A lawyer at a dinner I attended a month ago asked me how a bottle of wine could be worth $20,000. The answer I provided was not factual, since I am not aware of any befitting scientific light, but imaginative. It’s what I believe, not what I know for a fact.
When experts agree for a long time on some aesthetic value, I take this as being meaningful. But most of the experts become experts only after a true aesthete groks a priori value and publishes his or her notes. These quasi experts then get the quality fuzzily, at least, separating them from most people who don’t get much of any idea about magnificence, even after they are clued in.
For example, while Vincent Van Gogh was alive, only his brother Theo thought he could paint. Vincent could hardly sell a painting to pay for a meal. Today Van Gogh is arguably the most famous artist of all time, with his work commanding nine figures. How could he paint all those pictures without anybody at the time recognizing that they were any good?
Well, first one art critic recognized the meaning, and he (at that time they were mostly men) influenced lesser, quasi critics to consider the quality, which they were able to do thus tutored, and so on. I think the same process happens with wine. Most people tasting a great Bordeaux blind don’t like it at all. Robert Parker was the key critic of this genre beginning the cascade of appreciation among the masses.
A famous wine connoisseur was reported to have been reduced to tears after tasting a 1947 Cheval Blanc. I would argue that the man was a true aesthete. But what was the quality in the wine that so affected him? I believe it is not so much a quality, or qualities, in the wine itself but how the characteristics of the wine related to various parts of the connoisseur’s brain.
Our body receives signals and meaning in many brain – and body – parts, of which our conscious left cerebral cortex is unaware. For example, the limbic amygdala and hippocampus are involved in emotion and tied in to other body signals. You can tell a bloke mendaciously that his heart is wired to a sounding device, which he can hear, and then show him a picture of an unattractive woman while speeding up the phony heart beat, and he will think the woman is hot. Even our mid-gut ganglia receive and process information. The brain is a patchwork of add-ons in the process of evolution, not a product of intelligent design. For example, our midbrain, which we used more when we were amphibians, before we got our cortex, received signals from our eyes. A frog would see an insect and its midbrain would direct its tongue toward it. Today, our cortex takes over the function of working with the eyes, but our midbrain, unbeknownst to our thinking cortex, is still attached faintly, too. When a blind man, by virtue of a damaged cortex, is instructed to point to a stuffed animal in the room, he will tell you he can’t because he is blind. When the experimenter directs him to guess and point, some blind people can point to the object 99% of the time, without knowing that they can see.
Of course I don’t know how all these connections work, but I believe that masterpieces, whether of art, women, or wine, resonate in reaches of the mind and body other than just the cerebral cortex, and by association, maybe with some vaguely remembered primordial serenity, or something, the object has meaning – sometimes great meaning.
My wife, Lynn, and I took a six-week break from Brodeaux while traveling for pleasure. We dined wonderfully, but instead of drinking Bordeaux, which we do almost exclusively, we ordered Pinot Noir, Tempranillo, California Cab and even Merlot with our food. Lynn thought that Stags Leap Cab tasted better than a lot of the Bordeaux we drink. But we were aware that none of these wines resonated very deeply in our beings. They just tasted good – sometimes very good.
Returning to our Albany, NY area home, we relaxed last night in shorts and T-shirts on the back deck – the weather has been Florida-like – and drank a bottle of Bordeaux. Because it was Thursday night, our night of the week to cull out the cellar, and drink our worst bottle, I selected a 2001 Chateau Dufort Vivens. Parker had dissed it as disappointing with a tepid 82 points.
Lynn thought again that the Stags Leap tasted better, but we both immediately agreed that the Dufort Vivens spoke to us profoundly, unlike anything we had drunk over six weeks. We felt like an old house soaking up rejuvenating fresh paint. It was lovely and gave my life, for the moment, meaning.