Aristotle on True Aristocracy
25 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment
in Philosophy, Psychiatry/psychology Tags: Aristotle, golden mean, honour, Nicomachean Ethics, pride, truth, vanity, virtue
Is pride a virtue or a vice? Before deciding upon this question, it is important to define ‘pride’ and to distinguish it from other, related feelings.
According to the philosopher Aristotle, a person is proud if he both is and thinks himself to be worthy of great things. If he both is and thinks himself to be worthy of small things, he is not proud but temperate.
On the other hand, if a person thinks himself worthy of great things when he is unworthy of them, he is vain; and if he thinks himself worthy of less than he is worthy of, he is pusillanimous. Vanity and pusillanimity are vices, whereas pride and temperance are virtues because (by definition) they reflect the truth about a person’s state and potentials. In Aristotelian speak, whereas the proud person is an extreme in respect of the greatness of his claims, he is a mean in respect of their truthfulness, and so virtuous.
Aristotle goes on to paint a very flattering picture of the proud person. He says that a proud person is avid of his just deserts and particularly of honour, ‘the prize of virtue and the greatest of external goods’. A proud person is moderately pleased to accept great honours conferred by good people, but he utterly despises honours from casual people and on trifling grounds. As a person who deserves more is better, the truly proud person is good, and as he is good, he is also rare. In sum, says Aristotle, pride is a crown of the virtues; it is not found without them, and it makes them greater.
True, the proud person is liable to disdain and to despise, but as he thinks rightly, he does so justly, whereas the many disdain and despise at random (or, I would say, mostly to meet their ego/emotional needs). Although the proud person is dignified towards the great and the good, he is unassuming towards the middle classes; for it is a difficult and lofty thing to be superior to the former, but easy to be so to the latter, and a lofty bearing over the former is no mark of ill-breeding, but among humble people is as vulgar as a display of strength against the weak.
Again, it is characteristic of the proud man not to aim at the things commonly held in honour, or the things in which others excel; to be sluggish and to hold back except where great honour or a great work is at stake, and to be a man of few deeds, but of great and notable ones. He must also be open in his hate and in his love (for to conceal one’s feelings, that is, to care less for truth than for what people will think, is a coward’s part), and must speak and act openly; for he is free of speech because he is contemptuous, and he is given to telling the truth, except when he speaks in irony to the vulgar. —Nicomachean Ethics, Bk IV
In short, be proud of your pride. Give it a free rein. Let it work for you. And if you must still think that pride is a vice, what you cannot deny is that Aristotle is an astute psychologist who, in discussing pride, also gave us our archetype of the aristocrat.
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Styles of Port Wine
21 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment
in Wine Tags: colheita, crusted port, garrafeira, LBV, reserve port, ruby port, single quinta, traditional LBV, vintage port, white port
Port can be matured either oxidatively in wood or reductively in bottles. The four principal styles of reductive port are ruby, late bottled vintage (LBV), crusted, and vintage. Ruby is the most ubiquitous style of port. It is a blend of the most recent harvests matured for no more than 1-3 years. Before bottling, it is fined and cold filtered and so does not require decanting. It is deep red in colour (whence its name), fresh and fruit-driven with a medium body and lesser tannins than a vintage port. It is ready to drink immediately upon release and does not tend to improve with age. Port labelled with ‘Reserve’ is essentially premium ruby, sourced from better vineyards and matured for a longer period of 4-6 years. Compared to simple ruby, it is richer, denser, and more complex.
LBV is a single vintage port that is sourced from better vineyards and that spends 4-6 years in wood (considerably longer than vintage port, whence LBV). It used to be made only in non-vintage years from grapes that would otherwise have gone into the vintage port; today the main idea is to speed up the ageing of a quality port by exposing it to oxygen for several years longer than a vintage port. LBV is commonly fined and filtered prior to bottling, in which case it does not need decanting. However, the process of filtering does strip the wine of some of its substance, for which reason unfiltered LBVs benefit more from bottle age. These unfiltered, so-called Traditional LBV, ports tend to be made in better years and must spend a further 3 years in bottle prior to release. Rather than a stoppered cork, they are capped with a conventional cork that is more conducive to bottle ageing.
Though the standard-bearer for the Douro, vintage port accounts for no more than 2% of total port production. Needless to say, it must be made entirely from grapes of a declared vintage year. The decision to declare a year as a full vintage is made by each individual port house in the spring of the second year following the harvest. Historically, port houses have declared a full vintage about three times a decade. If a port house does not declare a year as a full vintage, it may still declare a top-quality single quinta. In many cases, a single quinta vintage port is only made in non-vintage years to prevent the grapes from the best vineyards from going into a lesser port. This is the case, for example, with Graham’s Quinta dos Malvedos and Taylor’s Quinta de Vargellas. Vintage port is matured in wood for up to two and a half years, and often requires another 10-30 years in bottle before being ready to drink (although it is drunk much younger in France and the USA). Old vintage port is extremely rich, balanced, and complex with aromas of cocoa, coffee, cedar and spice, and even—for example on the 1977 Graham’s—fennel and liquorice.
Crusted port is a blend of several recent vintages, with the date on the label referring to the year of bottling rather than to the year of the vintage. It spends at least 3 years in bottle and is ready to drink right from release, making it an affordable and undemanding alternative to vintage port. At the same time, it is also capable of improving further in bottle. As it has not been filtered, it deposits a great deal of sediment or ‘crust’ and needs careful decanting. It is, in effect, a super-premium unfiltered ruby port that resembles vintage port in both style and substance.
The three styles of oxidative port are tawny, colheita, and garrafeira. ‘Tawny’ refers to the oxidized, golden-brown hue that quality port acquires from long maturation in small casks with frequent racking. So as to accelerate the ageing process, some tawnies are aged in the baking hot Douro rather than in the more temperate climes of Vila Nova de Gaia. Inexpensive tawny port is a blend of lighter ruby port and white port, and tends to be pink rather than tawny in colour. Premium tawny port is made from high quality grapes not included in vintage and single quinta vintage ports. It may be sold either with an indicated age (10, 20, 30, or ‘more than 40’ years) or simply as ‘Old Tawny’ that is typically about 8 years old. Older tawnies in particular can be incredibly complex and balanced, dominated by aromas of burnt toast, nuts, dried fruit, coffee, and the ethyl ester and acetal products of esterification. Colheita is essentially tawny from a single vintage. Garrafeira, which is an uncommon style, is port from a single vintage that has been matured oxidatively in wood (for about 3-6 years) and then reductively in large glass demijohns (for at least a further 8 years).
Port is not invariably red. White port is made from white grapes, and ranges in style from dry to very sweet. White port darkens with age, such that a very old white port can be difficult if not impossible to distinguish from a very old red port.
I find it difficult if not impossible to write about port without having some. Saude!
Neel Burton runs the Oxford Summer School on the Appreciation of Fine Wine.
Keep on Asking Silly Questions
12 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment
in Philosophy
When I was younger, the world did not make very much sense to me. I asked many silly questions, but would seldom receive any adequate answers or even an honest ‘I don’t know’. This made me feel very inadequate, as though there was some fundamental truth that I was just not getting. Then I thought, alright, they don’t know, but they’re OK about it because they know that there is at least someone who knows. The people in charge must know.
As I grew older and older and met more and more people, it became increasingly clear that no one knew all that much and that the proverbial emperor had no clothes. It took many years for me to fully come to terms with this and to rediscover the self-confidence to ask silly questions.
More broadly, as a young man I expected to find such things as perfect wisdom, perfect virtue, or perfect love in the world. But these things simply do not exist in their perfect, absolute, and ideal forms—or, at least, not outside our unique and very peculiar imagination.
