Dwight Furrow is Professor of Philosophy at San Diego Mesa College in San Diego, California. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from University of California, Riverside in 1993 and specializes in the philosophy of food and wine, aesthetics, and ethics. Professor Furrow is the publisher and author of Edible Arts, a blog devoted to food and wine aesthetics. He is also the author of Ethics: Key Concepts in Philosophy, Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America, Against Theory: Continental and Analytic Challenges in Moral Philosophy and many professional journal articles, op-ed pieces, and magazine articles on issues in ethics and political philosophy. He can be reached through the Edible Arts blog. Email: dwightfurrow [at] gmail [dot] com
by Dwight Furrow The wine world is an interesting amalgam of stability and variation. As I noted last month, agency in the wine community is dispersed with many independent actors having some influence on wine quality. This dispersed community is held together by conventions and traditions that foster the reproduction of wine styles and maintain…
by Dwight Furrow Discussions of the factors that go into wine production tend to circulate around two poles. In recent years, the focus has been on grapes and their growing conditions—weather, climate, and soil—as the main inputs to wine quality. The reigning ideology of artisanal wine production has winemakers copping to only a modest role…
by Dwight Furrow From its origins in Eurasia some 8,000 years ago, wine has spread to become a staple at dinner tables throughout the world. Yet wine is more than just a beverage. People devote a lifetime to its study, spend fortunes tracking down rare bottles, and give up respectable, lucrative careers to spend their…
by Dwight Furrow Traditional aesthetics at least since Kant has been focused on the form of a work of art. It’s the design and composition of a work that strikes us beautiful. In a genuine aesthetic judgment, according to this view, we do not enjoy Van Gogh’s Starry Night because it contains our favorite color…
by Dwight Furrow Although wine writing takes diverse forms, wine evaluation is a persistent theme of much wine writing. When particular wines, wineries or vintages are under discussion, at some point the writer will typically turn to assessing wine quality. The major publications devoted to wine include tasting notes that not only describe a wine…
by Dwight Furrow Although frequently lampooned as over-the-top, there is a history of describing wines as if they expressed personality traits or emotions, despite the fact that wine is not a psychological agent and could not literally have these characteristics—wines are described as aggressive, sensual, fierce, languorous, angry, dignified, brooding, joyful, bombastic, tense or calm,…
by Dwight Furrow That music and emotion are somehow linked is one of the more widely accepted assumptions shared by philosophical aesthetics as well as the general public. It is also one of the most persistent problems in aesthetics to show how music and emotion are related. Where precisely are these emotions that are allegedly…
by Dwight Furrow Beauty has long been understood as the highest form of aesthetic praise sharing space with goodness, truth, and justice as a source of ultimate value. But in recent decades, despite calls for its revival, beauty has been treated as the ugly stepchild banished by an art world seeking forms of expression that…
by Dwight Furrow If by “objectivity” we mean “wholly lacking personal biases”, in wine tasting, this idea can be ruled out. There are too many individual differences among wine tasters, regardless of how much expertise they have acquired, to aspire to this kind of objectivity. But traditional aesthetics has employed a related concept which does…
by Dwight Furrow Unlike ice cream, orange juice, and most other things that taste good, wine is peculiar in that it is an object of devotion. Many people abandon lucrative, stable careers for the uncertainties and struggles of winemaking; others spend a lifetime of hard intellectual labor to understand its intricacies; still others circle the…
by Dwight Furrow It is natural to invoke beauty as the aesthetic ideal that winemakers strive to achieve and wine lovers seek to discover. Throughout much of the history of aesthetics beauty has named the highest form of aesthetic order. As Elaine Scarry writes, beauty is: Sacred, lifesaving, having as precedent only those things which…
by Dwight Furrow The explosion of interest in the aesthetics of food and beverages over the past several decades inevitably raises the question whether certain culinary preparations or wines can be considered works of art. I have argued elsewhere that indeed food and wine can be works of art. But within the wine and food…
by Dwight Furrow If you are one of the billions of people on this planet who avoid the wine press you might never have heard of "natural wines". Yet, they are the source of great controversy in the wine world, dividing brother from brother and tearing at the delicate fabric of overwrought sensibilities. It's not…
by Dwight Furrow The claim that wine is a living organism is something I hear often from people in the wine world impressed with the capacity of wine to evolve. Writer and sommelier Courtney Cochran writes: Wine, with its clear ties to the lifecycle of plants, its ability to evolve and change (to grow) and…
by Dwight Furrow Contemporary discussions of wine quality tend to oscillate unhelpfully between subjectivism and objectivism. One side argues that wine quality is thoroughly subjective because individual differences among tasters preclude agreement on the nature or quality of what is being tasted. The other side points to objective, scientific analyses of chemical components detected through…
by Dwight Furrow Perhaps the most important development in cuisine over the last 20 years has been the emergence of what has come to be known as modernist cuisine. Originally referred to as "molecular gastronomy", it is a form of cooking that uses materials and techniques first employed in the food industry to create new…
by Dwight Furrow When I first encountered the claim that our perception of wine was influenced by the music we listen to while imbibing, I was skeptical. It would seem to have all the hallmarks of a magic trick–barriers to accurate perception due to the vagueness of wines' properties and subject to the power of…
by Dwight Furrow Wine language often suggests that wines express emotion or exhibit personality characteristics despite the fact that wine is not a psychological agent and could not literally possess these characteristics. There is a history, although somewhat in recession today, to refer to wines as aggressive, sensual, fierce, grand, angry, dignified, brooding, joyful, bombastic,…
by Dwight Furrow Can we make sense of the idea that wines express emotion? No doubt wine can trigger feelings. Notoriously, at a party, wine triggers feelings of conviviality via the effects of alcohol. But the wine isn't expressing anything in that case. It's the people via their mannerisms and interaction encouraged by the wine…
by Dwight Furrow The wine world is never short on controversy. Among the most persistent are worries about how wine quality is assessed. Are scores the best way of assessing quality? Why do I disagree with wine critics so much? Why do price and quality often seem unrelated? Are cult wines worth their cost? And…