Exploration and Discovery in Place of Judgment; Correspondence in Place of Comparison and Evaluation
Because I love and feel a strong bond with you, I do not judge you. I live you in the encounter and in the exploration, along the lines of experience. I look after and take care of you. Judging is a thematic way of confronting oneself; it is a face-to-face relation that detaches and distinguishes. Instead, exploration is a discovering and enveloping process; it is lateral and diffused, stretched out in the ongoing situation. It absorbs as much as possible without focusing on objects or single aspects. Intellectual, rational, and methodical judgment requires an authoritative competence, but diffused and exposed exploration and potential discovery—like the rejection or the absence of any interest—requires manifold compassion. Love appreciates without reflecting. When one loves wine one does not criticize it, and everything participates in a story into which images flow, polyphonically in unison. For a lover with a wine, distinctions and analysis may occur subsequently, but they do not serve to explain. They rather tell us about an encountered and discovered beauty, about a received joy. When we really like a wine or a person, every detail is observed and described with an aura of eros or filìa; it is like a circle. Because we are involved, we describe the details as if we wish to announce, or even explain, the reasons why we have been taken up into this loving flow. However, when we refuse or reject that person or that wine, the same details become the reason for our dislike. If the worst fault can also become the best quality, maybe we need to place the question about the judgment of wine on a different level. (A technical-philosophical clarification: the displacement I’m talking about does not concern any “judgment without reflection” as a general guide for our life choices, a sensus communis, which is not the opinion of the majority but rather what is potentially available to everyone. The point here is the judgment of wine as appreciation, which is held to be rational, objective, and methodical. A judgment without reflection, a commonsense opinion, could also lead us toward an atmospheric way of discovering, toward a haptic way of perceiving as possessing touch. This is not what happens when one is faced with an array of glasses grasped by grim-faced tasters.)
Abandoning the judgment of wine as a fixed method—“visual, olfactory, and gustatory analysis,” the first Pavlovian reflex linked to the act of drinking—is the consistent consequence of what I have written so far. Epistenology suggests replacing judgment with exploration, understood as the global value of the experience we are living and creating. Once that value replaces thematization, exploration will replace judgment. This shift, however, is a rather difficult one: we have an inherent tendency to judge, particularly things that seem to be made to give us pleasure. An important step to reduce this fetish about the rational nature of judgment is to subtract the value from its reduction to monetary currency. In Italian, the words value and valuta (currency) have the same root (from valère, valitus, someone strong and robust, from which derives valetudo, to have value, to evaluate). The famous quality/price ratio in both eating and drinking has always triggered a feeling of tenderness in me. It is the wish to measure enjoyment and pleasure using an objective “tool” that instead reproduces the same discourses and diatribes about taste and standards as they change in relation to situations, needs, and sensibilities. Hence the quality/price ratio is a way of restating our (non)love or our (dis)affection for the experience we had with something we encountered: I would drink it again, I would do it again, or not. In the end, the quality/price ratio is much ado about nothing.
It is difficult to learn how to practice abstention from judgment. Consequently, I design tactics and traps to divert myself from specific, intentional, and focused attention, instead diffusing it throughout the environment. Initially, it is helpful to address the attention toward something other than wine and then return to it, maybe just for a moment, ensuring that the intellect avoids starting to reason in accordance with previously assimilated standards we believe we possess. Little by little, this haptic way forward embraces and amplifies, reducing rational individuality by spreading it throughout the overall experience. Another good exercise for deflating the intentional and individual self is to “identify” with wine, to feel as if we were that wine, imagining its life and the stories that led it here. This brief identification fosters a manifold compassion that in turn prevents the judgmental self from starting its dance. Earlier in my journey with wine, my epistenology technique procrastinated with a large degree of sarcasm about dismantling and crushing the methodology of judging wine, using either tasting or sensory analysis or a combination of both, like the aroma wheel, where describing and judging are one and the same. The problem with playing with taste is the illusion of objectivity and detachment it provides. In fact, we can taste, discover, and enjoy not because we are outside and detached but because we are totally inside.
Haptic perception, identification and empathy with, avoids the frame of detachment and judgment. (Beyond both Kant and the immanent and singular value of judging, beyond the proposals that overcome judgment from within traditional aesthetics, the term savoring has been proposed—epistenology tries to practice an understanding with wine without judgment for strategic reasons and after experimenting with the possibility and success of such an approach.) I suggest approaching exploration and enjoyment from a different perspective (partly inspired by Zen thought, partly by François Jullien, Tim Ingold, and Michel Serres). This thought, taken from a classic of Zen Buddhism, The Blue Cliff Record, expresses it clearly: “When the dispositions of judgment of intellectual conscience end, only then can you understand to the fullest. Thus, when you will see like in the old times, the sky is the sky. The earth is earth. Mountains are mountains. Rivers are rivers.”1 Serious philosophers might see a theoretical impossibility here, or a difficulty in thinking such a movement through to the fullest. The point, however, is not theorizing it but making it, living it, practicing it.
Do you remember? One of the main characters in the first part of this book was a technologist colleague who contributed to the thoughts felt with wine that I have elaborated over the years, and for this I thank him. Here is another short tale, a little haiku, that concerns him. During a thesis defense on wine with an ecological and epistenological approach, the examiner, my colleague, was somewhat perplexed and summarized his objections with a sentence that I found perfect: “A defect is a defect. End of story.” Dry and peremptory, a definitive and irrevocable condemnation. Indeed, so it must be because judgment has to do with acquittals and sentences. Like competence, judgment is also a legal term, from the Latin jus dicere: the judge is one who speaks on behalf of the law. Judging means according to the law, thereby applying general rules to a specific case. Norm is a term that may derive from the Greek root gn, indicating knowledge, as in gnosis and gnoma—in Italian an instrument for land surveying, a set square used to measure right angles—hence a rule. Therefore judging a wine is to put it in the dock or behind a school desk, to check if it is in accordance with the norm, with good behavior and knowing its place. Judgment here is a business for judges, for competent people and authoritative experts. If judgement requires expertise and if, as we have already clarified, being an expert does not necessarily mean being able to make experiences, then it follows that the judgment does not relate to the experiences undergone. The expert can gain experience by abandoning prior knowledge, but then he cannot judge. On the contrary, most of the time we think that gaining experience is important to the ability to judge. Does this raise a laugh? Is it paradoxical? Sophistic? Only if you wear the glasses of judgmental, analytical, and theorizing competence, which epistenology tries to uproot and displace.
Sometimes I set another exercise, called “the wine advocates,” just to tease Robert Parker and his supporters. First, people drink a wine, then the roles of defense lawyer and prosecutor are randomly selected, and, independently of what they actually thought about that wine, they need to find reasons for defending or prosecuting it. This exercise works better when somebody who hated the wine in question performs the defense, and the other way round. This performance puts professional judgment under the spotlight, as well as the strict regulations that must be followed even when what the participant feels is the opposite of what she is publicly expressing. In this way, the participants in the exercise gain an awareness that facts are made and constructed, as are judgments.
Not long ago in Rome I tasted several Champagnes. (I allow myself the affectation of Champagne, because in general I like it a lot. I confess, I am easily satisfied by Champagne, and I can rarely withstand the metaphysics of the bubbles.) It was a nice day and an interesting and well-spoken guide was presenting, but at some point I heard phrases such as “wine of the highest quality,” “exciting even though not perfect,” and “a product with an intrinsic quality.” With this setting as background, the bubbles came to mind even before I drank them, with this dance of comparative mentalities, all those adjectives thrown into the mix as if obvious, as if the words “perfect,” “intrinsic,” and even “highest” are all stable and clear expressions. Of course, these adjectives refer to norms, set squares, and standards. However, since these are not a permanent given, merely assumptions (facts are made, we already noted), we can understand the process by moving in the opposite direction. When we say that the wine we are drinking is “exciting but imperfect,” we are just expressing the shame caused by our astonishment at not having immediately acknowledged that what was previously defined as “perfect” has now changed, has transformed itself, has moved on. There is no “intrinsic quality,” especially when it comes to artifacts made to satisfy, on the one hand, the creativity of the maker—little does it matter if this is a poetic, rural, or economic satisfaction—and, on the other, the enjoyment of those who are going to taste them. A wine is not an airplane, an engine, or a bridge. Quality, goodness, and perfection are not the starting points for measuring the value of taste. On the contrary, quality, goodness, and perfection are redefined and reshaped each time anew by the experience of tasting. If we reflect on wine, thinking of it as a product or commodity, we will inevitably judge it like the bureaucrats of taste, applying protocols learned from masters who have instilled them in us as fixed and definitive truths. Instead, if we feel with wine as life and experience, it is never the case that “a defect is a defect, end of story.” I feel really sorry for my technologist colleague. What we define as a defect depends on where we place the pole-vault crossbar and on how we build the norm ex post: if you like and are taken with that wine, then there is no defect, but otherwise there is. This depends not only on your rational judging self but also on the situation you are living, the confluence of lines, the global experience: it is an ongoing and overdetermined scenario. As Miles Davis once said about improvisations and errors in music, there is no such thing as a wrong note per se because it all depends on how you resolve it with the following note. Everyone knows that wine is undoubtedly also a commodity and a product. We are playing a different game here, however, designing alternatives and telling other stories. The creativity of the haptic is a process of the ongoing adjustment of the experience of enjoyment, of exploration and comprehension that improvises strategic dispositions with the wine we drink.
It might be argued that practicing the noble art of judgment is both fun and human. One may say that without rankings we lose interest, and human beings classify to avoid boredom. This may well be true, but, to be precise, this happens here, in the West. It may not be true elsewhere. Epistenology is displaced, is elsewhere and barefaced, so it proposes a different way of feeling. You insist: What is wrong with ranking and competing? Let us think about competitions, sports, the Oscars: it is all about competition, ranking, a dizzying array and an endless fixation with listings and podiums. Authoritative judgment has the professional face of the critic, those who have secure and expert judgment, who know how to compare things. It is also said that comparisons are needed to improve ourselves—but in relation to what?
Consider conventional scholastic education based on the acquisition of facts and thoughts and on culture seen as the transmission of data instilled in students by a teacher. The rules of comparison and competition are part of this model. Some claim that competition is even good for young students as it makes them better and stronger. The aesthetic domain of judging wine perfectly imitates scholastic institutions. Assessment is based on competition and comparison in order to hand out marks and report cards. In the first part of the book I suggested contrasting this approach with a shamanic kind of aesthetics (I use the word “shamanism” strategically here, as if this were a universal category, while, of course, there are many and diverse forms of shamanism). During the exercises of epistenology, each wine is drunk alone. One glass at a time. Nothing is to be compared, because every encounter is an experience that is valid for itself, and in this way, value is detached from evaluation and currency/money. Therefore any comparison creates a juxtaposition that, once again, leads to an encounter seen as a focused and thematic relationship aimed at verifying consistencies, conformities, and differences.
Epistenology does not compare and contrast. Undoubtedly, the term comparison does not always mean a competition but rather the exhibition of cultural and stylistic differences, with neither a judgment nor a search for a unique synthesis or approval. Nevertheless, comparison fosters the rise of an area in which judgment can flourish. What we risk, and what usually happens, is the hegemony of the dominant norm, of the strongest one, which has become established because it “won”—value as the winning force.
Rather than seeing wine as a commodity and evaluating it using industrial standards, here I will be using amphorae, maceration, and subtle smells as examples since nowadays they are the key areas of analysis for particular models of wine. When, from a comparative perspective and according to the judgment of an authoritative and expert critic, a natural wine may not respect and coincide with the current canons, the poor wine loses face; it is defeated, removed, and nullified. Comparison always implies criteria, and for this reason epistenology strategically suspends them and puts the expert aside.
Because epistenology is nomadic and compassionate, an anarchic knot of lines, it means being tactful and attentive to the “lesser” norms, those below, those that have not won—on one side or the other. This is why I believe that what my Georgian friend said to the German gentleman was inappropriate, since in that situation the lesser norm was that of his skeptical and indifferent wife. It is for the very same reason that, unlike in my previous writings, here I do not include the names of wines, great and excellent wines, like many others I have loved, that have been the winners in one field or another. Here, we dedicate ourselves to the unknown ethyl alcohol, to the ordinary nameless wines, but with the same compassion and consideration. (Epistenology is not very sensitive to the laws of communication and marketing! Not only are there no rankings or ratings, there are not even the names of wines! A publisher interested only in marketing and immediate results would have explained, “This is how life works.” Take care, however, because marks for wine and their brands can go out of date very quickly, and life is not a currency.)
We replace comparison with a correspondence with wine. It is not a frontal encounter; it is a compatibility, an emotional engagement, with the flow of questions and answers, with tied and untied knots. We can neither improve nor compete in relation to a predefined norm, but, rather, we trace paths in order to evolve and enrich ourselves. Gaining experience with wine, appreciating it haptically, is different from the intellectual consciousness involved in judgment, because it is an overall experience in which wine is not an object, and it is scrutinized with intentional and specific attention. In contrast, it is a situation where wine has a role that is more or less important, depending on the occasion. Along a different path, it may also become the protagonist. Experience with wine and not of wine. Epistenology cannot judge because, otherwise, the judge (who is always involved and linked to the relationship she has to observe and describe) would also be judged. This means understanding that, when we say “this wine is the best,” “the best in its category,” “the finest of all,” we are simply congratulating ourselves because we judge ourselves capable of judging and knowing how to recognize excellence and quality. Without realizing it, we congratulate ourselves using the spectacles we have constructed for ourselves to wear in order to drink and savor wine. Therefore, can we no longer use the terms excellent, best, or worst? Of course we can. Epistenology runs through these words, revealing them as naked in their harmlessness, in their processes, and once they have been renewed, they can return to be used with a different meaning where we do not talk only about wine, but with wine.
Epistenology is committed to the suspension of judgment or, in other words, to a responsibility toward continuous exploration as a correspondence to be achieved. This responsibility is a communal construct because taste is social. Communal but without proxies, because we all contribute to this achievement, without precooked norms or identification with teachers to be imitated. Once that intellectual judgment has been debunked, imitation and identification are dissolved. Culture is always something one has to create, a process of learning, and not a container of data. Therefore taste without judgment is taste without pre-established norms. Nonetheless, it is rigorous, attentive, and precise, taking on board all the ties it can feel, taking responsibility for orientation and choice. In this sense, even though it does not judge, in this approach taste always tries to be just (ius, from the Latin root ju: to tie, what keeps tied). Taste is the glue, but it relates to justice and not to law.
What about the culture of wine? What about the cultivation of knowledge about making, names, places, time, and the land? I am not against culture; rather, I would try to foster it through beautiful images. I would like to repeat: good culture is always in the future participle, and it is never sclerotic, or other than what it is in itself. It takes care of what lives outside itself while being part of it, like the ignorance on which culture depends, like the lesser and the defeated, who neither emerge nor speak. If culture is aware of this, including the understanding that the experience of drinking cannot be reduced to itself and must be just one element among many others, then hooray for the culture of wine.