The taste machine: Sense, subjectivity, and statistics in the California wine world

Abstract

This article is about mid-20th-century attempts to turn subjective judgments about the quality and composition of wine into objective knowledge. It focuses on the research of Maynard Amerine at the University of California, Davis, and his project to formalize the procedures of sensory evaluation. Using controlled experimental conditions, Amerine and colleagues transcribed judgments about taste into numbers that could then be aggregated and analyzed statistically. Through such techniques, they claimed to be able to turn subjectivities into objectivities, rendering private taste sensations into reliable and stable facts about objects in the world.

Sensory labor: considering the work of taste in the food system

“…For Heymann, the history of sensory science is a history of personalities. Unlike recent work by historians of science who see the viticulturist Maynard Amerine as the shaping force of sensory science (Shapin 2016;Phillips 2016), Heymann argues that Rose Marie Pangborn-the influential UC-Davis professor responsible for the first formalized course in sensory science-was the key player in the almost accidental creation of the practices and conditions that brought sensory labor in the food industry into being. Pangborn's commitment to the scientific ideals of experimentation, purity, and rigor, coupled with her policy of freely distributing her course materials, resulted in widespread adoption by an entire discipline of her particular standards of research and statistical techniques.…”

“…This is in analogy to the foods being tasted: the value of sensory information concerning these types of foods depends on how well that information can be treated as a commodity (Lahne 2016(Lahne , 2018Lahne and Spackman 2018). Meanwhile, in systems of craft-or artisan-food production the role of sensory labor is quite different-for example, consider the role sensory judgment functions in the creation of value for wine (Phillips 2016;Shapin 2016), where anonymous expertise is essentially worthless-we do not value consensus judgments of wine quality. Instead, the identity and (taste) expertises of the winemaker, wine judge, importer, and sommelier are part of how the wine market as an economic system and we as individual wine consumers assign values to wine (Hennion 2007;Teil 2012;Shapin 2016).…”

Deciphering Markets and Money: A Sociological Analysis of Economic Institutions

“…The difference between subjective reviews based on judgments of taste and objective reviews based on technical instruments of testing is, of course, a gradual one and historically fleeting as shown, for instance, by the attempts to make wine reviews more standardized and scientific. The process of the 'scientification' of wine tasting started in California in the 1950s as an important step in creating a new kind of a market to its then internationally little-known and less valued wines (see Shapin 2016 andPhillips 2016). The fact that oenology, or the science of winemaking, became part of the university curriculum in California as well as in France and in many other wine-producing countries, including Australia and New Zealand, certainly also helped to legitimize this new, more scientific and standardized judgment device.…”

“…This can lead to a situation in which some market actors, in this case individual researchers or university teachers, do not recognize the legitimacy of this institution and can try to preserve or create other, competing devices. The at least partially successful attempt at making the quality assessment of wines more scientific and objective, initiated after the Second World War in the Californian wine industry and which quite explicitly aimed at standardizing wine tasting and judgments of quality by demanding that they should take place under strictly controlled, laboratory-like conditions-the standardization of the vocabulary for describing the experience of tasting was an essential part of this process-is a good example of a similar development of standardization in a market dominated by private economic actors (Shapin 2016 andPhillips 2016). The scientification of wine tasting was successful partly because the wine producers had an interest in better regulating their mutual market relations and coping with international competition.…”

Introduction toAccounting for Taste

“…In this imaginary, industry draws together food engineering and advertising to capture the public's senses with salty, sweet, and fatty foods (Moss 2013). A fundamental element of this engineering for taste is what Steven Shapin has termed the "aesthetic-industrial complex" (2012,179): the combination of public and private consumer-science research developed largely in the post-World War II era (Phillips 2016;Shapin 2016;Pettersson 2017). Focused on understanding and optimizing end-use sensory experiences of consumption, these sciences took on the task of transforming subjective sensory experiences (for indeed, what could be more subjective than taste) into objective knowledge that could then circulate in a standardized form, free from the fetters of individual eating bodies Despite scholarly and public agreement that the twentieth-century industrialization of food has profoundly reshaped food systems across the globe, the knowledge-making practices of the aesthetic-industrial complex have largely remained out of sight.…”