Snobbery & The Philosophy of Taste
Snobbery & The Philosophy of Taste
No Brillat-Savarins were consulted or harmed in the making of this polemic
It is a dangerous and serious presumption and argues an absurd temerity, to condemn what we do not understand.
Michel de Montaigne - Essais 1850
There are moments in our life when we accord a kind of love and touching respect to nature in plants, minerals, the countryside, as well as the human nature in children, in the customs of country folk and the primitive world, not because it is beneficial for our senses, and not because it satisfies our understanding of taste either, but simply because it is nature.
Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller - On Naive and Sentimental Poetry
Vilia miretur vulgus; mihi flavus Apollo Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua.
Let the base taste vulgar trash; to me golden-haired Apollo shall serve goblets filled from the Castalian spring.
(Amores - Ovid)
To have knowledge is a fine thing: to flaunt it, is vulgar. As Madame Leroi said: “L’amor? Je le fais souvent, mais je n’en parle jamais”. The true love of food and wine comes not from the casual discernment of the epicene gourmet nor the Rabelaisian excesses of the gourmand; it stems from the impulse of generosity. In John Lanchester’s brilliant novel The Debt To Pleasure, Tarquin Winot, the poisonous voluptuary and anti-hero, loves food and wine with an intellectual passion not reserved for his fellow man. Food, wine, art (and murder) share the same aesthetic in his universe of extraordinary order. He quotes Brillat-Savarin’s dictum that “Gourmandism is an act of judgement, by which we give preference to those things which are agreeable to our taste over those which are not”. Tarquin develops this duality further: “To like something is to want to ingest it, and, in that sense, is to submit to the world; to like something is to submit, in a small but contentful way, to death. But dislike hardens the perimeter between the self and the world, and brings clarity to the object isolated in its light. Any dislike is in some measure of triumph of definition, distinction and discrimination - a triumph of life”.
This is the essence of extreme snobbery - obviously! The professed love of something warped into a miserly elitism, the assumption that just being surrounded by objets d’art allows one to pass distasteful judgement on all aspects of life. Des Esseintes in J-K Huymans “Against Nature” is another extreme example of wilful withdrawal, desensitising himself through sensual immersion in sickly luxury. The snob thinks nature is a mere extension of his pleasures; he interposes his own framework of values on all around him.
The worrying thing is that if you elevate wine to the status of fine art, you implicitly encourage the artist to interfere too much in the process, to over-refine the product to appeal to aesthetic values. As Patrick Matthews articulates in Real Wine: “Terroir responds to other external realities: a vineyard, a climate, a region, a growing season. Such an approach also introduces a moral dimension - a sense that the means are as important as the result, and that the wine should be a true and transparent record of what went into it”. As with painting and music there are virtuous structures, but those structures must never overwhelm the essence of the work, whatever it may be. When Chagall talks about the purity that art aspires to, he is also pointing out that it is the artist must be humble in the face of nature.
When I am finishing a picture I hold up some God-made object - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree, my hand - as a kind of final test. If a painting stands up beside a thing, man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there is a clash between the two it is bad art.
Toujours Perdrix
With wine, snobbery and inverse snobbery clash like ignorant armies. Ranged on one side is a mindset nostalgically locked into 1855 classification mode which exalts the heritage of the wine above its innate quality. The modern equivalent would be taking as gospel Parker points (the commandments between 50 and 100!) and valuing wines accordingly. This validates our need for hierarchies. On the other hand there is the advocate who would populate a cellar with cheap Aussie fizz and Romanian Pinot Noir to prove a spurious point that the traditionalists are resting on their laurels. Of course, there is a degree of posturing on both sides: the Parker aficionado needs wines for everyday drinking and the new wave advocate occasionally wants to be reminded what great wine tastes like.
Taste is a more natural phenomenon than either of these opposed snobberies suggest. Exposure to great food and wine without reference to the quotidian may corrupt the palate and the soul. To me good taste is often the sheer genius of taking pains as well as a certain humility; in cooking it is sourcing the good ingredients; it is preparing them with love and attention; and it is in the meal, an occasion invoking hospitality, celebration, festival, family. It also goes above that. John Baptist in Little Dorrit who just has his stale loaf of bread in prison, yet he could cut it in different ways to taste like a melon or an omelette or a Lyons sausage. One’s imagination renders life empty or crowded, mundane or magical. As Kant says: “Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination”. No story illustrates this more aptly than Babette’s Feast wherein the glorious spread of food and wine becomes a regenerative catalyst to the community and, for, a brief moment, the men and women live beyond themselves (for they are so repressed they have never experienced real pleasure without guilt).
Elegentiae arbiter
Bad taste, if we may term it thus, may be due to a lack of a strong cultural identity. If we had a culture where we felt comfortable with food and enjoyed it, then making quality distinctions wouldn’t be regarded as patronising. In this country there is a demographic divide in our eating and drinking habits between an urban, cosmopolitan class who are receptive to new ideas, can afford to buy specialist foods and eat out frequently, and the culturally conservative who either don’t care or can’t afford to buy nice food. There is a considerable difference in saying, however, that a person’s palate is coarse and that it is inexperienced; there is always room for improvement. Your appreciation of what constitutes good taste is primarily the product of your upbringing and environment. Tarquin’s pathological snobbery arises from a reaction to a childhood encounter with shepherd’s pie and brown Windsor soup in a boarding school; thereupon he reacts by becoming manic obsessive about food as well as becoming a fastidious Francophile and a misanthropic everything else. (They order these things etc. etc.) The exposure to fine things gives us a taste for them, but also makes us conservative in a negative sense. Eating and drinking what you feel comfortable with is reasonable enough; on the other hand you should not exclude yourself from new sensations. However, as we become socially mobile, we travel a lot more, and because we are not protecting an indigenous wine culture (and only a minor food culture) we feel free to experiment. Tastes do develop. How many people after all could claim that they truly loved their first taste of wine? And yet when one goes abroad deeply average things can taste like elixir of the gods, because you are giving your critical faculties a rest. Context is everything.
We live in a culture of paradoxes. We don’t have an academy to defend tradition in language and the English language is vulgar and thoroughly vibrant, borrowing easily from other cultures. We don’t have the tradition of gastronomy, yet there is great exchange of ideas between chefs. We do have a tradition of trading wine, appreciating it and writing about it and yet until recently it has been a drink confined to a relatively narrow class of people.
Snobbery and The Collector
The collector of John Fowles’s eponymous novel imprisons a beautiful young art student, Miranda (much as Prospero isolated his daughter, Miranda) in a cellar away from prying eyes. His pleasure, such as it is, lies not in hoping to gain her love; it is the pleasure of absolute ownership, the butterfly broken on the wheel and then pinned on the wall. Thus the idea of ownership involves sabotaging the freedom of others. The miserly collector of wine would reason: “It is not enough that I have the most beautiful wine; it is imperative that others do not succeed in drinking it”.
Wine does appeal to the collector within us be it the private investor, the City institutions or the dedicated amateur. There is enormous pleasure in the patient quest for bottles that you love and intend to drink on a special occasion. And spending a lot of money on wine is perfectly healthy hobby to have as long as drinking them is the end. Equally there is something onanistic about the impulse to scoop up big parcels of fine wine, stick them in a warehouse and to boast that you own five dozen of whatever fancy claret it may be even though you have no intention of drinking them. Ergo bibamus.
Snobbery and Men
The earlier stages of the dinner had worn off. The wine lists had been consulted, by some with the blank embarrassment of a schoolboy suddenly called upon to locate a Minor Prophet in the tangled hinterland of the Old Testament, by others with the severe scrutiny which suggests that they have visited most of the higher-priced wines in their own homes and probed their family weaknesses. The diners who chose their wine in the latter fashion always gave their orders in a penetrating voice, with a plentiful garnishing of stage directions. By insisting on having your bottle pointing to the north when the cork is drawn, and calling the waiter Max, you may induce the impression on your guests which hours of laboured boasting might be powerless to achieve. For this purpose, however, the guests must be chosen as carefully as the wine.
The Chaplet - Saki (H.H. Munro)
Male wine snobbery may easily be caricatured by the image of public school trust fund flophead selling to his chums. Although, as in many caricatures, there is a morsel of truth, this is only part of the story. Men feel the need to hold a position and defend it fiercely, to roar their opinions like lions and impress others by flaunting their knowledge, real or assumed. As a former sommelier I’e seen the male peacock fanning his plumage, by claiming intimate acquaintance with wines which were obviously strangers. And, of course, in restaurants, the wine list is still invariably given to the man. As a seller of wine I’e been on the sharp end of the quills of the fretful male porpentine protective of its domain when I’ve ventured to suggest that there were other equally valid responses to a particular wine. I’ve been told that wines would be better if they had less alcohol or more acidity or any number of different characteristics which would be fair comment if the wines were not true to what they were. Playing the god-sommelier is the snob power-kick; that one can assert blithely that all wines are to be measured by one man’s opinion of greatness. I say to all of them: “Forget your preconceptions, open your mind and you might possibly learn something”.
Yet the most dynamic figures in the wine trade at the moment are generally women; not only because they have had to work especially hard to get where they are, but they are not generally taken in by hype, flummery, the perpetual blandishments; they are not part of the freemasonry and traditionalism attached to the wine trade.
Most people now employed within the wine trade whether they work for retailers, in shops, in restaurants or in the media are actively engaged in the process of demystifying wine in order to allow the public to make a more informed choice. Snobbery is the relict of tradition, where power is vested in the supercilious sommelier, where pretentious language is used to obfuscate and intimidate, where the financial imperative precedes the qualitative judgement. I was in a restaurant the other day when I overheard two people talking about the bottle of wine. “It’s a Syrah. It’s okay, you know. Do you realise that’s the same grape as Shiraz?” We are so worried about validating our choices that we seek the comfort zones of good or bad; we must like this or must like that. If we accept what we drink for what it is, then we will not fall into the snob trap; for we will suspend judgement, shed our preconceptions and taste fully with our senses.
Ultimately, taste is intuitive, natural, and empathetic; snobbery is misanthropic, over-evaluative, affected. The love of anything can bring out the best and the worst in a human being. Wine, being the product of nature, should evoke happiness, laughter and good will towards other people, not drive us to distance ourselves from them because we think we understand and appreciate it more. The fact that your palate or your sense of smell is refined is irrelevant: the examples of Hannibal Lector, the Marquis de Sade, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille and our friend Tarquin Winot illustrate that those who possess gilded taste buds are themselves possessed by contempt for others. Taste, good taste, holds a mirror to your soul, and, as such, has a moral component.
Don’t look at me: I am not a snob nor a hypocrite - I am merely a Pecksniff