On Connoisseurship

This post will have been kind of lame, since I'm writing it in the aftermath of the deadly one-two punch of having read the foreword and conclusion of the Tractatus L-P (surprisingly easy in German!) and having walked past the part of campus where, only at night, people are engaged in various crafty activities involving wood (the rending apart and putting together thereof) and metal (molten!).  Ah, crafty activities, how I wish I were practiced in your pursuit!

BUT the basic point is this, or at least, is to be found in or reconstructed out of the following text: it really isn't very surprising that common ingredients raised or found in very different environments or parts of the world should have different flavors or be susceptible to exacting differentiations among their instances.  I think the languagelog people have referred on occasion to viticultural terminology like "terroir" spreading to other culinary realms (coffee, chocolate), which is kind of funny, but shows only that people have been attending to and making purportedly fine discriminations regarding wine longer than they have regarding other things (or, at least, that the wine-vocabulary is more widespread and is easily recognized, since an appreciation for winey things is expected of the culturally aspiratious who might well be ignorant of specialized vocabulary deployed in other circumstances).

It would almost be beyond belief if chocolate, for example, grown from different strains in different climates, processed minimally, ended up tasting more or less the same.  Similarly coffee.  I wouldn't be surprised if, if one could get a lot of now-rare but once-common different breeds of chicken, and marshalled a suitably refined palate, one could delectate differences in scrambled eggs made from their would-be offspring.  But, of course, one must keep in mind what we might call The Fallacy of Sancho's Kinsmen, based on its occurrence (and apparent endorsement) in Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste": Sancho's kinsmen are able to distinguish and pick out flavors in wine with great keenness, and this is taken to demonstrate that they have great taste (not in the merely gastronomical sense, but judgmental).  But that simply isn't true.

Of course I'm nominally someone who actually cares about such shit.  I suppose the real point of my story is twofold: first, people shouldn't really be surprised when people who're good at detecting spreads of flavors turn out to do exactly that in something that hadn't previously had that sort of thing thematized, but which one could really have expected to manifest such a range; second, given that one can expect this range in just about anything, and that its existence, and even the ability to detect its existence, and "quality" (whatever that means) aren't necessarily related, the demands of connoisseurship are correspondingly reduced.

I reserve the right to claim that I don't believe any of this for any number of reasons, like for instance because it doesn't really make sense.         

Comments

[m. leblanc]

What are you talking about? What you said makes perfect sense.

[ben wolfson]

Oh, good. I was uncertain.