you're an idiot. reading novels is about knowledge. you can appreciate the detail and art of a novel by reading more... about novels, about the period, about the author, about anything. reading is an intellectual activity. tasting something is sensory. i know there's good wine and bad wine, stuff that is high quality and stuff that is low. there is also personal taste-preferences, entirely subjective. what i am saying is that drinking wine for 20 years will not make you a 'more adept' taster of wine. your sense of taste only changes as you age, completely arbitrarily, and has nothing to do with 'honing a palette'. this is pseudo-bollocks. even top wine tasters are inconsistent. there is literally no foundation in the idea you can taste a lot of wines and have an instinctively-trained 'better taste'. no more than the idea that by rubbing a lot of tree bark your sense of touch will 'acquire' improvement and become more sensitive. it is total bollocks. reading, being intellectual, means that if you read for 20 years... you will have 20 years of actual KNOWLEDGE about topics, about aesthetics, about novelistic style. people become 'fine art' appreciators because they have a lot of knowledge, expertise, and wide-reading. it involves some intellectual work. people become 'wine tasters' by talking entirely about subjective taste-impressions. 'taste' is like 'pain' - how do you qualify it? with writing there is actual technique. a novel has actual content. you can check (objective) reference works. you can read histories and studies that are related to the novel. how would you 'improve' your sense of taste over 20 years, in the same conscious fashion? your taste-buds and sense of taste changes as you get older. it is out of your control. there is no 'refinement' to be pursued. other than drinking a lot and becoming one of those boring people with a red nose who slur words about 'terroir' and 'cinnamon hints' at the end of a fulfilling meal.
imo 75% of the 'value' of an expensive wine comes from reputation/prestige/veblen good appeal alone. it is just an industry applying a specious sense of quality to a drink. it makes no more sense than lobster being (arbitrarily) expensive in restaurants - it's all perception, anticipation, the 'image'. people pay a lot for lobster and think it tastes 'divine' because it costs a lot and now has a social capital (which q.v. levi-strauss on the sociology of food). regardless of the fact that 100 years ago lobster was so common that people thought it was cruel to feed prisoners in the american north-east lobster more than once a week. it is ALL perception. if you put something in a cellar for 20 years, you are going to place a lot of apprehension and expectation about that drink. when you finally uncork it, you're going to be convinced you are drinking something that is 'objectively' better - despite the fact your taste-buds and sense-receptors have irrevocably changed between the present and that past, 20 years ago (i.e. there is no way to reasonably gauge it; no control). it is pretty much a totally specious placebo effect. the fact top wine tasters - in the WORLD - cannot consistently identify 'great' quality wine should say it all. no literature critic is mistaking 50 shades of grey for homer.
Last edited by Uzique The Lesser (2013-06-26 03:41:45)
