Skrewball Comity

On the Marvelous Subjectivity of Taste

Not the bottles we sampled…but perhaps just as dusty and burnished by reputation?

Since we had school and work off this past Wednesday for Juneteenth (if you don’t know the history or how to honor the holiday, here’s a primer), and because said holiday coincided with a heat dome settling over New England, we accepted the offer of a generous family friend (GFF) and took advantage of their backyard pool. While I’ve never been much of a beach bum, it was the ideal way to spend the day, dipping in and out of the water and generally eating way too many potato chips (my favorite hot-weather snack, along with ice-cold watermelon generously seasoned with torn mint and chile oil.) GFF invited us to step inside and sample his well-stocked home bar, which had among its many treasures not one, but two different vintages of Pappy Van Winkle bourbon (the 10 and 12).

For those who haven’t been indoctrinated by whiskey lore, a brief primer: Pappy Van Winkle is regarded to be one of the most expensive and rarest bourbons in the world, retailing at hundreds of dollars if you can get it, and often priced at thousands because of its scarcity. It doesn’t get its reputation by age (the label began in 1994) but by the company’s early promotion of the bourbon as a model of “craft” distilling, a commitment to small-scale, independently-owned production, often relying on traditional, “slow” techniques. Because Pappy’s was one of the first brands to promote itself on the basis of age—selling 20-year-old bourbon in 1994 as a “reserve” brand—it retained a certain kind of heritage glow, long after Buffalo Trace bought the company and changed its production process. The hype machine that surrounds the Pappy line of bourbons comes partly from genuine bourbon connoisseurs and partly from the food world, as chefs and tastemakers like Anthony Bourdain, Sean Brock, and David Chang extolled its virtues. At some point, it became impossible to differentiate between the product and its promise, especially when bottles of Pappy have become so scarce that people have gone to criminal lengths to secure it.

I long ago assumed I’d never taste Pappy, yet even though I was still dripping from the pool and in my bare unpolished feet, I wasn’t going to pass up a taste. Our generous host poured us each half a finger of Pappy, the younger vintage first, to sample. I swished a bit of water to clear out the ghostly flavor of BBQ potato chips, swirled the glass, then sipped…and it was fine. Tasty, smooth, definitely a quality bourbon. But no choir of angels descended upon me. After clearing our first sips, he poured a second taste, that of the older vintage. I swished, swirled, and sampled…and again, a very delicious bourbon, a bit deeper and subtler in flavor. But did it compel me to get a Pappy tattoo as it did Bourdain? No. It struck me as I was sipping that what I expected was the elusive taste of scarcity more than anything else—the sense that I was tapping into a limited commodity, the holy grail of bourbon according to some, but also just a solid pour for others. As I emptied my glass, and settled up for a less exclusive sample from the bar, I kept wondering why it had failed to exceed or even meet my expectations. Did the hype machine around the bourbon’s exclusivity meet its limitations in my mouth, or was it simply that I had different expectations for what a good drink should be? A few minutes later, my wondering turned into stunned silence, as I tasted my favorite sample of the afternoon, an unexpectedly subtle, well-balanced, and utterly delicious sip of Skrewball Peanut Butter Whiskey. I didn’t need to look up the disparate reviews of one drink versus the other; I knew which one demanded a second sampling.

People who work in food are constantly honing their sense of taste, and declaring what is or isn’t good; it’s part of the job, and part of how we establish critical credibility, both among our peers and in front of the general public. We can’t like anything, lest we appear undiscerning; we can’t hate everything, lest we look like misanthropes. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu framed the cultivation of taste as a key way that people garner cultural capital, built upon the statement of preferences in a manner that raises some boats and sinks others. “Taste,” as he put it, “is first and foremost distaste, disgust and visceral intolerance of the taste of others.” We signify what we value by valuing some things more than others, and by rejecting what others enjoy. To like a toasted marshmallow but to disdain a raw one is a sign of connoisseurship; to prefer Kraft Dinner over Martha’s homemade version is to have hidden childhood trauma. The distinctions we make between the great, the good, and the mediocre are how we demonstrate that we have taste.

Bourdieu had the right idea, in understanding that taste extended far beyond preference, that it could construct entire classes of culture and form the basis of numerous hierarchies, both real and imagined. Though he was writing about the birth of the French middle-class bourgeoisie in the 1960s, he understood that the formation of a taste-making class would shape the predilections of society at large, creating a distinct set of aesthetics that would express “good taste” in any period and across any form of cultural expression. Yet as Bourdieu was conducting his research in France, the American consumer marketplace (especially around food) was in full bloom, as consumers pushed against the strictures of the post-war diet and against the conservatism of the 1950s commercial marketplace. In the 1960s, whether one expressed one’s preferences by cooking from Julia Child’s newly published masterpiece on French cooking, or rejected the fussiness of the previous era via the counterculture and “ethnic” eateries of the day, there were a myriad of ways to declare one’s taste preferences. “Good taste,” it seemed, didn’t exist as the core of a national culture; it was a diffuse, utterly mutable good, changing with every second and every dish.

As we left the informal tasting on Wednesday, my taste expectations shook to the core, I recalled the history of another important tasting. In 1976, two wine retailers and enthusiasts, Steven Spurrier and Patricia Gallagher, convened a panel of expert judges to sample the best wines in the world at the Intercontinental Hotel in Paris. Spurrier had spent the previous few years learning about the upstart winemakers in Sonoma and Napa County in California, who were making wines of such quality and depth that they rivaled the best of the French tradition. His entry of those wines into the blind tasting, which would eventually be known as the “Judgment of Paris,” was on some level a lark, a publicity stunt that would support the sales of the California vintages in his Paris shop. Yet as the judges crowned two California vintages the winners of the day—one of which was a 1973 Cabernet made by Stag’s Leap Vineyards and crafted by the winemaker Warren Winiarski, who passed away last week—they upended the easy standards by which excellence could be discussed. In facilitating this tasting, a chance to assess and appreciate excellence far beyond what the wine industry could provide, Spurrier had revealed much more than just a burgeoning market for quality wines. He had exposed the beautiful fallibility of critical expertise, and the constant need to adjust our parameters of excellence to make room for the new.

Recommended Reading: I’ve got a book recommendation coming soon, one that will take up the better part of a blog post, but I don’t want to spill the beans just yet. For now, if you are in need of a great, zippy weeknight movie, you couldn’t do any better than Hit Man, the superb new movie directed by Richard Linklater and co-written by Linklater and human parking meter Glen Powell. We haven’t had this much fun with a goofy caper since Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

The Perfect Bite: Honestly, it’s hard to beat the combo of exclusive whiskey and potato chips on a poolside day. But almost as good was the slice of zucchini pizza I sampled from Pinocchio’s (a Harvard Square institution) this past Friday, followed by a cone of salted caramel blondie ice cream. The older I get, the more I appreciate pizzas that verge on the bianca, and zucchini is the ideal topping for a ‘za that goes light on the tomato sauce. Perfection.

Cooked & Consumed: We’re in fridge emptying mode in advance of our next trip, so last night I made my favorite crisper clear-out dish: couscous. (Sadly I do not have a couscoussier, as true purists would, but separate pans of grains and veg seem to the best to satisfy a crowd of different diets.) While the couscous steamed, I sautéed onions, carrots, peppers, and squash in a blend of chopped apricots and aromatic spices, constantly tasting and upping seasonings until it popped. (The key toppings here are cumin, cinnamon, strategic salting throughout, and a late addition of a single tablespoon of butter.) Served with harissa, an ideal Sunday night dinner.