vergant media

Coming To Your Senses

How Loving and Tasting Wine Can
Hone Your Senses, Palate, Preferences

© 2000 by Wendy Dubit
Originally published in Wine Enthusiast magazine
I started drinking YOUNG (dad was a wine lover who delighted in descriptions) -- a fact that I credit with keen senses, clearly defined preferences and a deepened enjoyment of life.

By age 18, I noticed myself salivating whenever Champagne was opened (much less poured) -- leading me to wonder whether memory and desire were not among our most powerful senses.
My first job was with Friends of Wine magazine, where publisher Ron Fonte suggested being blindfolded (literally) to help hone a beginner's palate -- at least until one could discern the aromas of hay and straw; barnyards (clean and dirty), river rocks (wet and dry), flowers (wild and cultivated), fruits (green and ripe), wood (oak and ot her) and wine (almost always more than the sum of its parts). I gave it my college try, and came not only to know the differences by-and-by, but also to learn how isolating and articulating the senses could strengthen and cement them.

At Wine Enthusiast, where we achieved an admirable balance of qualitative and quantitative characteristics for the Buying Guide, I followed many panels with a different sort of "blind" tasting -- ferrying assorted wine flights upstate to where my friend Belle Ryder (now 94 and back then legally blind) would astound us with evocative descriptions (i.e. "reminiscent of Aunt Ola's imported rosewater from the '40s" or "a baby's diaper that should have been changed hours ago!") that were in complete keeping with the experts.'

While Belle did uncannily well for a non-wine drinker, the larger truth is this: Enophiles as a whole are among the most sense-able people around -- having honed and articulated their palates and preferences to a surprising degree. They can describe aromas and flavors that might otherwise go wordless, sharing wine and impressions with friends, and creating vast stores of memories they can turn to again and again.

Coming to Your Senses

What are our wine senses and preferences, and how can loving and tasting wine help elevate them to life-enhancing levels?

The answers, of course, are right under your nose, at your fingertips, at the tip of your tongue (and all over it for that matter). We encourage you to swirl, sniff, taste, play and let your palate run wild. We also hope you will visit the Monell Chemical Senses Center, use Ann Noble's U.C. Davis Wine Aroma Wheel, read Diane Ackerman's A Natural History of the Senses and M.F.K. Fisher’s many fine works, refer often to this magazine, and drink deeply of your own senses and preferences.

Sense of Sight
Says Diane Ackerman, "Seventy percent of the body's sense receptors cluster in the eyes, and it is mainly through seeing the world that we appraise and understand it." Though appearance is not usually the key determinant of a wine's quality, it is nonetheless the first thing we note -- tilting our glasses against paper or cloth to assess color and clarity.

Mostly, a wine's appearance tells us when it's off, as when a red wine has bricked, browned or faded, a white has darkened (often symbolizing oxidation or age), or any wine has thrown off sediment.

Certainly, how well we perceive and replicate color gives us a scale to aspire to: From the primaries of red, yellow, blue, we come to an astounding array of combinations and gradations. Interestingly, what the graphics industry and Pantone Matching System have done to distinguish and categorize a near infinite number of colors, the wine industry has done for aroma.

Sense of Smell

Smell is our most primitive and powerful sense -- readily committed to and triggered by memory, cross-linked with other senses and feelings, evocative, contextual and able to transport one in time and space.

Like primary colors, aromas can be broken down into basic categories which, when combined, yield up the rich symphony that is wine. U.C. Davis' Wine Aroma Wheel categorizes fruit aromas as citrus (grapefruit, lemon), berry (blackberry, raspberry, strawberry and black currant), tree (cherry, apricot, peach, apple), tropical (pineapple, melon, banana), dried (jam, raisin, prune, fig) and other. Likewise, vegetative aromas can be fresh (stemmy, grassy, green, eucalyptus, mint), canned (asparagus, olive, artichoke), and dried (hay/straw, tea, tobacco). Other categories include nutty, caramelized, woody, earthy, chemical, pungent, floral, spicy. Smell (often called "aromas" for wine components and "bouquet" for the whole blend) is so much the predominant sense in wine tasting that some chemists have called wine "a tasteless liquid that is deeply fragrant."

Indeed, much of what we consider flavor (up to 80% or more) is aroma/bouquet as sensed and articulated by our olfactory. Based on bouquet alone, many tasters can identify a wine's grape variety, origin/terroir, vintage and aging (including the type of oak and degree of char/toast).

Powerful though it is, we become quickly inured to smell. Which is why, often, tasters will revisit the wines in a flight twice or more -- swirling to release aromas, inhaling deeply, and continuing to breathe in the bouquet even during the tasting process.

Sense of Taste
Taste, our most life-sustaining sense, comes in four or five basic flavors -- sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and the more recently identified umami (savory). But, as with primary colors and basic aromas, a seemingly unlimited range opens to us from there.

Most tastes are a combination of sweet (as found in some white and most dessert wines), sour (a lively acidity present in many whites and some reds), salty (seldom found in wine), bitter (often a result of tannin) and umami (ripe, peak, pungent). Often, flavors can cancel each other out (as in the case of salt inhibiting bitter) or enhance each other (as in the case of salt accentuating sweetness).

Though tongue maps usually place our perceptors of sweet at the tip of the tongue, bitter at the back and sour at the sides, in truth, our taste buds are less specialized and more broadly distributed. In tasting, it is important to let wine roll over and linger on the tongue, be aerated by breath and give forth its first, middle and lasting impressions (although much of what factors into these impressions will be aroma and mouthfeel).

Sense of Touch
Mouthfeel -- the sensations that delight/prick/pain our tongue, lips and cheeks, and that often linger in the mouth after swallowing or spitting -- can range from the piquant tingle of Champagne bubbles to the teeth-tightening astringency of tannin; from the cool expansiveness of menthol/eucalyptus to the heat of a high-alcohol red; from the cloying sweetness of a low-acid white to the velvet coating of a rich Rhone. Body (thin to full), weight (light to heavy) and texture (austere, unctuous, silky, chewy) all contribute to a wine’s overall balance.

More than just impressions, these perceptions are often associated with physical drying, puckering and salivation, which can literally have wines dancing on the tongue and clinging to teeth.

Keeping the Senses Clean

Short of tooth and tongue brushing between flights, how do you keep your palate clean? In wine tasting, we "clear the palate" so as to optimally perceive each wine's aroma, flavors, mouthfeel and overall attributes. This might mean revisiting each wine in a flight so as to pick up its impressions afresh, rinsing with water, and/or eating light bread or crackers between flights. (Tasters beware: The old saying "Buy on bread; sell on cheese," does not always apply: Most bread contains considerable salt, which improves wine's flavor by suppressing bitter and enhancing sweet. Cheese has even more of an ameliorative affect.)

Wine tasters can take a cue from the old perfumers' trick of sniffing their sleeves between the many essences/elixirs they may smell on a given day. In other words, they turn to something completely different -- balancing sense with non-sense. Likewise, wine tasters may opt to briefly leave the tasting room (with its wine-filled aromas), to move briskly (deep breathing and jumping jacks are recommended) and to return refreshed.

Articulating the Senses

According to Dr. Marcia Pelchat of Monell Chemical Senses Bureau, developing a palate is less a matter of ameliorating the senses than of articulating them. "With notable exceptions," she says, "Most people are born with an equal ability to see, hear, smell, taste and touch. It is the articulation of these senses that defines talent and differentiates experts. Senses occur when stimuli hits the central nervous system. When the senses are articulated, perceptions are stored differently by the brain, which can bring them back with surprising immediacy and accuracy."

Throughout history, wine tasters have done much to create a common language, and to savor the intersection where enlivened and articulated senses meet memory, anticipation, association and personal preferences.

Sense and Preference

Of all the things to know about wine, perhaps the most important is knowing what you like.

And here, there is no better guide than your own senses. While we are born with preferences (towards sweet and away from bitter), most of our palate is acculturated over time -- factoring in environment, experimentation and openness to new flavors and sensations. Once you know your senses and preferences, you can apply them not only to wine, but also to other areas of your likes and lives -- from honey, apples, bread, cheese, coffee, eggs, mustard, olives and teas to textiles, fabrics, paint colors, perfumes, plant varieties and more.

For example, wine tasting led me to define and refine a personal "alacrity" palate that craves all things zingy -- in crisp, dry wines like Sauvignon Blanc and Alsatian Riesling as in zesty/spicy flavors of lemon and wasabi, in endless shades of green as in fabrics with translucence and sheen.

What brings you to your senses and preferences? Wendy Dubit and The Senses Bureau would love to know!