by Dwight Furrow
If there is one commonly held “truth” that governs conventional wisdom about wine tasting, it is that wine tasting is thoroughly subjective. We all have different preferences, unique wine tasting histories, and different sensory thresholds for detecting aromatic compounds. One person’s scintillating Burgundian Pinot Noir is another person’s thin, weedy plonk. But this “truth” is at best an oversimplification; like a very good Pinot Noir, matters are more complex.
Wine tasting occupies a curious, liminal space in the architecture of human experience. It is sensual yet intellectual, visceral yet highly codified, personal yet somewhat anxiously public. It is therefore persistently haunted by the question of whether it can legitimately aspire to objectivity or is it hopelessly mired in personal preference and cultural contingency.
Most discussions of this topic settle into the familiar but facile polarity between the subjectivists, who proclaim that all tasting is little more than the projection of our private whims onto liquid canvases, and the objectivists, who dream of a science of wine, a rigorous catalog of chemical facts from which flavor profiles might be derived like astronomical coordinates. Both camps miss what makes wine worth talking about in the first place: the irreducible relational character of taste.
The notion of objectivity, as it was forged in the smithy of modern science, is a curious thing. It assumes the world is composed only of discrete entities endowed with properties that exist independently of how they are observed. This account of objectivity works reasonably well when applied to the movement of planets or an analysis of the chemical constituents of wine but falters with phenomena whose existence depends on being perceived. The taste or smell of a wine is not given in isolation but unfolds as an interplay between the liquid, our sensory mechanisms, and the mind.
When we taste wine, we don’t taste attributes that are patiently waiting to be discovered. We participate in a process in which a wine’s latent capacities are coaxed into sensory actualizations. To capture this process, we need an ontology not of discrete entities but of dispositions that exist in the wine, in the taster, and within the environment in which tasting takes place.
A disposition is a capacity or tendency for something to behave in a certain way under specific conditions. Dispositions are unlike categorical properties, which describe what something is like independently of any conditions. Unlike static entities, dispositions exist in a state of readiness, awaiting the right conditions for them to be revealed. A glass is fragile even as it sits safely on the table. A good Pinot Noir is aromatic even as it rests in the unopened bottle. Acidity is not simply a measurement of ph; it’s a latent tendency to soften or sharpen depending on such factors as temperature, aeration, or the molecular interplay with the taster’s saliva. Tannins in a wine can be objectively measured. But that is only one dimension of them. They are relational potentials that can be described as astringent only when proteins and polyphenols interact in the mouth. A dispositional ontology grants that wine has real objective properties but also asserts that among those real properties are relational, dispositional properties that are actualized only when particular environmental, physiological, and cultural conditions converge.
A wine’s aromas exist, to be sure, but their perceptibility depends on volatilization, on air and warmth unlocking the dormant esters and thiols that lie curled within the liquid. What we call a wine’s “bouquet” is less a thing than an event, a fleeting manifestation of underlying chemical potentials that unfold as air, warmth, and olfactory receptivity interact.
The subjectivist error is to collapse this relational unfolding into pure projection, imagining the taster as the sovereign author of all sensory meaning, conjuring flavor from the depths of personal fancy. But this ignores the stubborn fact that certain wines—regardless of who tastes them—display a remarkable consistency of character across contexts. The peppery bite of a northern Rhône Syrah, the flinty austerity of a Chablis, the volatile florality of a Muscat—these are not hallucinations but recurring actualizations of dispositional tendencies, tendencies that emerge whenever particular thresholds are crossed and the right senses engaged.
Of course, no two tasters ever summon precisely the same set of potentialities from a given glass. Palates differ, shaped by physiology, experience, cultural repertoire, and even mood. But this does not mean that every tasting is radically incommensurable with every other. Tasters engage with a field of dispositional properties—a structured domain of potentials that can be actualized in multiple ways, none of which exhaust the wine’s total potential, but all of which remain anchored in the wine’s real tendencies. This is why two skilled tasters can disagree without contradiction—one emphasizing a wine’s acidity, the other its fruit—because each is attending to different aspects of the same dispositional field.
This structured field explains the remarkable, if imperfect, intersubjective agreement that emerges among experienced tasters. Wine critics and other professionals whose job requires skilled tasting, reliably converge on judgments about balance, intensity, complexity and ageworthiness despite their different preferences and the fact they may use different vocabularies to express what they sense. Their training gives them an understanding of a wine’s dispositional properties and the range of potential expressions a wine is capable of, teasing out latent capacities that the casual drinker may not notice. This doesn’t make a critic an infallible oracle. She is just a practiced interpreter attuned to the many dimensions a wine exhibits as it unfolds in the tasting experience.
The reliability of wine criticism then does not rest on a fantasy of absolute objectivity. It rests on the expertise that comes from the accumulation of varied experiences engaging with wines’ dispositional properties, sometimes under optimal conditions, sometimes under sub-optimal conditions, but in either case recognizing patterns that recur across bottles, vintages, and styles. This is why wine professionals often taste blind, blocked from knowing facts about a wine that might influence their judgment. In addition, they often engage in comparative tasting that makes differences more apparent. The point is not to erase subjectivity but to shape personal perception into a shared language that elevates their judgment beyond a mere report of their private experience.
Mistakes, of course, are always possible. A corked bottle occludes more than aromas; it blocks access to the wine’s dispositional field, leaving only the sour trace of microbial betrayal. Temperature shocks and faulty glassware create sensory mirages, leading the taster down blind alleys. Even experienced tasters can be seduced by attractive labels, the price, or the prestige of a wine. Neither training nor experience can make one immune from ordinary human biases. But these errors don’t demonstrate the futility of attempts at objective evaluation. They show that the manifestation conditions for perceptual judgments are fragile. Their accuracy depends on vigilant monitoring for potential biases along with the careful alignment of external conditions, sensory acuity, and interpretive skill.
Indeed, some of the most common errors in wine tasting stem from impatience—from the belief that a wine’s essence can be grasped in a single sip. Many great wines, especially those structured for long aging, resist immediate comprehension. Their dispositional properties unfurl gradually, demanding aeration, temperature adjustment, and above all time. Hasty judgments confuse nascent potential for a fixed reality. Accurate tasting requires that we attune our perceptions to change, that we dwell in the contingent unfolding of a wine’s nature rather than leap at premature certainty.
In summary, wine tasting is not a simple, passive perception of fixed features of a wine. It is instead a dynamic process of relational co-creation. The taster does not passively receive sensory data but actively participates in actualizing latent properties and interpreting their significance. Because of biological, cultural, and historical differences, tasters may disagree about what they’re tasting but in the absence of mistakes or biases noted above they are tasting what the wine makes available to them. And that capacity is as much a part of the wine as the chemical constituents that underlie it.
Objectivity does not denote a detached vantage point above experience; it names the shared structure of the dispositional field itself, the stable framework of potentials that makes meaningful communication possible. Wine, then, is neither a blank screen for subjective projection nor a fixed object awaiting objective discovery. It is a dynamic web of potentialities, a liquid matrix whose character emerges only in the interplay between chemical structure, environmental condition, sensory apparatus, and cultural memory. To taste wine is to enter this matrix, to move through its layered potentials, to bring its latent properties into fleeting presence. The most reliable tasters are those whose movements through this field have become habitual, whose sensory maps have been shaped by long acquaintance with the terrain.
If there is a practical, take-away point from this revised ontology it is that, except for quite specific professional circumstances such as winemakers identifying faults, wine tasting is more about exploration than accuracy. Because a wine is not a fixed bearer of determinant properties but a field of dispositions that can be accessed from various points of view, the point of attentive tasting is to uncover as much of that field as possible. Paying attention to what others taste in a wine is as important as nailing down your own description since they may be uncovering a different aspect of that dispositional field.
In the end, the objectivity of wine tasting is relational, emergent, and provisional—grounded not in the elimination of subjectivity but in the cultivation of a shared practice, a collective attunement to the ways in which wine’s dispositional properties unfold across palates, contexts, and time. This is what makes wine more than a drink and tasting more than a hobby. It is an ongoing philosophical exercise, a sensory apprenticeship to relational being itself.