I've had a terrible cold for the last week. Without being able to drink or taste wine, I am reduced to  contemplating it in my armchair, like a philosopher.

Of course, the connection between wine and philosophy goes right back to Socrates' boozy after-dinner dialogues with his high-minded cronies. From that time until now, as Monty Python so melodically observed, philosophers have not been shy about knocking back a few bottles in between lectures on ethical imperatives or what-have-you.

It continues to this day. Click here, and you can listen to a chatty, down-to-earth interview with the British philosopher Barry Smith, as he discusses his own work on the philosophy of wine. Prof. Smith just edited a collection of essays on this topic entitled "Questions of Taste" (Oxford University Press, $34.95). His main concern is whether the experience of wine is subjective and unique to each individual, or whether the wine has an objective taste that can be shared among people who know what to look for. Can anyone be "right" when giving judgment about a wine?

Though this question may seem academic, a lot of money rides on whether we can depend on wine experts to give us objective evaluations of the quality of wine.

Take the great American wine critic, Robert Parker. As Slate Magazine explained in an article, his 100-point scale of rating Bordeaux and other wines is now used as a sort of Standard and Poor's Index for people who want to buy hundreds, thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars of fine wine as an investment vehicle. But the New Yorker recently ran a fascinating piece about a man who may well be the world's greatest wine fraudster. One of the more interesting tidbits in this article is how Robert Parker may perhaps have been duped at a three-day wine tasting hosted by this man. If true, not only did Parker mistake a recently concocted fake for a wine supposed to be decades old and worth many thousands of dollars, but he was a shill for the fraudster's scheme.

All of a sudden, whether Robert Parker can form an objective assessment becomes a million dollar question. What would Prof. Smith say? Well, he indicates that he does believe that wines do have objective characteristics, and that by educating our palettes, not only will we be able to detect them, but we will learn to enjoy life more. How does he know there is a "right" way to taste wine? Because, he says, there are many wrong ways. For instance, if you try to drink it when you've got a headcold.

Matthew Sullivan is a lawyer with the Department of Justice in Toronto. He writes a weekly blog entry here on lawandstyle.ca. The Short Cellar column appears in the print edition of Precedent. Matthew can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

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