Taste Is Not an Opinion. It Is an Inheritance.
How French wine colonised global taste — and what that reveals about power.
There is a particularly well-maintained illusion in the world of wine: that taste is a personal matter. An intimate preference, spontaneous, authentic. You like what you like, and no one can tell you otherwise.
Neurology, sociology, and the history of wine tell a very different story — without denying what is irreducible in individual sensory experience.
Taste is not an opinion. It is an inheritance. But like any inheritance, it can be questioned, contested, or deliberately acquired.
What the Brain Does Before the First Sip
In 2008, Plassmann, O'Doherty, Shiv, and Rangel conducted a deceptively simple experiment: participants tasted the same wine presented under two different price labels, without their knowledge. The results became a landmark in decision neuroscience. The wine presented as more expensive generated measurably and significantly higher activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex — the region associated with the subjective experience of pleasure. Participants did not merely believe the wine was better. They derived objectively more pleasure from it.
This is not pretension. It is not naivety. It is cognitive biology.
Information precedes sensation. Context rewrites experience. And if a bottle's price is enough to alter the neurochemistry of pleasure, consider what centuries of prestige, classification, and discourse on excellence do to a palate.
That said, the price bias does not explain everything. Anyone who has watched a novice — without codes, without references, without cultural capital — be genuinely moved by a great wine knows that something escapes social construction. The sensory epiphany is real. It is documented, and it resists class analysis. What neurology demonstrates is that this authentic experience is systematically altered, amplified, or diminished by the context in which it occurs. Pure taste is not non-existent — it is simply very rarely accessible.
Bourdieu at the Table
Pierre Bourdieu did not write about wine. He wrote about something more fundamental: the way dominant classes transform their preferences into universal norms, and pass off their particular tastes as good taste in general.
Distinction (1979) demonstrates that what we call refinement, elegance, or aesthetic sensibility is never neutral. It is always someone's taste — a class, an era, a group — elevated to a standard by those who have the power to make it recognised as legitimate.
Applied to wine, the mechanism is surgically precise. Knowing that a Chambolle-Musigny 2015 is more elegant than a Gevrey-Chambertin from the same year, appreciating the minerality of a Chablis premier cru, distinguishing the autolysis of a grower Champagne from a large house blend — these are not innate abilities. They are acquired. Transmitted within certain families, certain schools, certain professional circles. They function as capital — Bourdieu's cultural capital — whose value rests precisely on its scarcity and opacity.
What you call your palate is, in large part, the imprint of your social trajectory. Not entirely — individual sensitivity exists, and some develop remarkable sensory acuity regardless of their background. But the interpretive frameworks within which that sensitivity expresses itself — what counts as complex, elegant, or great — those frameworks are socially constructed.
Technical Quality and Social Prestige: Two Realities That Coexist
Before going further, a clarification is necessary — because the sociological argument, taken to its extreme, risks producing a relativism that does not correspond to the reality of wine.
Great bottles are great for genuinely technical reasons. The aromatic complexity of a Romanée-Conti, the tannic structure of a Latour in an exceptional year, the glyceric concentration of a Yquem produced under perfectly managed botrytis — these are not social constructions. They are measurable chemical realities, the result of precise technical decisions in the vineyard and the cellar, which we have analysed in detail in The Engineering of Taste.
What sociology deconstructs is not technical quality — it is the mechanism by which certain technical qualities are recognised as legitimate, hierarchised, and priced accordingly. Technique creates the potential. Culture decides what is recognised as great.
A wine can be technically exceptional and culturally ignored — this is the history of many appellations in South-West France for decades. These two dimensions coexist, influence each other, and cannot be reduced to one another.
Understanding this distinction is precisely what allows one to navigate the wine market with lucidity rather than reverence.
Parker, or the Colonisation of Taste by a Single Palate
The modern history of wine offers an unparalleled case study in the social construction of taste: Robert Parker.
An American self-taught critic, Parker began publishing his notes in the 1970s. His method was simple — a 100-point scale, accessible descriptions, a declared independence from advertisers. His credibility was genuine. His influence rapidly became structural.
What followed was unprecedented in the history of wine: some of the most prestigious châteaux in Bordeaux began modifying their winemaking practices to match the profile Parker scored highly. More concentration. More extraction. More new oak. Higher alcohol. Wines more immediately seductive, more powerful, more legible to a palate trained on American references.
The phenomenon acquired a name: the Parkerisation of Bordeaux.
It would be inaccurate to present French producers as mere victims in this story. Many adopted these codes voluntarily — because Parker's scores opened markets, justified price increases, and simplified commercial conversations with international buyers unfamiliar with the nuances of Bordeaux. The complicity was real, and it was rational. What is remarkable is not that individual producers chose short-term profitability — it is that the collective result of these individual choices temporarily reconfigured the style of an entire region.
What is revealing is the nature of what occurred: France, a country that had for four centuries exported its own system of gustatory values to the rest of the world, temporarily redefined its production to please the palate of a single man. And in doing so, produced wines that the French themselves no longer recognised as their own.
The paradox is vertiginous: the country that had colonised global taste found itself colonised in return — not by force, but by the market, with the active complicity of some of its own actors.
French Taste as an Export System
It would be inaccurate to cast France as a victim in this longer history. Before Parker, before the globalisation of markets, it was France that had imposed its own system of gustatory values on a planetary scale — and with remarkable efficiency.
The great appellations, the classification system, the hierarchy of crus, the vocabulary of tasting — tannins, terroir, minerality, length on the palate — all of this constitutes a language that France exported as though it were the universal language of wine. To speak about wine "correctly" is still, today, to speak French — even in English.
This system is not neutral. It structurally favours French wines at the expense of those from the New World, not because they are objectively superior, but because the evaluative framework was built by and for them. A Barossa Valley Shiraz can only be assessed as "great" to the extent that it approximates the criteria established by the great French reds — structure, length, ageing potential. These are French criteria applied universally.
This is precisely what Bourdieu called symbolic violence: the imposition of a particular value system presented as universal, and accepted as such by those it dominates.
What This Changes for You
Understanding that taste is a construct — neurological, social, historical — does not mean that everything is equivalent, nor that all hierarchy should be abandoned. Nor does it mean that pleasure should be evacuated. Wine remains, for many, a vehicle for hedonism, conviviality, and sharing — and these dimensions legitimately escape class analysis.
What this reading provides is an additional freedom: the freedom to choose with full awareness.
When you select a wine for a business dinner in Paris, you are not simply choosing a bottle. You are choosing which register of taste you wish to position yourself within — and in front of whom. Understanding taste as a system gives you a freedom that the mere memorisation of references cannot offer: you can choose to play the code, to circumvent it, or to transgress it deliberately. And in each case, you know what you are doing.
Pleasure and lucidity are not mutually exclusive. A wine can move you genuinely and inform you strategically at the same time. That is precisely what makes it such a singular object.
It is not your palate that guides your choices. It is the codes you have internalised — or chosen to question.
References:Plassmann, H., O'Doherty, J., Shiv, B., & Rangel, A. (2008). Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness. PNAS, 105(3), 1050–1054.
Spence, C. (2024). Cognitive influence on the evaluation of wine: The impact and assessment of price. Food Quality and Preference, ScienceDirect.
Spence, C. (2013). Multisensory Flavor Perception. Current Biology.
Bourdieu, P. (1984).Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (trans. R. Nice). Harvard University Press. (Originally published 1979 as La Distinction).
Demossier, M. (2001). Wine Drinking Culture in France. Anthropology of Food.
To Go Further Trubek, A. B. (2008). The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir. University of California Press.
Smith, B. C. (2015). Subjectivity and Objectivity in Wine Appreciation. The World of Fine Wine.
Shepherd, G. M. (2016). Neuroenology: How the Brain Creates the Taste of Wine. Columbia University Press.
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