Wine Subjectivity

I found this recent article in Wine Spectator written by a guy named Matt Kramer (not to be confused with the Matt Kremer in our class) in which he argues for the inherent subjectivity of wine being quite reasonable and makes a somewhat compelling case that you should embrace the notion of subjectivity when it comes to assessing quality of something like wine or music, because it's totally plausible that you can't point to an objective argument and yet still perceive a quality difference between items. The math person in me is a bit bothered by the argument (especially given that the end result in the example he highlights actually did come down to an objective fact, just one that was unknown at the point). But, setting that aside, I found the point quite compelling.

It reminded me of a somewhat slightly different (but super related) subject that briefly came in one of the last class sessions when Weids highlighted this question of the existence of an objective idea of "quality" and it's a subject I really struggle to answer but think about a lot when it comes to film.

On the one hand, I recognize that "objective quality" is really difficult to assess because you can't really point to objective metrics as to what makes a great movie, great piece of literature, great song, or great wine exactly. You can highlight attributes that the piece has and note that you generally like those attributes and yet I would contend that (A) Nobody has a specific litmus test of "If X has Y, Z, and A qualities I will perceive it as good" and (B) Two different people (even those both with expert status, whatever that means) will disagree as to level of quality that a work has.

Is Citizen Kane an objectively great movie? Hamlet an objectively great play? Lafite an objectively great wine? If I say no to any of those questions, at least somebody might think I have bad taste or that perhaps my opinion is incorrect. But are varied opinions on these questions always correct for that person? There's an inherent bias where all of us want to say "Absolutely!" to that question and yet I've never met somebody who doesn't sometimes judge another's taste in quality. If I tell you that I truly think a McDonald's Cheeseburger is better than a fine steak, you're likely going to think "Devin has terrible taste in food", not "Devin's opinion is equally valuable and reasonable to mine." I do the same thing all the time with film - Despite claiming to believe that subjective paradigms of quality are equally valid, I can't help but get bothered when people complain about how boring a film is that I think is great, whereas they think Michael Bay's Transformers films are all worth seeing.

It's a difficult line to draw and I tend to try to force a line by noting that any choice of an artistic work being quality is valid as long as the work is truly a piece of art, not simply a capitalist attempt to generate a profit - In that way, I tend to be dismissive of works like Bay's where I can point to the blatant product placement which gets in the way of the film, or could be dismissive of cheap wine which is mass produced. Of course, what I'm doing is arbitrarily self-serving in that I'm pretending I have some magic wand I can wave and say "that's art" and "that's not art" as if that's even objective in and of itself. It's totally cheating giving an actual answer by just giving an answer I want to be the answer. That said, it's the closest I have come to fitting an answer that is in line with how I perceive the world.