Rashomon, the Relativity of Taste & Marquis Fruit Weight
Chapter Five. Part Three.
In Akira Kurosawa’s classic 1950 film Rashomon, four people witness the same crime but recount drastically different versions of the event. The New York Times reported, “The title quickly entered the English language and became shorthand for the relativity of truth: “the Rashomon effect,” invoked to indicate how witnesses to the same event may see it differently.”¹
I studied Kurosawa’s work in college where my professor summarized Rashomon’s theme with the observation, “Truth is relative; therefore there is no truth.” Since becoming a student of perception I’ve come to believe my professor may have gotten it wrong. It is not truth that is relative; it is perception.
All that we perceive, all that we see, smell, hear, feel and taste is blurred through the lens of personal experience and tainted by relativity. You and I may see the same images and smell the same scents but can you see the joy in my son’s eyes when we meet, or experience the same comforting warmth as I do when inhaling the sweet spice aroma in my grandmother’s kitchen? Sure, we look at the same sunset, listen to the same music, and eat the same meal but we don’t experience the same reactions once those perceptions are filtered through our unique set of memories, emotions, upbringing, culture and environment.
Putting wine into some sort of quality hierarchy based on personal observation is a practice built on the shaky foundation of the Rashomon Effect. Wine quality is determined through perception and therefore true wine quality evaluation can only exist for the individual. For the world to agree on what constitutes “quality wine”, like-minded individuals must come to terms with an intuitive common denominator.
Here’s the secret. Wine lovers all over the world have formed a giant club. Its members share the same perceptual interpretation of taste and they’ve built an elitist union that agrees on what constitutes “quality wine”. If your perceptions don’t jive with the membership – say you’re one of the people who help consume 20 million cases of White Zinfandel every year – then you are persona non grata in this club.
Some club members are more outspoken and have taken on the mantle of “wine critic”. Once the club agreed that wines have different quality levels the critics took it upon themselves to rate, rank and classify wine in a variety of formats. In some systems the highest rating is 100-points while in others there’s no higher honor than Tre Bicchieri (3 glasses). Some prefer the 20-point scale and some prefer little icons such as stars or bottles, which are really just a 3, 4 or 5-point scales for the mathematically challenged.
In his book Reading Between the Wines, wine importer Terry Theise laments the inadequacies of rating wine on the 100-point scale. He tells the tale of an encounter with Pierre Rovani, who at the time was a critic with Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate – the same publication that popularized the 100-point scale;
I asked him why it wouldn’t suffice to simply have groups – fair/good/very good/excellent/superb – and rank the wines in order of preference within those groups. “Good question,” answered Pierre, “so what you’re proposing is a five-point scale.”²
In the end it appears that all rating systems come down to some sort of finite numerical ranking. But while all wine rating systems may be created equal, they are not all created by wine critics. Winemakers also have their own unique systems for analyzing and rating wine quality and the process they use to reach their numerical analysis can be very different from the methods employed by wine critics.
Measuring Marquis Fruit Weight™
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the “MollyDooker Shake” – a process popularized by Australian winemakers Sarah and Sparky Marquis of MollyDooker Wines. While researching that post I came across notes from an interesting seminar hosted by Sarah and Sparky several years ago. All of my meetings with the Marquises have been “interesting” which comes from the Latin “inebriating”.
Since this is an article about wine ratings I should point out that MollyDooker wines have landed in the Wine Spectator’s Top 100 Wines of the Year eight times (including three placements in the Top Ten) and Robert Parker of the aforementioned 100-point scale has awarded 99-points to five MollyDooker wines.
To determine the quality level of wine potentially destined for their label, MollyDooker created a unique rating system called Marquis Fruit Weight™ (MFW). The scale is based on the “measure of how far back on your tongue the velvety sensation of fruit goes, before the prickly sensation of tannin is exposed.”³
I’ve written about the credence I give to texture and weight when assessing wine, so I was fascinated by the concept and eager to give it a try. Marquis Fruit Weight, Sarah explained, is measured as a percentage from the very tip to the very back of your tongue. I sipped some wine, closed my eyes and imagined the stripes of a little football field superimposed on my tongue. When I considered the depth of fruit weight on my palate I reached the conclusion that the first wine was just 12 yards shy of a touchdown so I awarded it 88 percentage points.
After participating in this rating exercise I compared the Marquis Fruit Weight percentages I perceived to ratings awarded the same wines by the Wine Advocate and the Wine Spectator. I found it curious that even though the process was considerably different, the resulting ratings were remarkably similar.
- Mollydooker, 2007 “The Boxer” Shiraz. 88% MFW
The Wine Spectator, 90 points. The Wine Advocate, 93 points. - Mollydooker, 2007 “Blue Eyed Boy” Shiraz. 92% MFW
The Wine Spectator, 92 points. The Wine Advocate, 95 points. - Mollydooker, 2007 “Carnival of Love” Shiraz. 96% MFW
The Wine Spectator, 95 points. The Wine Advocate, 96 points. - Mollydooker, 2007 “The Velvet Glove” Shiraz. Off the scale – the velvety fruit sensation stopped somewhere between my kidneys and my spleen.
The Wine Spectator, 96 points. The Wine Advocate, 98 points.
In the end it doesn’t matter if you rank wine with a 100-point scale, little wine glasses, or a tiny football field imagined on your tongue because your quality measurement is really only relevant to you. I sometimes use a simple star method when tasting hundreds of wines in an afternoon. At a recent tasting I sat through several average wines before finally getting excited about a sample of Gerard Seguin’s Gevrey Chambertin Les Crais. I waxed poetic about its lovely attributes and exclaimed, “Finally, a delicious wine that I can give 3 stars!”
The taster to my right agreed and said, “I use a star rating system too, but my scale has five stars!”
“Oh, so does mine.” I replied.
And so it goes. Even within a club that shares common taste perceptions there is disagreement. Its members may feel their perception is as honest and true as the witnesses in Rashomon but as long as perception is the tool we use to ascertain quality, there can be no truth in wine evaluation.
Except of course, for the individual, and in the end isn’t that enough.
¹ Lopate, P. (Dec. 2, 2016) Is ‘Rashomon’ Kurosawa’s Best Film?, The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/books/review/kurosawas-rashomon-paul-anderer.html
² Theise, T. (2010) Reading Between the Wines, 104
³ Mollydooker. Marquis Fruit Weight.™ http://www.mollydookerwines.com.au/web/about_us_fruit_weight.cfm Accessed January 13, 2013.
