This whole “complexity” thing has been a pet peeve of mine for awhile. Seems like I find myself trying to come up with a new way to say the same thing every time so I’ll just beg everyone’s indulgence and copy-paste a bit on the issue I posted a few years ago.
Cacophony and its Discontents
A comment by Japanese chef Hiromitsu Nozaki in a Wine Spectator review of the Tokyo restaurant scene recently jumped out at me. Nozaki said, “My role is to remove—not add—to the ingredients, so that we can see the purity, the simplicity, and the essence of each dish. It is much harder to remove than to add.” It’s an unusual perspective to read in a wine magazine, since the prevailing standard of quality for wine is often assumed to be the opposite of simplicity—complexity. In wine jargon, “simple” is always a pejorative, never associated with purity or other virtues. Complex is better than simple the same way that big is better than small. Since so many people accept this so unquestioningly, it is worth considering what they mean when they call a wine complex, and what they might be undervaluing when deriding the simple.
In his new book Desert Island Wine, Miles Lambert-Gócz traces the origin of complexity’s use in winespeak to H. Warner Allen’s 1932 book The Romance of Wine. “Allen,” writes Lambert-Gócz, “made reference to complexity by name several times while discussing how grapes ought to be processed so as to maximize the multiplicity of ‘nuances.’” People use the term in a similar manner today. A wine with a “multiplicity of nuances” is presumed to be complex, even though this kind of multiplicity often results in a cacophony or disjointedness. A wine with its elements in perfect harmony is often mistaken for simple, since it is not possible to isolate every nuance and reduce it to a “descriptor” in a “tasting note.”
The “tasting note” is by now the principal medium through which people of all experience levels communicate about wine, and like any medium it dictates a message independent of its content. Specifically, the need to communicate about wine in tasting notes results in a revision of aesthetic standards to favor those characteristics easiest to express in tasting notes. “[W]ith our nose to larboard,” writes Lambert-Gócz, “we chase the fleeting nuances in our frantic effort to determine the relative complexity of the wines coming before us. As if all aromatic sensations could be named, and none would overlap, we attempt what in effect amounts to a headcount of sensations which we are ready to accept as the definitive indicator of quality: Complex, rich flavor with suggestions of plums, cherries, capers, violets, mint, raspberries, green pepper, almonds, cedar, and an undertone of chocolate.” And as a result of writing in such “tortured prose likening wine to 57 different fruits (the Heinz Variety Tasting method),” as Joe Dressner puts it, “we try to pigeonhole a wine into the confines of these external evaluators. We do not taste and drink the wine for what it is, but for what it approximates in wine tasting lexicon.”
Interestingly, one comestible which the Heinz Variety Tasting method is especially useless to describe is Heinz ketchup itself, which only distantly tastes like its primary ingredient (tomatoes) and has no other individually discernible constituent flavors. This was the subject of a long Malcolm Gladwell piece attempting to resolve the conundrum of why nobody’s been able to improve on Heinz. The article is premised on the fact that while ketchup may seem pedestrian, it is actually a very sophisticated concoction—“alone among the condiments on the table, ketchup could deliver sweet and sour and salty and bitter and umami, all at once.” But just as importantly is the way in which it delivers these things. Heinz ketchup is strong in “amplitude,” “the word sensory experts use to describe flavors that are well blended and balanced, that ‘bloom’ in the mouth”:
When something is high in amplitude, all its constituent elements converge into a single gestalt. You can’t isolate the elements of an iconic, high-amplitude flavor like Coca-Cola or Pepsi. But you can with one of those private-label colas that you get in the supermarket. “The thing about Coke and Pepsi is that they are absolutely gorgeous,” Judy Heylmun, a vice-president of Sensory Spectrum, Inc., in Chatham, New Jersey, says. “They have beautiful notes—all flavors are in balance. It’s very hard to do that well. Usually, when you taste a store cola it’s”—and here she made a series of pik! pik! pik! sounds—“all the notes are kind of spiky, and usually the citrus is the first thing to spike out. And then the cinnamon. Citrus and brown spice notes are top notes and very volatile, as opposed to vanilla, which is very dark and deep. A really cheap store brand will have a big, fat cinnamon note sitting on top of everything.” . . . Generic colas and ketchups have . . . a hook—a sensory attribute that you can single out, and ultimately tire of.
It’s that multiplicity of hooks that is often mistaken for complexity. But, as Lambert-Gócz concludes, “The great paradox of worthy complexity is that it reaches its apogee when the aromas comprising it have pulled together, e pluribus unum fashion.” The veneer of such a composition may appear simple. If there is an underlying complexity, it lies in the precarious balance necessary to render that veneer flawlessly, and the aesthetic vision to make it beautiful. If you are merely counting the multiplicity of nuances, imbalances can be drowned out by the cacophony. If instead you are striving for one sustained note of unadulterated purity and exquisite beauty, it is essential to have the courage to silence the cacophony, even if the result is, for better or worse, beyond description.