gives us a reason to let alcohol make us happy without one. It’s the ritual context that civilizes the simple need. Yet there is still a strong taboo in place among even the ritzier reaches of wine writing about addressing this untroubling truth. It is true, of course, that the professional wine-taster tastes and spits. And I am told that there are wine-tasters who are allergic to alcohol. But the specialized bits of the activity would not exist without the totality of the larger truth: if wine were just better-tasting grape juice, we wouldn’t have the books or the background or the bards.

  Our experience is whole. We can take one moment, the mouth moment, from the whole experience, but we would not relish the moment if we did not keep the whole experience in mind. If we were not warmed by wine, we would not take the trouble to categorize its tastes. (And even if we didn’t others would do it for us; there’s a social dimension to wine, a division of labor, à la Adam Smith, in which the tasters do some of the work, and the drinkers do the rest; if there were no drinkers, there would be no tastings for the tasters.) Men like to look at nude pictures of pretty women—or perhaps that should be, at pretty pictures of nude women—without necessarily having (or feigning to have) sex with them. But it is only the wider experience of sex that lends the pictures their punch and their point.

  The strident denials on the part of the wine connoisseurs that their experience has anything to do with that other experience of getting tipsy reminds one of nothing so much as the earnest insistence, on the part of Victorian aesthetes, that the nude in art had nothing whatever to do with sex, and that if it did “it was bad morals and bad art.” To which Kenneth Clark replied, mischievously, in his great book The Nude, that if the nude in art didn’t have some relation to sexual desire, then it was bad morals and bad art. This doesn’t mean that Clark wanted to make love to the Venus de Milo (though given what we know of his avid sex life, maybe he did). It just means that the idealizations and the “aesthetic” pleasures, the gentle flow of curves and breasts and rear, in the Venus is an extended, heightened, crystallized form of desire—desire transformed into art, but still desire at, er, bottom.

  The wine expert can create a new space, between intoxication and discrimination, and then perform in it—just as the fun of being a connoisseur of the classical nude, à la Rubens and Titian, is to play in the space between the erotic and the pornographic. But the hunger for the comfort drug lies at the root of one activity, as the hunger for the human body lies at the root of the other. The reproductive instinct is at the start, though by no means always at the finish, of our love lives. Divorcing sex from reproduction in everything we write about it—if only to counsel birth control—would not strike us as elegant; it would strike us as unreal. And the same is true of wine. If wine did not warm, we would not want it.

  The mixed-up sensations of wine do not make a case for the superfluity of wine writing; it is the case for its necessity. Without wine lore and wine tasting and wine talk and wine labels and, yes, wine writing and rating—the whole elaborate idea of wine—we would still get drunk, but we would be merely drunk. The language of wine appreciation is there not because wine is such a special, subtle challenge to our discernment but because without the elaborate language—without the idea of wine, held up and regularly polished—it would all be about the same, or taste that way. Wine talk and wine ceremony are not simply snobbish distractions that lead us away from the real experience; they are part of what lets the experience happen. Once again, our contexts and our convictions are in constant play. We believe in the virtue of some kinds of wine, we bounce with joy at the tastes of others—our tastes and our temperaments debate even as they dance.

  To turn wine away from happiness is the drinker’s sin, as turning food from gusto is the eater’s. A good fruity bottle of a Santa Barbara Pinot Noir, with a pretty label and a decent story, makes us happy, and happier than that we don’t really deserve to be. In that Henry James story, of course, the innocent empirical American’s reward and punishment would come when he marries that comtesse and retires to her château, where they spend the rest of their lives drinking nothing but water, for their health.

  11. E-MAIL TO ELIZABETH PENNELL: Potatoes, Steak, Air

  Dear Eliza:

  I notice that, in your essay on the perfect dinner, you dish-drop pommes soufflées. Of all the dishes that are out there, and that I dream of making, pommes soufflées is perhaps the first on the list. The dish was popular already in your time, which is why you refer to it—that might have been its heyday, actually: potatoes are sliced about a quarter of an inch thick, then twice deep-fried. The first time preps them at a lower heat, the second time—done right, done fully, done with luck—the potatoes blister and then blossom, popping up and filling with air, so that they are delicate little balloons of potato and salt and the lingering taste of the oil they were cooked in. They are, if not the immortality of potatoes, as cheese is said to be the immortality of milk, then at least the elegance of potatoes. Parmentier, the great French agronomist who brought the potato to Paris, thought of it as a plebeian dish, and we eat it mostly in that manner, mashed or roasted or boiled. But the fried potato, absurdly ubiquitous as it now is, once was the royalty of the line, and the pomme soufflé, if you can find it, keeps some savor of that stature.

  They don’t seem to make them anywhere in New York these days, though I have read that they were still available in the fancy places in New Orleans until recently, along with crêpes suzettes and flambéed duck and all the other ancient dishes of the old theatrical cuisine. I think the only one I have ever eaten in New York was a one-off. I was in a burger-and-lobster sort of place along Second Avenue, thirty years ago, when the eastern avenues of Manhattan were lined with glass cafés and the phrases “singles bars” and “brunch” still resonated. Ordering sautéed potatoes, I saw that one had swelled and risen, just like a pomme soufflé. It must have fallen into the oil twice,
by chance, and inflated by accident. It was, exactly, a “hopeful monster,” of the kind that evolutionary biologists, Stephen Jay Gould prominent among them, were talking about in those days—the one lucky potato slice dropped by accident twice in the ever-hotter oil, suddenly inflated and ballooned.

  It was evidence, though, that they can be made. So the other night, following a recipe in one of the old, sixties-era French cookbooks I like to collect, I neatly peeled some firm russets—the books emphasize that you can’t use new potatoes, or baking potatoes that have gone too soft—and then sliced them into what I measured as a template of three-eighths of an inch. Then I poured canola oil into two Dutch ovens, took out the candy/frying thermometer, and turned on our (unfortunately electric, and slow-responding) stove. I decided to serve them, for safety, with one of the meals that I knew in advance the children would love: a rib steak done with a red wine and shallot sauce—sauce Bordelaise, as it’s called in the old recipe books, a classic three-step sauce: shallots, red wine, veal stock. I made the steak with my “consciousness raised,” as people used to say, to the ambiguities of meat-eating. And yet… hunger rose.

  It is surely somewhere here that the real difficulty about the whole vexed meat-eating question lies. Not how we think abstractly about the rights of meat-eating, but how we actually feel when we eat meat. In that most evil of all films, the Goebbels-produced Nazi-era “documentary” The Eternal Jew, there’s a bizarre, interminable sequence—obscenely heralded by a title page warning off “sensitive German viewers”—of kosher butchery, taken during the Polish invasion, in which a cow, its throat cut, is bled to death, poor beast, and the indifference of the bearded Jewish butchers to the suffering is a sign of their evil indecency. Because they are cruel to animals (let us bracket, both on the page, and in our minds, whether kosher butchery is truly crueler than any other kind) we can be cruel to them: they don’t have the same feelings as the rest of us, either of empathy or of sensitivity. Exterminating them is not like exterminating people; it is like exterminating rats.