I like cheese. I like trying new cheeses; I like returning to old favourites; I like knowing the cheeses that I like. If you ask me about my favourite cheese, you’d better be prepared to settle down for a bit to listen, because it’s a subject on which I have quite a bit to say. I even – I admit it – like turning my nose up at inferior cheeses, and not just at the cheeses but at the shops, the restaurants and the nations with poor cheese selections. I am, in my own small way, a cheese connoisseur.

It may be a trick of the light, but I think there is more and more such connoisseurship around. I can without exertion think of people I know who are coffee connoisseurs, music connoisseurs, car connoisseurs, game connoisseurs, beer connoisseurs, television serial connoisseurs, whisky connoisseurs, Dr Who connoisseurs, computer connoisseurs, book connoisseurs, tea connoisseurs, film connoisseurs, and Buffy episode connoisseurs.

Yet I am deeply ambivalent about connoisseurship as a way of engaging with the world.

Good

On the one hand, connoisseurship is a good thing.

To be a connoisseur is to be engaged in delighted exploration of some small aspect of creation. It involves a formation in discrimination – the ongoing discovery that some small portion of your view is not a blandly monochrome smear, but is richly dappled, and beautiful.

To be a connoisseur can also mean a delight in inviting others on journeys of exploration. It can involve becoming an evangelist for the beauty of some small aspect of creation, infectiously teaching others to taste a richness there that they have been missing.

And to be a connoisseur sometimes goes with a turn away from mass produced items – the repeatable and predictable – to smaller producers, to artisans and cottage industries. It can be a small, and very enjoyable, gesture of resistance to economic empires.

Bad

On the other hand . . .

To be a connoisseur can mean that enjoyment becomes harder to come by – that one cannot simply drink a cup of cheerful coffee, but must analyse and compare and criticise, reserving one’s delight for the very few occasions on which one’s exacting criteria are met.

Worse, to be a connoisseur can lead to a delight in disliking: an ever more finely honed ability to pour scorn on the items that fall short: the inadequate, the ordinary, the mainstream, the popular. Some connoisseurs can be recognised by their grimaces: the sign of the permanent bad taste in their mouths.

Still worse, to be a connoisseur can involve the cultivation of superiority, an education in despising the lumpen mass of ordinary people who never look beyond their instant coffee, who think a cheese is just a cheese, and who think there is no telling difference between a Mac and a PC.

To be a connoisseur can mean developing a taste for luxury, to justify spending more and more on less and less, year by year willing to divert more and more resources and then still more into one’s quest to complete one’s collection or further one’s education – until one is willing to make purchases that one’s undiscriminating former self would have regarded as obscene.

And to be a connoisseur can require a training in falsehood, learning to declare distinctions where no distinctions exist – relishing the subtle tastes of an expensive wine that in a blind tasting one would confidently have identified as plonk.

Ambivalent

There is more and more such connoisseurship around – and I am very ambivalent about it. I am ambivalent about my own tendencies to connoisseurship (part of my general geeky obsessiveness): a version of every paragraph above could turn up in my self-description. And I am ambivalent about its spread around my world.

It strikes me that I could start collecting examples of connoisseurship, refine my categorisation of its problematic and positive features, identify excellent exemplars of these vices and virtues. Perhaps, in time, I could become known as someone who displays fine discriminating taste when it comes to displays of fine discriminating taste . . .

XKCD 915: Connoisseur – Randall Munroe – Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License

Oh, and just in case you’ve been wondering: the quick answer is probably Curworthy. For now.