Once, many moons ago, I was in a bar in Sanlúcar de Barrameda with my friends Tim and Rocío Holt. Possibly I had imbibed one too many copitas of Manzanilla, but I let slip that I wrote poetry – whereupon an earnest young Sanluqueño asked me if my poetry was “subjective or objective”.
I felt a bit like Joseph Cotten’s hapless pulp-Western-writer Holly Martins in the movie The Third Man, when he is quizzed (at a meeting of Viennese intellectuals convened by Wilfred Hyde-White’s unctuous Crabbin) whether he “believes in the stream of consciousness.” The truth was he had me stumped. Various responses came into my mind – including the achingly pretentious “I hope my poetry overcomes the subjective/objective divide” – but none seemed quite right. I mumbled some sort of answer, but felt I hadn’t done justice to the young man’s question.
It came back to me the other day at a big London supermarket tasting, in the following slightly rephrased form: Should one taste subjectively or objectively? On the one hand the question is absurd – after all one has only one’s own sensory apparatus and judgement to taste with. So tasting in that sense is unavoidably subjective.
But on the other hand we wine professionals write and even publish tasting notes, which try to offer some objective bases for judgement; some of us go so far as to give wines marks out of 100 (or 20). I’m not a great fan of numerical ratings, and you could well argue
