The Acquired Taste

“I know what I like.” People say it the way you plant a flag — with a little pride, a little finality, as though it settles something.

It settles nothing. Or rather, it ends the conversation, which is not the same as winning it. Knowing what you like is the easy faculty. Everyone has it. A child has it, fiercely. It costs nothing to acquire and asks nothing to keep. You point, you reach, you prefer — and none of it requires you to understand a single thing about why.

The rarer faculty, the one that takes a life to build, is knowing why. And the two are so often mistaken for each other that we have nearly stopped noticing they are different at all.

Liking is a reflex. Taste — the real thing — is a discipline.

We say certain things are “an acquired taste,” and we mean the difficult ones: the bitter, the funky, the austere, the pleasures you have to work your way toward. But the phrase gives away a secret it does not intend to. All taste is acquired. No one is born knowing why a bitter finish completes a sweet one, why a toasted note wants food beside it, why one room calms you and another sets your teeth on edge. You learn it. You learn it the way you learn a language — by exposure, by attention, by time — one distinction at a time, until the world has more grain in it than it had before.

And, like a language, it lives or dies on words. You cannot account for a preference you have no words for. The moment you can finally say why — toasted, resinous, bitter-then-bright, too clever, not clever enough — is the moment the preference quietly becomes taste. The vocabulary and the discernment are not two achievements. They are one faculty wearing two coats.

Here is where taste parts company with what people imagine it to be. A trained palate is not the one that likes finer things, or rarer ones, or the things that signal well. It is simply the one that knows why — and knowing why does something unexpected to a person. It makes them teachable.

Preference is certain. That is its whole character, and also its prison: a thing you cannot explain is a thing you cannot be argued out of, which means it can never grow. Taste can be wrong. It can be corrected, surprised, overturned by something better than what you brought to it. The person who can say why they love a thing is also the person who can discover they were mistaken — and, stranger still, be glad of it. Knowing more is the surest road to learning how much you do not. Taste is not a status. It is a humility.

I learned the difference at the pour.

For most of my life I had favorites I could not have defended — drinks I reached for without quite knowing what I was reaching for. I thought I loved them. Then I began to meet them on the axis of their making — flavor, construction, the intention underneath — and to ask, for the first time, what it was I had actually been responding to all along. Some favorites fell away under the question; there was less there than I had believed. Others deepened, because the thing I had loved without knowing it was the craft itself, and the craft turned out to be real.

Now I can say why. I know why the toasted depth of hojicha makes me want the best food on the table beside it — roast calling to roast, the whole meal sharpened by it. I know why my nightcap has to be an amaro: that the bitterness is not an ending so much as a punctuation, the proper closing of the evening’s sentence. These are not grander pleasures than the ones I had before. They are the same pleasures, finally accounted for.

And the gift hidden inside the accounting is humility. I had assumed that knowing why would make me more certain. It did the opposite. Every preference I can finally explain has revealed a dozen I cannot — each answer opening onto the size of everything I still have not tasted, or read, or learned to notice. The more I can account for, the more there is to want.

This is the whole of what the house means by curation. Not to tell you what is good and ask you to trust it — but to make the why legible. To pour something that stands openly on the axis of its making — Provenance — and to set the language down beside it, so the pleasure reaches you with a reason you can hold, and argue with, and one day outgrow. The measure of it was never whether you agree. It is whether, in time, you can say precisely why you do not.

There is a small, almost physical relief when it happens — when a thing you have loved wordlessly for years arrives at its word, and something behind the ribs settles. That is what it was. You were never wrong to love it. You had only just been introduced to the reason. And the reason, the moment you have it, points straight past itself — to everything you have not yet learned to taste. You will never be finished. After a while, that stops being daunting, and becomes the whole of the pleasure.

— Karen Ornstein