Wine Criticism Should Explain How Wine Works

Most wine writing tells us three things: whether the critic liked the wine, what the wine smells and tastes like, and how good it is presumed to be. These are important to know, but they do not exhaust the task of criticism. What wine writing too rarely explains is how a wine produces its effects. We get the verdict, the descriptor list, and perhaps a score. What we less often get is an account of how the wine moves, how it creates tension, how it resolves that tension, where it changes direction, what remains unsettled, or why the experience sustains attention. This is striking because other forms of criticism routinely attempt this kind of explanation. A serious music critic does not merely say that a performance was beautiful and then list the instruments. A literary critic is not content to name the themes of a novel and assign a grade. An art critic does not just identify colors and how much she enjoys them. At their best, critics explain how a work becomes meaningful. They show…