I argue against Harbin's claim that aesthetic judgements, for Kant, are not normative. By focusing on the systematic nature of Kant's Critical philosophy, I show that aesthetic judgements, like judgements in the theoretical and practical domains, must be normative, though such judgements display a distinct kind of normativity, which is expressed in their subjectivity, indeterminacy, and affectivity.

Kant claims in the third Critique that one can make about wine the merely subjective judgment that it is agreeable but never the universally valid judgment that it is beautiful. This follows from his views that judgments of beauty can be made only about the formal (spatiotemporal) features of a representation and that aromas and flavors consist of formless sensory matter. However, I argue that Kant's theory permits judgments of beauty about wine because the experience displays a temporal structure: the aromas and flavors evolve over the course of a tasting from the bouquet through the palate to the finish. An analogy with music, which Kant describes as ‘a play of sensations in time’, illuminates how wine qualifies as an object of pure judgments of taste: the ‘structure’ of a wine can be compared to harmonic structure, and its development throughout the taste can be compared to the unfolding of melody and harmonic progression.