taste as an accomplishment Based on comparative ethnographic observations of wine, food and music lovers, the paper proposes an analytic grid in order to give an account of taste as a collective performance and an on-going process, instead of treating it as a passive consequence of the things tasted and an addition of competences and preferences inside the amateur (“discovering quality”). Four central elements have been displayed, on which taste as an activity relies on: – the object tasted – a collective of tasters (be they “amateurs” or not) – the taster’s “body and soul” – and material and technical devices. The crucial argument is not in the list itself, but in the reflexive and performative status of each of those elements. None of them is“already there”, none can be taken as an external determination of taste. Being both results and sources of taste, they are emerging together with the performance: they are “footholds”, productive constraints which amateurs themselves continuously discuss, test, elaborate. Bodies, spaces, durations, devices, objects, tools, instruments: the love of music or wine is an activity, not only the acknowledgement of social identities or a collective rite reinforcing groups and subjectivities. All the heterogeneous mediations engaged in any tasting performance give a handle to the analyst, when she herself wants to give an account of taste as an active performance. This is not only true within the moment of taste: it can be extended in time, to the analysis of the consumer-product agreement on markets. Buying is like tasting: it can be described as an on-going experimentation relying reflexively on the product to be sold, the collective of sellers and buyers, the technical devices of markets and each buyer’s own “interest”.Thus, economics leave the only scientist model of a set of hidden determinations. So conceived, taste is much more than a natural property of men and things, a miraculous coordination of products and preferences on a market, or a passive social rite: it is an experience, providing an empirical model to analyse our active relationships with things, with ourselves, and with the others.