Aesthetics and perception in geographical writing: the case of wine

Abstract

To cultivate emotionally engaged and embodied geographical research, we, as human geographers, need to engage more closely with sensory perception and aesthetics in geographical writing. Put simply, we need to write (more) about beauty and pleasure. This commentary uses wine as a touchpoint to explore how such writing can be done. Drawing on the work on geographical writing, the interdisciplinary study of food and wine, and food and wine writing, I accentuate not writing about perception, but writing with perception. I bring the lexicon of subjective sensory experience into the lexicon of standard disciplinary analysis so that the former can enrich the latter. In doing so, I foreground what we gain intellectually and politically from more direct engagement with aesthetics and perception – beauty and pleasure – in human geography. Such engagement can help us value and practice qualitative, embodied, and sensorially present research and writing.

Introduction: wine, place and pleasure

Wine is drunk in part for its capacity to evoke emotion, reward sensitive perception, and give sensuous pleasure. Aesthetics is often close to the surface in our encounters with it. Because of this emotional and sensory charge, wine can be a particularly effective vehicle for telling intellectually and politically complex stories about nature, culture, economy and subjectivity. And stories about place as well, for wine is ineluctably linked to place and, thus, helps us ground these complex stories in place.

It is a mistake, therefore, as Terry Theise argues, to try to demystify wine for consumers. The task, instead, is the opposite: to remystify wine by foregrounding its aesthetic value. ¹ Theise’s suggestion is difficult to follow, however, in societies (such as the ones where most wine is produced, consumed and analyzed) that reward standardized descriptions and numerical scores. It is also difficult in academic scholarship that requires an analytical and demystifying lens. How can we remystify wine without compromizing the analytical rigour of geographical research? How can we integrate the metaphorical writing that characterizes the best wine writing into geographic scholarship without lapsing into self-indulgence? Methodologically, these questions are about the space available in academic geography for individual sensory perception and the related categories of aesthetics, beauty and pleasure. Addressing such questions can teach us something useful about scholarly method.

This commentary uses wine to make a wider argument about writing in human geography. It examines how we can practice more sensorially oriented ways of geographical writing. The argument proceeds in two steps. First, I explore the use of metaphor in academic prose. Because communicative writing on wine is highly metaphorical, we need to make greater use of metaphorical writing in the geographic study of wine and other experiential goods. I bring the lexicon of subjective sensory experience into the lexicon of disciplinary analysis to illustrate how the former can enrich the latter. Second, I clarify why closer attention to sensory perception matters to human geographers. My focus is not on writing about perception but on writing with perception. As Yi-Fu Tuan pointed out, the root meaning of the word ‘aesthetic’ is ‘feeling’ or ‘sensitive perception’, and the root meaning of its opposite – ‘anaesthetic’ – is lack of feeling or perception. ² The second half of Tuan’s point is especially useful because it reveals the stakes: Tuan showed that cordoning off beauty and pleasure from academic writing has an anestheticizing effect on our work.

This piece grows out of my struggles with writing about and around wine. People drink wine for emotional reasons, for sensuous pleasure. Even at price levels accessible to most wine-drinkers – and this is the market segment that I experience and study – one’s encounter with wine is often ‘part-analysis, part-awe’. ³ But writing about emotional reasons and encounters in much academic work, much less using words like ‘mystery’ or ‘awe’, can appear superficial. The safe approach is to avoid aesthetics, but such avoidance obfuscates the reasons that attract people to wine in the first place. I, thus, combine geographical reflections on academic writing, broader cultural studies of food and wine, and wine writing to foreground the ways in which perception and pleasure can be brought closer to the surface in geographical writing. A more embodied and emotionally present approach to aesthetics and perception can also ‘embolden’ us to enter into ‘a more positive conceptual and emotional relationship with our writing’. ⁴ Writing with perception and with wine, I argue, can help us cultivate slow, non-uniform and sensorially attuned research in geography.

Sensory knowledge and metaphor in academic writing

Geographical study of wine typically speaks of production and consumption, and rightly so: wine is a commercial product. Wine production is a sector of many regional economies, and wine is widely used in place-making and place marketing. ⁵ At the same time, wine is a fringe topic in any academic discipline because its study seldom focuses on the theoretical concerns of the day. Wine always seems to require too much context – historical, ecological, cultural – for an in-depth investigation of any theoretical issue. It invites and, indeed, requires engagement beyond any one sub-discipline and beyond academia: most professional writing on wine is in wine writing (a variety of journalism). Wine is also inescapably linked to aesthetics and pleasure. Like good food, it has the capacity to ‘shock’ us into recognizing our own powers of enjoyment. ⁶

The challenge is about integrating the experience of wine into academic analyses of wine and other experiential goods. Sensory knowledge, as distinct from intellectual expertise, is an ambiguous and subjective business. Studying wine heightens the difficulty because it is often seen as a niche and possibly elitist endeavour. Anyone with a passionate interest in wine, Amy Trubek notes, has likely been called a wine snob. When researching wine, a colleague remarked, it is wise to use that substance merely to illustrate an argument about something else: regional development, place marketing, whatever. Yet many academics study wine because they have become ‘enthralled by the mystery and complexity’ they perceive in the glass. ⁷ Many advocates of place-driven wine, as well as local food, see their quest partly or even largely as an aesthetic one. ⁸ The language of commodities and consumption, rather than beauty and pleasure, obscures the intellectual and emotional impulse of much research practice.

Beauty and pleasure are integral, rather than incidental, aspects of the political advocacy for good food and wine. For example, the original Slow Food Manifesto from 1989 speaks not only of food but also, and unapologetically, of pleasure: it is sub-titled International Movement for the Defense of And the Right to Pleasure. ⁹ This sub-title in no way undercuts the movement’s political ethos; it, rather, affirms the core role of pleasure in that ethos. This affirmation is not without risks. ‘Pleasure was, and is, a thorny subject’, the Slow Food Movement’s founding leader Carlo Petrini commented: ‘if you are involved in any sort of social cause or movement, your fellows will rebuke you for mentioning it; others will cite health concerns; and almost anyone will regard an interest in pleasure as a sign of superficiality’. ¹⁰ The revised document from 2006, indeed, avoids the thorny subject altogether. Out goes ‘pleasure’ (two of the three mentions in the 1989 version are cut), and in come ‘consumer’ (three mentions) and ‘consumption’ (four mentions), neither of which appears in the original. Along with more than double the number of words (646, instead of 273) and the middle-of-the-road sub-title The Slow Food Manifesto for Quality. ¹¹ This example is instructive because it illustrates the unease around pleasure even in the realms – eating, drinking, conviviality – that are centrally about it. That academics are not alone in that unease does not absolve us of the responsibility to reflect on its operation and effects intellectually and politically.

The unease around sensory pleasure stems, in part, from the fact that such pleasure is irreducibly subjective. This is the case especially with the sensations derived from smell and taste: we perceive, label and communicate the nuances of aroma and flavour in highly individual ways. Conveying sensory pleasure in academic prose takes considerable effort because we cannot rely on agreed vocabulary and because the results are not reproducible. A visual image, the most accepted expression of aesthetics in academic journals, is of little use. Wine complicates things further because it invites both literal and metaphorical descriptions of sensation. In the sphere of perception and aesthetics, metaphor often communicates better than descriptor but is difficult to insert into academic analysis. When Karen MacNeil says that good wine matters because it is ‘unrushed’ – ‘the silent music of nature’ – she communicates wine’s societal value with precision, but not with the kind of analytical vocabulary that many academics expect to see. ¹² Even wine professionals like sommeliers acknowledge that the lexicon of sensory experience is more difficult to practice than the lexicon of technical analysis. The challenge for academics, then, is to allow more experience-near and metaphorical writing, and the borrowing from such writing, in academic prose. Such an allowance is necessary not in the interest of stylistic tolerance, but in the interest of effective communication. Metaphorical writing, like descriptive writing, is not separate from analysis but an integral part of it. ¹³ To disregard wine’s ‘unrushed’ or musical quality is to take a standardized, one-dimensional tasting note for the highly individual and multi-textured experience of wine.

Sensory perception and sensory pleasure have political ramifications. They are the natural antidote to disembodied and standardized knowledge because they are necessarily embodied and unstandardized. Just as smell and taste can powerfully disrupt the ‘palate-blind’ ¹⁴ consumption of ingestible commodities in our society, writing with perception can similarly disrupt standardized stories of commodities in academic research. It can help us understand ‘the truant freedom of practices’ that are involved in the making and tasting of food and drink. ¹⁵ ‘The primary instrument’, Petrini writes, that ‘can make it possible for anyone to choose an adequate and enjoyable diet are our senses’. ¹⁶ As the Slow Food Movement has shown, attention to pleasure can be a progressive political project. Participating in that project requires that we engage with pleasure in our own professional practice.

Writing with perception

This commentary explores the boundaries of scholarly writing in human geography. Although focused on wine, its principal concern is with academic writing that is more open to, and engaged with, sensory perception. What sensorially attuned writing, or writing with perception, means in any one writing is individual to each writer: my effort here is to suggest more allowance for experimenting what such writing might mean in published geographical scholarship. My argument is not for integrating humanities-oriented work in cultural geography and cultural studies, food studies, or the voluminous feminist work on emotions and the body into the social scientific study of wine. Others working in those fields have made such humanities-oriented arguments eloquently already. ¹⁷ My effort here is more specific: to bring aesthetics and perception closer to the core of social scientific work on experiential goods like food and wine. ¹⁸ It is a both/and, rather than either/or, argument: not against any current practice but for a more spacious approach to what we consider analytically rigorous writing. By adding sensory texture to the standard academic language of production and consumption, such an approach can help us write political geographies of food and drink in a more experience-near manner. It can also help us practice a more transprofessional writing that bridges and transcends academic, trade, and journalistic conventions to analyze the lived experience. Hence, my use of food and wine writers, including Terry Theise, Andrew Jefford, Karen MacNeil and M.F.K. Fisher, in this commentary. These writers are not scholars, but we can learn from their sensorially attuned writing.

Although this commentary uses wine to make an argument about method, the beverage itself is of fundamental importance as well. Wine matters to geographers in part because it creates emotional bonds to place and powerfully communicates the value of place. No other flavour experience ‘has been defined so long and so well by place’. ¹⁹ The Slow Food Movement, which has been a catalyst for a broader revitalization of place-based food traditions globally, illustrates this point. Petrini, who founded the movement in Piedmont (Italy), explicitly acknowledges wine’s catalyzing role in his activism. ‘In the beginning’, he writes, ‘there was wine’: before the fascination with local food, it was wine that made people want to learn about its place of origin. ²⁰ Researching wine necessarily focuses us on place-making in ways that are experiential and emotional.

The task, then, is to cultivate scholarship that actively engages and reflects aesthetics and perception, rather than just being tolerant of aesthetics and perception. Such engagement can help us not only analyze but also practice the irreducible connection between and among the intellectual, the sensual, and the aesthetic. ²¹ In addition to the language of commodities, production and consumption, geographical analysis needs to use the language of beauty and pleasure. Closer attention to the aesthetic and the sensual can help us value and practice sensorially receptive ways of doing research. It can also help us claim space for embodied conviviality within academia.