What does it mean to taste something one cannot describe?
The question presupposes that, regardless of the extent to which one can or cannot describe what one is ingesting, one will nonetheless be tasting it—even if it is tasteless, even if one's ability to taste has been diminished or lost. (“Tastelessness” is, if nothing else, a description.)
One doesn't have to put much pressure on this presupposition before the sense of the initial question threatens to unravel—or rather to ravel, entangling itself with other questions: When and how does gustatory, tactile, and olfactory sensation amount to taste—taste as a mode of cognition, taste as a mode of judgment? In what manner and to what degree is the data of taste communicable? Are concepts and language the only media of this communicability?
Questions such as these can provoke high levels of abstraction in response. Western thinkers may be inclined to cite Kant's critical philosophy—its formulation of the so-called “togetherness principle,” for instance. They may also insist, à la Kant, on rigorously distinguishing between judgments of taste (qua aesthetic judgments) and sense perceptions of taste. And reasonably enough. Yet I would caution against mistaking this distinction for any fundamental separation: our language for aesthetic discrimination can be tellingly parasitic on our language for touch, smell, and taste, and only a lamentable sort of philosopher could doubt the reality of tactile, olfactory, and gustatory beauty. True lovers of wisdom can recognize the beautiful and the sublime in flavor and aroma as well as they can recognize beauty and sublimity in any other mode of manifestation.1
So let us hew to the concrete in thinking through that initial question. Let us pour a glass of clairin, the inimitable sugarcane spirit of Haiti, and see the sense that unfolds as we sip.
Why clairin? Well of course, because I’m obsessed with the stuff. But also because it calls to mind and complicates a certain maxim: “De gustibus non est disputandum.” (Literally, “That which concerns taste is not to be disputed.” Paraphrastically, “When it comes to taste, argument is pointless.”) Many take this to mean that matters of taste are matters of private experience and personal preference, and, as such, insusceptible of verification and adjudication. (A less common, but nonetheless clear-sighted interpretation would be that matters of taste appeal to a nonpropositional, yet nonetheless universal order of mind or reason... But let’s stay with the more popular reading for the moment.) It’s said that clairin is a polarizing spirit—that one either loves it or hates it. To some extent, that’s to be expected: despite the remarkable diversity among Haitian clairins (there being over 500 stills or guildives on the island), virtually all of these spirits are profoundly intense in flavor. Moreover, as a distillate of sugarcane juice or syrup, one can call clairin a rum, but it doesn't take long to realize that it is a unique expression of the form—worlds apart from most molasses-based rums and quite distinct even from its closest cousins, the rhum agricole of the French Antilles and, of course, Haiti’s own Rhum Barbancourt.2 (If for no other reason than the sheer potency and complexity of its flavor, clairin is arguably most reminiscent of the high-ester dunder-and-muck styles of Jamaican rum. In fact, one well-known clairin, Clairin Le Rocher, is distilled from a wash of 30% dunder.) For these reasons, one’s first experience of clairin can be overwhelming and disorienting. People who are unaccustomed to sipping high-proof spirits—let alone unaged, unfiltered, still-strength spirits—are apt to reject it.
Yet with a suitable introduction, with preparation and experience, the taste of a clairin opens out onto a world. Or better: it opens out onto a place, a place in all of its particularity. For perhaps more so than any other distillate (with the exception of pisco), clairin captures what viticulturists call terroir: the synthesis of local and environmental conditions in which a wine is produced—the soil, the topography, the climate, the vintners’ technique—and the reflection of that synthesis in the flavor of the wine. (It really is a splendid loan-word, terroir, its untranslatability consisting in how the French plays on the “-oir” suffix: as a mirror is how one sees oneself (miroir – mirer), a dormitory where one sleeps (dortoir – dormir), terroir figures an image of our being-on-land (terre)—of how a place places.)
Cut sugarcane dessicates rapidly: its juice needs to be pressed within hours of harvesting. Juiced sugarcane spoils rapidly: its fermentation needs to be controlled within hours of pressing.3 Cane juice spirits, then, require producers to work in close proximity to cane fields. Indeed, many distillers are themselves the cultivators. The consequence is a rooted spirit—a spirit distilled from cane varietals indigenous to a specific terrain (or from cultivars carefully selected to thrive in a specific terrain). And in the case of clairin, that terrain further includes the wild yeast strains in the air and on the cane stalks, which induce the fermentation spontaneously.4 (Naturally, few if any of these ecological conditions are static, and the clairin that is gathered and imported by Velier and The Spirit of Haiti is accordingly among the rare spirits that record the year of distillation on the bottle. Different “vintages” display different characteristics.)
One could write at far greater length about clairin's production history and cultural significance—about the role of sugar in the colonization of the Caribbean; the import of French methods for distilling brandy; the continuation of these traditional distilling methods and the relative absence of agricultural industrialization in Haiti (resulting in no small part from its successful war of independence and its ensuing exclusion from the global economy); about clairin’s typical distribution through village pharmacies; its popular enjoyment in Haiti as a base for infusions with fruits and spices; its ongoing use in Vodou ceremonies; and so on. But these topics warrant a far more informed and sustained study than I am capable of composing. And again, my primary interests here pertain more to the phenomenology, hermeneutics, and aesthetics of taste.
These interests carry me to clairin in part because of the cane spirit’s tendency to elicit and quicken a particular mode or genre of writing: “tasting notes.” Of course, one can find tasting notes in just about any product description or review, for just about anything ingestible. But spirits as abundantly flavorful as clairin have a way of sending this descriptive impulse into an overdrive of enargeia (if not into the borderlands of dream and chimera).
Consider a few instances from the singular Lance Surujbally, a.k.a., “The Lone Caner”.
On the nose of a Clairin Sajous 2013:
There was this incredibly large bubble of salt and wax expanding through my head. Brine and gunpowder exploded on the nose, mixed in with kerosene and fuel oil, turpentine and lacquer. It was almost like sniffing a tub of salt beef, yet behind all that, there was the herbal clarity of water in which a whole lot of sugar was dissolved (“swank” we called it in my bush-working days), crushed green mint leaves and just-mown grass on which the sprinkler is irrigating in bright sunlight.
On the palate of a Clairin Casimir 2013:
It had the smooth, hot body of an energetic and buxom porn star, and took a sharp left turn from the nose, starting out with sweet sugar water and cucumber slices in diluted vinegar…it sported a mouthfeel that alternated between silk and steel. Mint, marzipan, more floor polish, faint olive oil notes drummed on the tongue. It had less of the fusel oil that so marked the Sajous, with dill, coriander, lemon pepper, fennel, fish sauce, and some weird mineral/vegetal component that reminded me of peat for some reason. I don’t know how it managed that trick, but somehow it walked the delicate line between tongue-in-cheek titillation and overt sleaze.5
What is one doing with such accounts? —Having fun? —Of course. Perhaps most importantly. But why is it fun? —Well, to dissect the why risks ruining the fun... Imparting information? —Sure. Or maybe. What kind of information, exactly? In composing and publishing our tasting notes, are we enabling others to imagine what we taste? Do we expect others, when ingesting the same thing, to taste what we taste? —Say we’re inviting them to, exploring the reach of our communion in such things.
But we’ve already gotten ahead of ourselves here—literally: before we begin to inquire into the intimacy and communicability of taste (“De gustibus,” etc.) we should dwell on what these descriptions serve to accomplish for oneself in recording them. No doubt, many of us have had the experience of reading a product's tasting notes and wondering, “Did someone really taste all that?”—perhaps suspecting that s/he did not. (Liberties can be taken, after all, especially in the context of promotion.) Nevertheless, I urge you to pour yourself a fine something, familiar or unfamiliar, and to take notes on the notes you taste—as freely and as uninhibitedly as you can write them, the only limit being the basic aim of doing so: to articulate your experience in tasting.
Let’s have a go. I pour a glass of Vaval 2017. I nose it. This isn’t our first encounter. (Nor is it my first drink of the evening.) I glide past the acetone barriers that might hamper the uninitiated. My experience of these aspects is now more akin to sticking my head inside an old cradenza: it’s not just the lacquer that I smell, but the house—old paper, pottery, dried flowers, Grandma’s Sunday Gravy... There are the herbal notes: bruised mint or tarragon at first, but with the tomato- and caper-like acidity, the full impression is that of a bouquet garni that’s been stewing in cacciatore. And still, for all of this saltiness and savoriness, the last bit of breath is always earthy-sweet, like toasted meringue set out to cool in a wine cave. I sip, and it’s this unctuous meringue profile that presents first, followed by a loamy retronasal olfaction of chocolate mint. The unfiltered lipids in the spirit buffer my mouth from the heat of the 50.5% abv: there’s no burn, but a warmth travels up and down my pharynx at once. Seawater at the back of my tongue. The tomato returns, as though sun-dried in ocean air. The lacquer is in the palate too, but now as a kind of astringency that rolls hot over the sides of my tongue like over-steeped black tea. A few more searching sips and the central-nervous-system effects have set in. It feels good to be writing...
This exercise in noting demonstrates several things. First, one tastes more—notices more—when one is writing about the experience. No doubt, this is in part a practical consequence of how the act of writing disciplines one’s attention to the phenomena. A similarly heightened awareness would flow from talking about the drink with another who is sharing it (presuming one's company and atmosphere were collectively conducive to attending patiently to the phenomena).
However, this exercise in noting/noticing/taking note shows even more than the insights of cultivated attention (Warhnehmung, not just “perception,” but “taking account of something,” “taking something as true”). To return at last to our opening question, it intimates an intertwining of taste and language. This is not to assert that one can taste only insofar as one can articulate the particularities of what one tastes—not to deny, in other words, the pre-conceptual, pre-thetic deliverances of our perception as a distinct order of mind or logos. It is simply to trace the analogical bond between the intuitive and the discursive. It is to show how one’s taste and articulacy are enriched concurrently, each capacity developing with and through the other. Call it an education of the tongue.
My first encounter with clairin beggared my powers of expression. At the time, I had a fairly weak grasp of what clairin was, but I knew that it was a cane juice distillate from Haiti. I had even heard a bartender or two on Cocktail College mention it in passing as something that excited them. So I bought a bottle—specifically a 2018 Casimir—anticipating something akin to the Martinique rhum I was beginning to enjoy, if something a bit stronger. (Bartenders who routinely sample diverse spirits often end up gravitating to the stronger flavors.) Even with this background, I was unready. That first dram stoned me. It left me groping for words. All I could manage to sputter out—after, of course, “holy shit”—was “banana” and “burning tires.” I couldn’t so much as say whether I enjoyed it. (One could take that as a sign that I did not, but the distinction wasn’t so clear-cut as that; giddiness is not without its enjoyments.) Still, the more I learned about clairin—about that particular bottle, about other producers, about the category as a whole—the more I read what others had tasted and described in it, and the more deeply I came to understand the sources of those flavors, lo and behold, the more I was able to taste and describe when I sipped that Casimir.
All the same, that learning had to be anchored in my embodied existence. For another entailment of the intertwining of perception and language is the fact that one’s ability to taste and describe is conditioned by all that one has tasted and described previously. This is the crux at which the hermeneutics of gustation animates the phenomenology. Cognition in touch, smell, and taste is recognition (anamnesis). Hence the fixations in culinary art and science on memory and Proust's madeleine, the picture of flavor and aroma as transportative, if not transformative—as affording momentary recoveries of childhood. To be sure, in defending flavor and aroma as conduits of beauty, truth, and goodness (or at least, as fitting topics for philosophy), one need not search for better evidence than their capacity to engender childlike wonder. However, these recognitions too often rest at a kind of nostalgia, as if the recollection of prior experience were an end in itself. Richer it is to regard these recognitions as events in the adventure of one's being, with each manifestation recasting one's horizons for the next, drawing one evermore deeply into the plenitude of Being. To paraphrase Nicholas of Cusa: sipping and being-sipped coincide.6
Less mystically, we might also recall Gadamer's characterization of hermeneutic situatedness and understanding as an ongoing “formation and fusion of horizons.” In one sense, this fusion (Verschmelzung) describes a particular or personal coalescence: my memories of my grandmother's house inform my experience of a clairin; my experience of a clairin leads me to see those memories anew; all that I experience thereafter makes further such folds in the weave of my "historically effected consciousness."7 In another sense, this historical effect or effectual history (Wirkungsgeschichte) consists in a collective mediation: the fore-structures of meaning through which I apprehend a clairin are inherently social; the being or reality of clairin transcends any one person’s history or experience; that being or reality unfolds in the understanding as a kind of conversation, in which the partners continually (re)create a common horizon. If I should ever have the opportunity to share my experience of clairin with a person from Haiti—say, a manbo or oungan who regularly uses clairin as an offering or in consecration—our understanding(s) of clairin (of its place in our histories, of its history as ours) would be brought into question. How we then respond to the charge of that question—its summons to a dialogue of question-and-answer, speaker-and-listener—is another matter.
“De gustibus non est disputandum.” Ultimately, it’s not clear whether the adage earns its keep. It’s as though the only kind of argument concerning matters of taste that it can picture is one that insists on “how it tastes for me.” One thinks to the theatrical arguments for skepticism—“But surely another person cannot have this pain!”—that Wittgenstein does not seek to refute so much as to dissolve as an instance of language “idling” or “[going] on holiday.”8 Indeed, it is the very intertwining of taste and language we have been exploring—the fact that I myself hardly understand what I am tasting before I can put it into words—that complicates the so-called privacy of inner experience. Metaphysical finitude, the fact of our separateness—that only I can live my life, have or be my body—entails no limit to our capacity to reach one another through speech.9 Communication is social through and through, and insofar as the contemplation of our inner experience is conducted via language, there in the chamber of our innermost selves we will find the other, the common, already waiting for us (pouring two glasses of clairin, one hopes).
Prosit.
There are not many book-length philosohical studies of gustatory taste, but two very fine examples can be found in Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), and Sarah E. Worth, Taste: A Philosophy of Food (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).
We should all heed the wisdom of Matt Pietrek and Carrie Smith in distinguishing rum and clairin as discrete subcategories of cane spirits. We should also buy their prodigious new book, Modern Caribbean Rum: A Contemporary Reference to the Region’s Essential Spirit (Wonk Press, 2022). See in this regard pp. 3-4, 9-10. No doubt, clairin is as rich in its internal variety as other cane spirits—cachaça, charanda, arrack, and so on. Even so, that hasn’t stopped producers of clairin from labeling the bottles “rum clairin,” “rhum sirop de canne,” “rhum pur jus de canne,” or even “rhum agricole.” And even if that practice is done largely for economic ends, providing a frame of reference for prospective buyers who are unfamiliar with “cane spirits” as a family of distillates, the choice says something. It acknowledges that most people (outside of Haiti) will learn about clairin by dint of learning about rum. Likewise, professional rum writers—writers who hardly need to be reminded that clairin is clairin just as cachaça is cachaça—do not hesitate to write about clairins. Nor do they hesitate to call them rums.
Alternatively, distillers can reduce the fresh juice into a syrup. Being more stable, that syrup can be transported, reconstituted, and fermented at a later point in time. These processes entail various possible changes to the end product, to be sure, the desirability of which depends on the distillers’ intentions.
Compare Velier’s “Triple ‘A’ protocol for Clairin” with the A.O.C. for Martinique Rhum. Apparent from the outset is the greater length and density of Martinique’s geographical indication. With that regulation comes standardization—hardly an ill in itself, but a source of fewer examples and less variety within the category. Secondarily, one may note the shorter fermentation period of A.O.C. rhum agricole in contrast to clairin, along with its use of column stills rather than pot stills.
See the digest of the Lone Caner’s clairin reviews in his Key Rums of the World series. I also recommend the reviews on the Different Spirits YouTube channel. Check out Scott's responses to the Clairin Vaval 2017 and Clairin Casimir 2018, along with some of the aged clairins that have begun to surface in recent years. Throughout, you’ll find descriptions ranging from one-to-one comparisons (grassy, briney), to fanciful hybrids (pickled mint leaves, marshmellows soaked in olive oil), to the immersively ekphrastic or imagistic (the musky dampness of moss on a misty morning, a sumo wrestler in heels).
See Chapter 10 of Cusa’s De Visione Dei, translated by Jasper Hopkins as Nicholas of Cusa’s Dialectical Mysticism: Text, Translation, and Interpretive Study of "De Visione Dei" (Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press, 1985).
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, Second Revised Edition, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2006), cf. 267-382 (Part Two, IV), esp. 298-304 (Part Two, IV.1.B.iv).
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Revised Fourth Edition, ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), §38, §132, §253, cf. §§65-133, §§243-315.
See Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 343-370, esp. 369.