Secrets of Taste

“Taste is the feminine of genius.”

—Edward FitzGerald, English writer. (1809-1883)

Human beings are driven by taste. The search for new tastes has driven human beings to seek out new frontiers since they realized there were new frontiers to seek out. I have no doubt that Captain Kirk and the Starship Enterprise were actually looking for new trade routes in space to find exotic species with new spices.

History’s official “Age of Exploration” began in 1453 when Constantinople was conquered by the Ottomans (modern day Turks). That not only ended the last remnants of the Roman Empire, it also shut off the only land route from Europe to Asia. When the Ottomans started raising taxes on the land route, the Europeans set out to sea to find a different route.

Columbus wasn’t searching for enlightenment in India, or just looking around at the beaches. He was searching for a sea trade route to buy spices from India without going overland through Constantinople. Nobody likes taxes. Especially King Ferdinand.

Some wines are regularly described as “spicy”—usually Shiraz, Zinfandel, Petit Sirah for reds, Gewutztraminer and some Rieslings for white.

___ the Does God Drink?

The Search for Taste

There are five basic tastes. Or, six. Or, seven. It depends on who you talk to and how much they’ve been drinking. Scientists don’t always make the same distinctions that chefs make. According to scientists for instance, spices are not tastes, they are a sign of pain. At least as far as your nervous system is concerned.

So, to say a wine is “spicy” is to scientifically say it’s painful. I’m pretty sure that’s not what people mean when they say a Gewurtztraminer (white) is spicy, or a Petit Sirah (red) which can smell strongly of pepper. Spicy is usually designated as a taste, but of course aroma (think saffron, or turmeric) is the major part of experiencing individual spices.

Spices have always been valuable, although exactly which spice at which time varies. (London dockworkers in the 16th century were paid their bonuses in cloves.)

The chart below shows one version of the “Five Basic Tastes” that doesn’t count spicy as a taste. It shows where on the tongue you perceive different tastes. Those areas are generally agreed on but the names can vary quite a bit.

Salt

If you’re tasting salt in a wine then something has gone terribly wrong, so I’ll move right along to the others.

Sweetness

Sweetness in a wine comes from the sugar in the grapes when they are pressed. That in turn is a factor of ripeness. It’s the sugar that magically becomes alcohol during fermentation but most of time there is some residual amount left in the wine to make it more palatable. Sweetness is perceived on the front tip of your tongue. (See diagram below).

People have different thresholds for being able to recognize sweetness—which is to say some of us are more sensitive to sugar (or anything else) than others. Sugar levels in even the driest wine like Chardonnay or Cabernet are sometimes brought up to just below general threshold levels so your brain knows it’s there but you don’t.

Bringing the sugar up to or just below threshold has sold a lot of wine (including Champagne) that would have otherwise just sat there. Humans like sugar. A lot. There are other sources of sweetness too.

Glycerin makes the “legs” on a wine—-those slow streaming tears that go down the side of the glass when you tilt it. Glycerin is sweet and gives body and thickness to the wine.

Umami

Umami is a name made up by Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda based on the Japanese word umai which translates roughly as “delicious” or “pleasant savory taste.” Ikeda discovered scientifically that umami is recognized on the back of your tongue where researchers have discovered specialized taste receptors for umami, just as there are for salt, sour, sweet, and bitter. The taste is caused by glutamates from the glutamic acid found in seared meats, mushrooms, ripe tomatoes, and parmesan cheese among other things.

Sour

Ah, sour and bitter. The first reaction of people who aren’t into wine is usually “it’s sour,” which for them is a bad thing. To them it means the opposite of sweet so from a sales standpoint it’s not that hard to deal with. Give them something sweet.

But, what is usually called sour in food is what I call acidic in wine. Tomato sauce is acidic when you are talking about food. There are a lot of acids in wine but tartaric and malic are the most common ones.

Acid is a good thing in wine to a point. It makes wines crisp and sharp. Wines low on acid are often “flabby.” That’s a bad thing.

Bitter

Bitterness is what I call “astringent” and is recognized on the very back of the tongue usually in the aftertaste. Tannins are critical to aging wine successfully and are astringent. It tastes like aspirin on the back of your tongue.

It takes a little practice to separate “sour” from “bitter” from “umami” since normal people don’t get nearly as picky about the differences as food experts get. The easiest way to learn is to train yourself to notice where on the tongue you taste it. Then, you can call it anything you want.

Animal Tastes

Rodents, such as mice, can taste a flavor humans cannot: starch. Starch is a type of carbohydrate found in foods such as rice, potatoes, and corn.

Many carnivores, from cats to sea lions, have lost their “sweet tooth”—they cannot distinguish sweet tastes.

Whales, dolphins, and other marine mammals have a very reduced ability to recognize any taste except salt!

from National Geographic, Resource Library, “A Matter of Taste”

So, your cat doesn’t know if their food is sweet or not. And, your squirrels can taste cornbread. Somehow it’s not that surprising that animals that live in the ocean can only taste salt. I have relatives like that.

Where else do you learn this stuff?

Secrets of Alcohol

Alcohol is a much bigger subject, but for now I’ll just note that alcohol is a taste too. Usually it’s considered bitter among the tastes above but not everybody uses the same words and misunderstandings do arise.

When I was President of a non alcoholic winery (yes, that really happened) I drank mostly non alcoholic wines and I can tell you, when I did taste normal wines they tasted like vodka. Vodka tasted like gasoline. People who didn’t drink alcohol were fine—they had no baseline to judge it against—so they didn’t notice.

The point is that alcohol doesn’t always taste the same. It’s relative like aroma or color. It depends on what you taste right before and after it. But beyond that is another secret your average wine expert doesn’t know.

In 2014 a writer named Anne Harding published an article for Live Science which reported studies that proved that alcohol doesn’t taste the same for everybody.

There is a specific variation in a particular human gene that makes alcohol taste different to some people, based on your genetics. So, besides the variation in taste due to the context of what you’re tasting, there is an actual physical difference in taste for some people.

"The reason this work is significant is because it fills in this gap, because no one had shown in the lab that the alcohol actually tastes differently depending on which [version of the gene] you have."

—John E Hayes, head of the Sensory Evaluation Center at Pennsylvania State University.