WHAT IS TASTE, REALLY?
A conversation between Benedict Johnson and Amelia Singer on the difference between liking things and rating them. With Rory Sutherland, and Tim Hayward.
Ben
The first wine that stopped me was a Chateau d'Yquem opened at a mate's place in Highbury. I was in my twenties, and someone had bought a bottle at a steal. Floral and apricot and electric. I didn't have the words then. I just knew I wanted more.
Taste does not begin with knowledge. It begins with wanting more of whatever just happened.
Taste is one of those words that gets bandied around until it stops meaning anything. But when you push on it, it splits into three different things we have been pretending are one. Personal taste: what you like. Cultural taste: what’s considered good. Quality judgment: the ability to perceive excellence independent of preference.
The interesting question is how they play off each other, and what can be learnt
Amelia
I completely agree that the goal is not expertise. It is about having some kind of navigation system. But I would add confidence to the framework.
Confidence is what makes the choosing pleasurable. Without it, every wine list is a test. Every dinner party a performance. Every bottle a risk. You can have all the accumulated experience in the world, but if you do not trust it, you stand still.
Curiosity and enthusiasm matter too. Rory Sutherland puts it precisely: "The pleasure is not just in the consumption. It is in the choosing." Personal taste is what makes the choosing possible. But confidence is what makes the choosing a pleasure.
THE SHORT VERSION
Taste is not one thing. It is three: personal preference, cultural context, and quality judgment. Most people confuse them, or perform one while neglecting the others. Personal taste is built through attentive pleasure, not study. Cultural taste is borrowed and breaks under pressure. Quality judgment can be developed but requires honesty about what you know and what you don't. Regardless, confidence and appetite make it a pleasure. Where we disagree is whether quality can ever be objective. Ben argues shared view on quality can be and is arrived at. Amelia argues that biology, context, and cultural training make objectivity impossible. We both agree on what matters: the goal is not expertise. It is a navigation system - and with it a tantalising sense of wanting more - that makes every glass more interesting.
I. THE ACCUMULATED SELF
Ben
The first taste is the simplest. What you like. What you do not like. The Riesling that made you sit up and pay attention. The Malbec you’ll never order again.
This is accumulation. Experience piled on experience until a something emerges.
In Ratatouille, critic Anton Ego takes one bite of the title dish and is transported to his mother's kitchen. His pen drops. The semantic collapses into the sensory. The film understood something Proust spent years articulating: taste is archaeological. It excavates who you were to arrive at who you are.
Julia Child put it simply. Paul, she said, "was a great inspiration, his enthusiasm about wine and food helped to shape my tastes." We borrow taste before we build it. The borrowing is not wrong. It is apprenticeship.
But borrowing only takes you so far. At some point you have to own what you like and know what you like about it. Is it the acidity or the texture? The fruit or the earthiness? Finish or the attack? Every answer adds to the toolkit. Every tool makes the next choice clearer.
Personal taste is like a compression algorithm. It reduces infinite choice to a small set of likely wins, using a model trained on your own experience. The more you feed into and calibrate the model, the faster you converge on what will actually please you. Rory Sutherland describes this in our Paul Graham piece as ‘pattern recognition under conditions of uncertainty’ The patterns are yours. The uncertainty is what makes it interesting.
The problem is that most never calibrate. They experience without attention. A thousand bottles all blur together because no one stopped to ask: what just happened?
II. THE STATUS GAME
Ben
The second kind of taste is social. What is considered good. The producers you should drink. The regions you should visit. The vocabulary to use.
This is where it becomes trickier.
When you order a bottle at a client dinner, you are not just choosing wine. You are choosing a version of yourself choosing the wine. Your knowledge. Your confidence. Your membership in a certain kind of world.
Rory Sutherland, who advises Ourglass on the behavioural side of taste, makes this point with characteristic clarity. "The reason expensive wine exists is not because it tastes better. It's because you can't fake having spent the money." The price is the primer The taste comes after.
But here is the counterintuitive bit, and it is one Rory would be the first to acknowledge: the status game is not entirely wasteful. Social pressure forces you to try things you would never have chosen alone. Someone orders a Barolo at dinner because they think they should. They discover they love Nebbiolo. The performance fuels serendipity and a new experience. The status game, for all its absurdity, occasionally functions as a means of trying something new.
I played the game like everyone else. Ordering what I thought I should order. Nodding at descriptions I didn’t quite get. Hoping nobody would notice. The sommelier asks what style you are in the mood for. You panic, because the honest answer is: I don’t know. You tell me.
But performance without foundation collapses under pressure. Cultural taste is borrowed confidence. It tells you what your tribe values, not what you value.
There is a difference between style and taste. Style is knowing the right references. Taste charms and unsettles you before you can explain why you like it.
Amelia
There is another dimension the status game obscures, and it is a positive one. Choosing wine for others is an act of attention. Reading the table. Knowing your guests. Removing your own bias to find the bottle that will genuinely move someone else.
When I order wine in a restaurant and want to please others, it makes me so happy when I choose a wine which genuinely moves people or makes them happy. That intuitive component is important because wine is meant to be shared and to unite people. Choosing for a table is a great lesson not only in expertise but in thinking about others and removing your ego.
"I know my guests love this region, or they are ordering this food, or they have memories with this style of wine. What will give them real satisfaction?" That question is not performance. It is generosity. And it builds a different kind of taste: the ability to read a room, not just a label.
III. THE HARDER CLAIM
Ben
There is a third kind of taste that people usually avoid discussing.
If taste is just personal preference, then there is no such thing as better or worse. Only different. Your Pinot Grigio from a box is as valid as another’s Coche-Dury. Who is to say otherwise?
But does anyone truly believe that?
Jancis Robinson has described great wines as having a kind of energy that is impossible to ignore. She is not talking about preference. She is talking about perception. The ability to recognise when something brings just more to the table.
Quality, as near as I can define it, is coherence plus surplus. Coherence means balance, integrity, purity, everything in proportion. Surplus means length, energy, layeredness, the sense that it contains more than it is showing. You can disagree about preference. You can define quality.
Rankin described his own process when we talked for this series. "I go very much with my heart first and then my brain. If I like something because it makes me feel something, then I'll intellectualise it from there." Quality registers in the body before the mind puts it into words.
Tim Hayward, the FT critic, put it directly: "You're not writing, you're not performing. You are transmitting an idea from your head to somebody else's. Everything else is just finesse." For Hayward, quality judgment is about clarity. Knowing what you think and why you think it.
Here is the awkward version: if you cannot tell the difference between two wines, it can just take time and exposure. And that is fixable.
Amelia
This is where I will play the biggest devil's advocate card.
I completely agree that quality perception can be developed. But the claim that quality can be totally objective and definitive runs into serious problems from several directions.
The biological argument first. People literally do not taste the same. Sensitivity to bitterness, sweetness, tannin and aroma compounds varies widely. Supertasters versus low-sensitivity tasters will rank the same wine very differently. If two tasters experience different sensory inputs from the same glass, it is hard to claim that one ranking of "better" is objectively correct for all palates.
Then context. Perceived quality is heavily shaped by occasion, mood, company, food, glassware, serving temperature, and story. The same bottle can feel magical one night and ordinary another. A rosé surrounded by friends in a beautiful setting with fantastic food is immediately enhanced. Going to a DRC tasting in a clinical setting, the wines may objectively be the best Pinot Noir or Chardonnay in the world, but can feel muted and fail to move the senses. If contextual factors can flip our judgment of a wine, that undermines the claim that its qualitative ranking is an inherent property independent of circumstance.
Oz Clarke taught me a valuable lesson a long time ago. Never taste a wine when you are in a bad mood or when you are anxious. The wine will taste muted, bitter. This plays into the importance of context and setting, no matter how trained you are.
And expert disagreement. Trained tasters and critics often disagree significantly on both description and evaluation of the same wines, even within similar traditions and using the same vocabulary. The lack of stable convergent consensus among experts suggests that wine does not present a single fixed scale of quality that everyone is accessing in the same way.
Cultural training shapes what counts as "good." Classic French hierarchy prizes restraint and structure. Critics like Parker and Suckling reward ripeness and concentration. Natural wine circles may value volatility or cloudiness that others call faults. These style preferences are learned within communities of practice. "Better" often means "closer to the canon our group has agreed to admire."
Here is the crux. Experts can reliably identify grape varieties, regions, faults, and winemaking techniques. Those are matters of fact. But moving from description to "this wine is better" is a normative leap. You can say objectively that a wine is oxidised, corked, imbalanced, or microbiologically unstable. But whether a sound, clean, technically correct wine is better than a wild, funky one is a value judgment. Wine quality can be inter-subjectively stable within a trained community, but not strictly objective in the way pH or alcohol percentage is.
Ben's definition is elegant: coherence plus surplus. But who defines what surplus should constitute? And how can that definition be objective when even trained tasters are affected by mood, biology, and context?
Ben
I agree on the philosophy point. Quality is not absolute in the way a measurement is absolute. Two tasters will perceive the same wine differently. Context shapes things. Expert disagreement is real and persistent.
Giorgio Agamben defined taste as ‘a knowledge that is not known and a pleasure that is not enjoyed.’ It does not close. It does not decide. A gap between what you perceive and what you can explain. That gap is uncomfortable. It is also where discernment is formed. Amelia and I are arguing about whether the gap can be closed. Perhaps the point is that it should not be.
I do think that quality perception - however you define it - can be developed, and that development is worth the effort. You may never get to the point where you can blind-taste Burgundy by vineyard. But you can close the gap between what you experience and what you can say about it. Closing the gap is liberating (and also a hell of a lot of fun).
IV. THE GOURMAND'S CORRECTION
Ben
There is a counterweight to all this, and it matters.
A.J. Liebling, the great New Yorker food writer, distinguished himself as a "gourmand" or "feeder" rather than a "gourmet." He dismissed Proust's madeleine because the amount of brandy it contains "would not furnish a gnat with an alcohol rub." His rule: "The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite."
Fergus Henderson, who built St. John around nose-to-tail eating, has the same energy. "It would be disingenuous to the animal not to make the most of the whole beast; there is a set of delights, textural and flavoursome, which lie beyond the fillet." And then, characteristically: "Nose-to-tail eating is not a bloodlust, testosterone-fueled offal hunt. It's common sense."
Pierre Koffmann, who trained Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White, put it plainly: "I like to cook the kind of food I like to eat." His signature dish is pig's trotter stuffed with chicken mousseline. Luxurious creation from humble ingredients.
The correction is this: taste built through enthusiastic engagement beats taste built through anxious analysis. The feeder is in the arena. The gourmet is in the gallery. Appetite is not the enemy of discernment. It is the precondition.
Amelia
Completely agree. And this connects back to confidence. Most people buy wine based on their mood, their food, their setting. They remember enjoying that rosé with friends and a charcuterie platter. So they buy it again. That is a way of learning, engaging and choosing which gives real satisfaction. Their pleasure when choosing wine is not based on a Platonic ideal of quality. It is based on experience and the willingness to trust what they enjoyed.
The most important thing in wine education is fostering exactly this. Not the anxiety of getting it right. The simple pleasure of experience.
V. THE WORK OF DISCERNMENT
Ben
The shift from borrowed taste to earned taste happens when you start to articulate.
A violinist friend Scottie trained at a conservatory. He said the most important thing he learned was not technique. It was being able to say why he liked or disliked something. Not just "I like it" but "I like it because the tension resolves unexpectedly" or "I dislike it because the rhythm is too predictable." He built a vocabulary for his instincts. And the vocabulary sharpened the instincts.
Wine works the same way. You notice something. You try to name it. You compare it to other experiences. You adjust. The work is not reading books about wine or memorising appellations. It is paying attention while you drink. Learning is a byproduct of enjoyment, not the other way round.
Think of George Clooney in Up in the Air. His character does not love flying. He has just done it so often, so attentively, that he moves through the system with zero friction. Which queue, which seat, which lounge, which gate. Not because he studied aviation. Because he paid attention while doing the thing he was already doing.
That likewise happens with wine. You drink better bottles. You notice things. Fragments accumulate: this grape with that dish, this glass shape with that wine, this producer in that region, that bottle you opened on the night your daughter was born. Before you know it you have means of finding your way around. Not expertise. Fluency.
Tim Hayward described this when we filmed together for this series. The person who walks into any restaurant in any city and knows how to read the room, read the list, and enjoy themselves without performance or anxiety. That is what taste confidence looks like in practice. Not knowledge. Ease. The liberation of not having to think about it.
Diana Vreeland, the legendary Vogue editor, understood this another way. "Elegance," she said, "is refusal." Not accumulation. Refusal. Knowing what to leave out. Knowing what you are not. There is an old saying in surgery that makes the same point: a good surgeon knows how to operate, a better one when to operate, and the best when not to. Taste works the same way. It is revealed by what you refuse, not just what you choose.
Anthony Rose, the founder of SeedLegals, told me something that applies here. He sees thousands of startup founders, and he has learned to spot the difference between confidence and bluster. "The 98% is easy," he said. "The 2% is where judgment lives."
The same is true of taste. Anyone can spot the obvious. Discernment is revealed in the edge cases.
VI. THE VULNERABILITY OF NOT KNOWING
Ben
I should be honest. I still get this wrong.
A few months ago at Noble Rot Mayfair with a mate Frank, visiting from the States. He is Italian by background, loves Tuscan reds. I ordered a bottle of Tenuta di Carleone Il Guercio, thinking it would hit the mark. A well-made wine, slightly more natural, open and expressive. It landed okay. Just okay. I had played the man, not the cards, and the percentages had not rewarded me. Frank chose a Château Canon 2016, a great but not uncomplicated vintage. Again, okay. Not the mind-blowing experience we had both hoped for.
The lesson: in playing it smart, sometimes you miss the swing. Better to go the home run or strike out than to hedge into forgettable.
That is the trap. You learn the vocabulary and start deploying it defensively. The words become armour rather than tools.
The antidote is staying honest about what you don’t know. Which is most of it - even for the veterans. The people with the best taste I have met are not the ones with the most knowledge. They are the ones most open to challenging it and being surprised.
VII. WHY ANY OF THIS MATTERS
Ben
Why does any of this matter. There are wars abroad and division at home. The cost of living does not care about your Cuvée Florine.
It is easy, in the noise, to forget that life is for living.
Taste is the difference between fuel and nourishment. Mum's coq au vin and an end-of-day supermarket sandwich. A life lived bursting at the seams, and one marking time.
The borrowed preferences have to go. At some point - you choose whether Jon Bonham is more your thing than Charlie Watts, Ginger Baker or Dave Grohl (or Han Solo vs. Indiana or Five Guys vs McDonalds). Taste is unpredictable, generative, and restless. It pulls you somewhere unfamiliar, out of your comfort zone. The danger with all this carry on about taste is that it just creates another gate for someone to guard. If we’ve added to that, then we’ll have failed.
Amelia
What remains, if done well, is confidence. Not the confidence of knowing everything. The confidence of trusting what you enjoy, being curious enough to keep exploring, and enthusiastic enough to share what you find.
That’s worthwhile. Not to tell you what to drink. To make every glass worthy of attention.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Benedict Johnson (@benedictegjohnson) is the founder of Ourglass, a London-based taste platform dedicated to helping people become confident wine lovers. He writes on everything to do with wine, and curates the Taste Decoded series.
Amelia Singer (@amelias_wine) is a wine educator, consultant and TV presenter, and winner of the IWSC and WSET Future 50 Up and Coming Drinks Stars Award. She is a presenter on ITV's The Wine Show and has spent a decade helping people find confidence and pleasure in wine.
Rory Sutherland (@rorysutherland) is Vice-Chairman of Ogilvy UK, a columnist for The Spectator, and author of Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense. A pioneer of applied behavioural science in business, he explores how perception, context and signalling shape value across every category imaginable, from watches to wine.
Tim Hayward (@timhayward) is the Financial Times' food columnist and author of several books on food and hospitality. A former restaurateur, he writes on what makes eating and drinking meaningful.
EXPLORE MORE WITH TASTE DECODED
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- Read: Charles Spence on Sensory Science
- Article: What Makes Wine Cheap vs Expensive
- Guide French wine regions guide
- Guide: Italian wine regions guide
- Bonus: Spain, Germany, Australia, Argentina, South Africa and the USA country guides