Michel Foucault and Michael Fridjhon are invited by Melvyn Minnaar to share a glass of wine

Born and grown up in France’s Haut-Poitou region, where his mother’s family owned vineyards, the French philosopher Michel Foucault surely knew his wine. He also got to know a lot more about, let’s say, knowledge – or the ‘way of knowing’. And pleasure. And the ‘aesthetic experience’.

With thoughts and words about human issues ranging from madness to sex, prisons to politics, would it be folly to think that he occasionally considered the essentials of wine competitions? Unfortunately, his unpublished writings were either destroyed or doomed, by his will, to remain unpublished after his death in 1984. But by that time he and his mindful mates had turned the sacred world of absolutes on its head. If he had any ideas about judging wine, we will never know. From clues in his oeuvre, one may make a guess or two about this.

Together with his nemesis and pal Jacques Derrida, who died last year, and some other bright young things of the French intelligentsia, he deflated those who seek final, fixed answers with a cerebral weapon that, in academic and cocktail-party circles, started as ‘structuralism’ and became ‘deconstruction’. Developing theories like Ferdinand de Saussure’s claim that ‘the linguistic sign is arbitrary’ (something to ponder when deploying words like ‘linearity’ with such abandon in wine notes!), they pushed and pushed at prevailing perceptions – leading some sceptics to deconstruct everything into meaninglessness, and others to radical reappraisals of ‘how to think of thinks’.

Foucault and friends shot holes in the dream of grand metaphysics. Everything is relative. Meaning finds, defines itself. If it sounds negative, the result has been a sharpening of the way we describe what we experience. Think carefully when you claim absolutes.

Now what might this have to do with wine evaluation? More specifically, what has the theorems of deconstruction to do with pronouncements about the wine in your glass?

Let’s imagine Michel Foucault sharing a convivial glass of wine with, say, Michael Fridjhon, grand master(mind) of South Africa’s wine competitions …. Could Professor Foucault possibly convince Professor Fridjhon that there is an essential structural fault in his epistemological endeavours with these competitions? That the urge to final answers, to pronouncing winners and losers and some in-between, is, to be honest, a foolish mission? That his ways of wine judging, in fact, a pseudo science, is more like Alice’s tea party, where any judge could fall into a deconstructed dark hole?

To demonstrate, while pouring a glass of sensual sauvignon from the vineyards of his homeland, the French professor would perhaps offer his UCT Business School colleague a parallel from one of his other, undoubted passions: the arts. Foucault would gleefully boast that the structuralists and their descendants provided the means for a confused public to come to terms with the oddities offered as contemporary Western art. In simple terms, they suggested that with preconceived ideas about art’s merit, value and worth, you’ll get nowhere.

This is exactly what yet another professor, John Carey of Oxford, spelled out in a book published last month when he bluntly and boldly answers the question ‘Is it art?’ with simple Foucauldian logic: ‘Yes, if you think it is; no, if not’. With the idea of absolutist art criticism firmly nailed, we know that in contemporary art, everything is possible.

Which, Professor Foucault might point out, reflecting on how matters stand in the global village of wine, pretty much sums up contemporary wine culture as well. With vineyards growing just about everywhere and some wine judges preferring New Zealand pinot noir to burgundy and Australian shiraz to hermitage, it is obvious that nothing is fixed. Like art, wine can’t be pinned down.

And if, like art, wine operates on a hyper-personal level, all this talk of ‘getting it right’ in evaluation (yes, in all our endless competitions and awards) ‘employing the right, experienced palates’, scoring in the most detailed fashion, auditing and all, is, in fact, a mere smoke-and-mirror performance, structured around a pseudo-scientific methodology. Wine simply can and should never be objectified to this level, Professor Foucault would laugh: ‘Mon Dieu, monsieur Fridjhon, c’est pas possible, ca!’

Take personal responsibility in its true sense, Foucault would urge. The Platter guide and Wine magazine would say they are doing this by putting names to scores. This is good, and calls individual taste and experience to the ball game. But once it settles on the ‘committee decision’ of averaging the judges’ scores in a superficial deployment of democracy, the very method deconstructs, as it were, in front of our cynical eyes and expectant tongue. Do you believe in the 13-pointer? Or the 17-pointer? Does anyone?

Visual art critics have learned their lesson: postmodernism may have been a hard comedown from earlier ideals, but there is not much argument these days. The how and why and where of art may be hazy, but it is accepted and handled. (There is much more fun in the discussions at the present Venice Biennale, than to be read in the ramblings in Decanter – or Icons, for that matter.) The classic theorem of ‘an artwork determining its own value according to its own rules’ seems handy.

Then why is there this ongoing fakery about ‘objective standards’ for what is, after all, something aimed at the most personal of the individual’s senses? And, in Foucault’s world, a ‘limit-experience’? Why should wine be tasted blind, for example? (A respectable postmodern structuralist will quickly shoot this down on the grounds of ‘context’.) The idea seems especially silly when all the highbrow lovers of wine talk about ‘origin’ and ‘individuality’ all the time. A sop to pseudo-scientificity, yet implying a serious distrust of judges’ honesty and ability, ‘blind tasting’ – as Michel F would surely say across the table to Michael F – is a remarkably short-sighted approach to full experience.

With the Haut Poitou in their glasses warming up the conversation, the talk may turn to language use and murky wine notes. Maybe Jacques Lacan would be mentioned. How he would have giggled, contemplating his system of ‘signifieds’ and ‘signifiers’, while reading the wine gobbledygook dished up as ‘truth’.

As the bottle between them runs dry, MF may tell the other MF that ‘pleasure’ all too often seems like the enemy in the process of contemporary wine judging. Quite upset by the thought, Foucault would propose that life should be fully and passionately lived in the quest for knowledge. The right way. The right knowledge.

There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks and perceive differently than one sees is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all. (The Use of Pleasure, 1985)