Value

Is there a reason why caviar and wine are considered finer than cheeseburgers and soda pop?

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There is a reason. They are more expensive.

Maimonides pointed out that civilized people value much more highly things that are literally useless or superfluous to our wellbeing, as compared with things that are vital. So bread and water are regarded as boring, and are relatively cheap, while more exotic and unnecessary products are valuable and cost a lot. He took this to be one of the features of civilization that are regrettable, and surely he is right.

I suspect Oliver Leaman has to be teasing. Good wine is -- of course -- a lot more expensive than soda pop because it is a very great deal finer (and that takes effort to produce!), not finer because it is more expensive.

The long cultivation of vines over many seasons at a good estate in the Chianti or Bordeaux, the careful harvesting, the long stages of production from vats to barriques to bottles, the cellaring, ... all that is not a cheap business, so of course decent wines are necessarily more expensive than industrially produced soda gunk. But we happily pay the price for the result of the loving labour of good producers as the wines are indeed one of the great achievements of human civilization.

We appreciate good wine for the elusive complexity we find in the aromas released in the glass, the intricately structured tastes, the very feel in the mouth, the lingering aftertastes. We delight in the delicious intoxication that it brings. As we experience more good wine, we learn to appreciate and distinguish more -- to find more in the wine. We learn how to marry appropriately good wine with good food, so eachenhances and supports the experience of the other. And just as goodfood demands to be shared with friends and family, good wine asks to bedrunk in company so the private sensual experience of relishing thewine itself becomes a shared human delight. That delight adds to the weave of human life linked to a long history and culture of wine-making and wine-drinking.

Wine is a proper object of aesthetic evaluation, as when we praise a wine for being balanced, elegant, well-structured, or criticize a wine for being crude, vulgarly brash, uninterestingly bland. Wine may not be an art object, but it is an aesthetic object -- something that repays our attention: here is an inexhaustibly complex aesthetic world to explore. Of course, the experience of tasting wine is essentially ephemeral -- but then so are many other of the great joys of life, whether it's listening to music or the more intimate fleeting sensual pleasures. Being ephemeral doesn't entail being trivial, or unimportant, or lacking value. Human things are empheral.

To be sure, just as there are some who are tone deaf or who can't relate to more than the most mindless pop music, there are some who are similarly unable to "get" good wine (indeed I believe that there is evidence than a significant proportion of people just can't "taste the difference"). But they are equally sad deprivations, being closed off from what are indeed two of the finest things of life, good music and good wine.

So I think I'll just go and open a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino, and listen again to the Goldberg Variations ...

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