Wine
'Taking an interest in wine allowed me to have an interest outside the game,' Alex Ferguson explains 'You have to have outside interests to distract you away from the intensity and the pressure you come under as a football manager.'
Snobbery, subjectivity and expertise
Review of books by Steven Spurrier, Oz Clarke and Kevin Begos TLS (2018). The 'Judgement of Paris' was the 1976 tasting when Californian wines beat classic French wines in a blind tasting (with mostly French expert judges). What does this show about how quality and reputation are related? Non-paywalled version here.
What is Champagne and why does it cost so much?
Review of The Story of Champagne, by Nicholas Faith TLS (2016)
What is champagne, what is so special about it? I don't quite answer these questions as fully as they should be answered, but it's a start.
Natural wine, orange wine, biodynamic wine etc.
Review of some books on wine by Clark Smith, Jamie Goode and Charles Frankel TLS (2014)
How natural is wine? How much do winemakers intervene? I review the second edition of Jamie Goode's Wine Science, Charles Frankel's Land and Wine, and Clark Smith's Postmodern Winemaking.
What are wine books for?
Review of some books on wine by Jay McInerney and others TLS (2012)
What's the point in books full of tasting notes, for wines which most of us will never be able to find or afford? Nothing to do with philosophy this one, unless the taxonomy of kinds of wine book counts as philosophy.
Scruton on wine
Review of Roger Scruton, I Drink Therefore I am (2011)
Roger Scruton's lovely book is part philosophy, part autobiography, and part wine-nerdery. The chapter on the wine regions of France is particularly recommended.
Is wine art?
Wine as an Aesthetic Object (2007)
This is my contribution to Barry C. Smith’s wonderful collection Questions of Taste (2007). The book arose out of a one-day conference he and I organised at the Institute of Philosophy in London in 2004. The essays by Roger Scruton, Kent Bach and Barry himself were presented at the conference. But the book also contains a wide range of essays by other excellent writers, including Jamie Goode (the wine anorak). The book also has a foreword by Jancis Robinson, one of the world’s leading wine writers, who studied philosophy and maths at Oxford. In my essay I claim that it is wrong to say that a great wine is a work of art; though it is, in an obvious sense, an aesthetic object.
Does it matter that wine gets you drunk?
Excess (2004)
I wrote this for the luxurious journal The World of Fine Wine. My question was: what is the connection between being interested in wine and getting inebriated? Someone who read the enormous wine literature might be forgiven for thinking that there was no connection at all. But would we be so interested in wine if it tasted exactly the same and yet did not intoxicate? I doubt it. Even excess, I claim, can be an integral part of the whole business -- though only in moderation. This essay owes a lot to Mike Ratledge.
Can there be a philosophy of wine?
Philosophy and Wine (2003)
This was published in Harpers magazine (the wine and spirit trade magazine, not the wordy and worthy American monthly). Wine is a good example to illustrate the problem of how to relate the scientific description of the world to its phenomenological description. Thanks to Tim Atkin for the encouragement to ramble on in this way. This is the only one of my articles which has been illustrated by Ralph Steadman. For more on this subject, see the writings of Barry C. Smith.
Review of books by Steven Spurrier, Oz Clarke and Kevin Begos TLS (2018). The 'Judgement of Paris' was the 1976 tasting when Californian wines beat classic French wines in a blind tasting (with mostly French expert judges). What does this show about how quality and reputation are related? Non-paywalled version here.
What is Champagne and why does it cost so much?
Review of The Story of Champagne, by Nicholas Faith TLS (2016)
What is champagne, what is so special about it? I don't quite answer these questions as fully as they should be answered, but it's a start.
Natural wine, orange wine, biodynamic wine etc.
Review of some books on wine by Clark Smith, Jamie Goode and Charles Frankel TLS (2014)
How natural is wine? How much do winemakers intervene? I review the second edition of Jamie Goode's Wine Science, Charles Frankel's Land and Wine, and Clark Smith's Postmodern Winemaking.
What are wine books for?
Review of some books on wine by Jay McInerney and others TLS (2012)
What's the point in books full of tasting notes, for wines which most of us will never be able to find or afford? Nothing to do with philosophy this one, unless the taxonomy of kinds of wine book counts as philosophy.
Scruton on wine
Review of Roger Scruton, I Drink Therefore I am (2011)
Roger Scruton's lovely book is part philosophy, part autobiography, and part wine-nerdery. The chapter on the wine regions of France is particularly recommended.
Is wine art?
Wine as an Aesthetic Object (2007)
This is my contribution to Barry C. Smith’s wonderful collection Questions of Taste (2007). The book arose out of a one-day conference he and I organised at the Institute of Philosophy in London in 2004. The essays by Roger Scruton, Kent Bach and Barry himself were presented at the conference. But the book also contains a wide range of essays by other excellent writers, including Jamie Goode (the wine anorak). The book also has a foreword by Jancis Robinson, one of the world’s leading wine writers, who studied philosophy and maths at Oxford. In my essay I claim that it is wrong to say that a great wine is a work of art; though it is, in an obvious sense, an aesthetic object.
Does it matter that wine gets you drunk?
Excess (2004)
I wrote this for the luxurious journal The World of Fine Wine. My question was: what is the connection between being interested in wine and getting inebriated? Someone who read the enormous wine literature might be forgiven for thinking that there was no connection at all. But would we be so interested in wine if it tasted exactly the same and yet did not intoxicate? I doubt it. Even excess, I claim, can be an integral part of the whole business -- though only in moderation. This essay owes a lot to Mike Ratledge.
Can there be a philosophy of wine?
Philosophy and Wine (2003)
This was published in Harpers magazine (the wine and spirit trade magazine, not the wordy and worthy American monthly). Wine is a good example to illustrate the problem of how to relate the scientific description of the world to its phenomenological description. Thanks to Tim Atkin for the encouragement to ramble on in this way. This is the only one of my articles which has been illustrated by Ralph Steadman. For more on this subject, see the writings of Barry C. Smith.