{"id":54266,"date":"2024-11-12T01:00:14","date_gmt":"2024-11-12T06:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=54266"},"modified":"2024-11-11T08:43:12","modified_gmt":"2024-11-11T13:43:12","slug":"qotd-roger-scruton-terroiriste","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2024\/11\/12\/qotd-roger-scruton-terroiriste\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Roger Scruton, terroiriste<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>>Good wine is a “somewhere”, not an “anywhere”. It is stamped with a place and a year. Rooted, literally. The fancy French word for this is terroir<\/em>, referring to the way in which environment \u2014 soil, geology, even the history of a place \u2014 is all responsible for a wine’s character. Terroir<\/em> is a sense of place in a glass. Roger Scruton often referred to himself as a “terroiriste<\/em>“. And this could describe his political philosophy as much as his philosophy of wine. From 2001 to 2009, Scruton wrote a wine column in the New Statesman<\/em>, enabling him to smuggle into that otherwise exclusively Left-wing journal, all sorts of reactionary political ideas: about God, about fox-hunting, about beauty, about his love of the countryside.<\/p>\n

Wine, for Scruton, was never just about the taste, never a merely aesthetic sensation. Indeed, he was extremely sniffy about all those “blind tastings” \u2014 the ones where we delight when an expert fails to spot the difference between plonk and Premiere Cru<\/em>. They miss the point, says Scruton. Blind tasting, he explained, is like blind kissing \u2014 not a good way to distinguish, for example, between someone who is sexy and someone who is not. Indeed, if the experiment on Love Island<\/em> is anything to go by, it’s not even a good way to distinguish who your own girlfriend is.<\/p>\n

That’s because sexual chemistry, like wine, is a great deal more than some momentary sensation on the lips. It’s a great deal more than a message sent by taste receptors to the brain. It is all about the terroir. And this is not just a comment about wine but about aesthetic experience in general. When we encounter a work of art, we bring a whole hinterland of knowledge that makes sense of that specific experience and gives it its character as art. Music is more than a vibration of the air and its reception by the ear and the brain. So too with wine and taste.<\/p>\n

Giles Fraser, “Raise your glass to Roger Scruton, the terroiriste<\/em>“, UnHerd<\/em><\/a>, 2020-01-15.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Good wine is a “somewhere”, not an “anywhere”. It is stamped with a place and a year. Rooted, literally. The fancy French word for this is terroir, referring to the way in which environment \u2014 soil, geology, even the history of a place \u2014 is all responsible for a wine’s character. Terroir is a sense […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,28,41,131],"tags":[477,248,101],"class_list":["post-54266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-media","category-quotations","category-wine","tag-magazines","tag-realitytv","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-e7g","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54266"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":92356,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54266\/revisions\/92356"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}