Do You Smell That?

When I first started on this adventure of mine, I was interested to see what preferences my friends - who, generally speaking, have no formal culinary training - would have toward styles and origins of wines, beers and certain foods.  My aim was/is to find out if they would have a preference for products made closer to home, as is my suspicion.  This is by no means a scientific study, but I do think people tend to be influenced a lot more by their environment, including gastronomically, than we would believe.  The Italians believe that the food of your mother's childhood home is the food you would prefer.  And that is the hypothesis I am working on.

Over the last couple of months while conducting tastings and asking people for their opinions, I have watched the way they have been tasting wine.  People tend to look at the wine, smell it then take a sip and swallow almost immediately and then spend some time analyzing the taste - which then tends to be the finish, or aftertaste.  Many would struggle with the question "what are you tasting?" while others would react more to the aromas of the wine than the taste.  I have done some research into the tasting of wine and will give a synopsis here of what is important in tasting a wine.

During wine tastings it is important to observe the appearance, colour and body of the wine with the eyes but one should understand that the visual aspects of today's wines do not give the hints as to flavours or quality that previous generations of wine did.  Hold off at this point in determining anything about the wine other than whether or not it appears to have an off colour (dark gold to brown for white, red-brown to brown for red).  Swirl the wine a little and look to see if the wine has "legs", this means long, thin streaks of wine running down the sides of the glass.  Alcohol is denser than water and thus has more body, these "legs" are an indication that the wine will have a decent body feel (a fullness, coating the tongue) in the mouth and appropriate alcohol content.

Now place your nose deep into the glass, not just above the rim.  Getting your nose inside the glass ensures you pick up just the aromas of the wine and not aromas from the room.  This is where the majority of the fruit will be noticed.  We are able to distinguish thousands of scents and you should try to think about what the wine reminds you of, not what it smells of.  Try to detect the aromas of the fruit and the barrel aging if any.  White wines should have mineral, light coloured fruits and grassy or herbal notes; red wines should have darker fruits, woody scents, exotic spices and leather or tabaco, generally speaking. The bouquet of a wine will give us a better sense of what to expect in the mouth and on the palate.

Now, sip the wine as you breathe in and hold the wine in your mouth for 3-5 seconds.  Purse your lips so that the sides of your mouth press against the sides of your tongue.  Think about what you are tasting.  As Kevin Zraly would suggest, it should taste like wine.  It is in the tasting that we get tripped up expecting to detect all of the fruits and flavours associated with wine, but our tongue is only capable of 5 basic tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami.  The first four we are all familiar with, but the last one is more recent and comes from the Japanese to describe the combination of tastes or the taste of savoury items - think about the taste of steak, asparagus or mushrooms.  When we taste wine we can forget about the salty, if it tastes salty take it back and get a refund.  That leaves us sweet, sour, bitter and, to a small extent, umami.  If a wine is extraordinary you should experience all these tastes in balance, each on the appropriate areas of the tongue.  A wine higher in tannins tends to be higher in bitter, but that should not mean a bad wine, just as some whites will be higher in sweet and does not mean bad.  Basically, we are looking for an overall balance between sweet, acidic (sour) and tannin (bitter).

Now, swallow the wine and take a breath through you mouth and nose simultaneously.  This will bring the olfactory bulb into the picture.  Olfactory receptors running from the bulb to inside your nose and the back of your throat help in distinguishing what we call flavours of the wine.  This is different from actually tasting the wine.  At this point we have determined the bitter, sour and sweet constituents of the product and prior to that the scents, and now we are detecting the combinations of these on our palate.  It is at this point that the wine will reveal itself, and yet, it is at this point that so many people get confused as everyone describes what they are experiencing.  Some people find they are unable to detect specific flavours that others are detecting.  Others are perplexed because they are detecting contradictory flavours from those of others.  All of this is normal and completely acceptable.  Mark Twain said it best: "There are no standards of taste in wine, cigars, poetry, prose, etc.  Each man's own taste is the standard, and a majority vote cannot decide for him or in any slightest degree affect the supremacy of his own standard."  I could not agree more.  Having people tell others what they are tasting may simply help someone else articulate what that something is that they are experiencing, but we are all different and if that molecule is not being detected by someone it does not mean that it isn't there or that the person is not appreciating the wine.  There is no more a subjective interpretation than that of human taste.

It is at this point that we may consider all of what we have experienced and decide, do I like this wine?  Is this a wine I think of when I think of the grape or the style of that wine?  Would I pay what is being asked for this wine?  Would this wine do better with something to eat?  All of these questions will help to determine if, in your opinion, this wine is good or bad, better or worse, etc.  I hope this helps.  My next post will pick up on the idea of taste as I discuss pairing wines with food.