Tim James: Understanding wine starts with pleasure but what comes next?

Once it’s been successfully nabbed, a good quotation should not be allowed to get away too quickly. I had three of them in my last column for World of Fine Wine, and decided to keep one of them at work a little longer for Winemag. That column was, in my usual rambling way, wondering about how much technical etc detail is useful to know if one wants to “understand” something like wine (or music, which I used as an analogy), and, relatedly, what it means to  really “get” a feeling for the subject. My concluding quote came from the great British poet Philip Larkin, who was also a notable jazz critic. It’s worth sharing more widely. He said:

“[A] critic is only as good as his ear. His ear will tell him instantly whether a piece of music is vital, musical, exciting, or cerebral, mock-academic, dead, long before he can read Don DeMichael on the subject, or learn that it is written in inverted nineteenths, or in the Stygian mode, or recorded at the NAACP Festival at Little Rock. He must hold on to the principle that the only reason for praising a work is that it pleases, and the way to develop his critical sense is to be more acutely aware of whether he is being pleased or not.”

The quotation specifically speaks of critics, but I think it is relevant for all of us who (1) love drinking wine; (2) want to be able to express in words a response to it (i.e. share with someone); and (3) find it useful to know some stuff about it. It can’t fully answer my question(s), of course, but I find it pregnant with significance that I think can be applied to wine, especially because it prioritises pleasure. 

I’ll return to the pleasure idea, but the first sentence about having a good “ear” conjures up difficulty. It clearly is much the same thing as what I mean when I speak of “really getting” a subject. The great question is, of course, is a good “ear” something you can acquire through hard work, or is it an innate gift and you have to be one of the elect to have it?

I used music as an analogy when I was first tinkering around with the idea of effort and knowledge about something in relation to enjoying that something. That was because music (mostly “classical” music) is something that I greatly enjoy, that I have learnt not much about in the technical sense, and for which I know I don’t have a good “ear” as Larkin puts it. I’m basically unmusical, to my great regret. I do think, on the other hand, that now I have an essential, quasi-instinctual, feeling for wine – and I have known professional, highly competent wine people who, in my opinion, do not fundamentally “get” wine. It’s hard to explain briefly, or even at length, but I will trust that you see more or less what I mean. (And I apologise if this piece is getting too confessional in tone!)

Not being tone-deaf, I daresay I could have learnt quite a lot about music if I’d made a serious effort to do so (that learning not coming easily to me), but I can’t believe that I have the basic aptitude that would have given me the good ear that Larkin describes. As to wine, I am sure I’m not greatly gifted naturally. I don’t have the subtle discrimination of smell and taste or the wine-memory that I observe in some people – though, again, I’m not convinced that all those people actually have a deep understanding of what wine is really all about (“really all about”? Huh? More vagueness there, I fear). So that I think that my own understanding is not innate, but developed over time on the basis of some capacity – but  partly through simple repetitive experience, partly through some learning of facts, and substantially through a lucky exposure I had in my formative wine-years to two people who really understood wine, I think, and that rubbed off on me.

So, I am with Larkin in his reference to the need of the “critic” to “develop his critical sense” (though the basis on which it is developed might be differently constituted for different people). But getting to another point: Larkin talks of praising a work ONLY because it pleases (and presumably dispraising because the work does not please, and all the gradations in between). That is arguably, though, a bit elusive because in both wine and music pleasure can come from different things, some of which surely depend on understanding, on knowing stuff.

Nonetheless, he is surely wonderfully right in suggesting that developing a better critical sense comes though the critic (the serious winelover) learning “to be more acutely aware of whether he is being pleased or not”. It can seem such an obvious point, but it isn’t. Firstly because there are probably different sorts of pleasure and we need to cultivate them. And the pleasure that Larkin refers to is surely not an immediate, simple thing. We need to properly understand our pleasure – our preferences and tastes (and to justify them); we need to know how to measure them, and to allow – surely – for new iterations and versions of them. We must work at understanding our pleasure, as well as how to extend it on the valid basis we learn – and continue to learn – to develop.

• Tim James is one of South Africa’s leading wine commentators, contributing to various local and international wine publications. His book Wines of South Africa – Tradition and Revolution appeared in 2013.