The domain of the aesthetic

Many of the purported hallmarks of tastes and smells that, as we saw in Chapter 1, are used to question their metaphysical and epistemological status, have also been called on to challenge their capacity – and hence, by extension, the objects they constitute, such as wine – to be of aesthetic interest and value. On the rare occasions that philosophers in the past deigned to discuss tastes and smells in relation to aesthetic interest and value, they generally did so either to exclude them from the domain of the aesthetic altogether, invoking a putative distinction between genuine aesthetic value and merely sensuous pleasure; or to claim that whatever aesthetic value is possessed by tastes and smells is trivial, attenuated or otherwise lacking in significance.

Despite his otherwise robust defence of the importance and value of wine in the life of rational beings, Roger Scruton's voice has been the loudest and most cogent here, but increasingly also the loneliest. For most contemporary philosophers writing on wine seem loath to dismiss its aesthetic value, although they remain ambivalent about the precise character and degree of such value that wine can possess. In part, I think, this is because the discussion of aesthetic value is often intertwined with the closely related, but by no means identical, question of whether wine can be art. Even where the two issues are explicitly distinguished, the kinds of aesthetic values attributed to wine are more often than not conceived in terms of, compared to, and contrasted with the particular aesthetic values that artworks can manifest.