How to Taste Like a Winemaker (Part 1)

If you can taste food you can taste wine.

So, here you are, a trillion or so smells in hand, now what are you going to do with them? How do we narrow that down into something we can make wine with?

There are five elements to tasting wine, one for each of your five senses:

• smell (olfactory)

• taste (gustatory)

• touch (kinesthetic)

• sight (visual)

• sound (auditory)

Unless you are impaired in one or more of those five, you use all of those everyday. You already know the basic skill of recognizing and naming your sensory experience—swimming in a freezing mountain stream is kinesthetic—touch. In this case - cold. Every single person in McDonald’s knows how to recognize taste. Every person who ever smelled coffee or bacon in the morning knows how to smell.

You see the sunset or the ocean foam. And you hear the church bells on Sunday morning or the chants from the desert Mosque at dawn. You already have all the basic skills you need. They just need to be trained.

I will say that last one is conspicuously less noticed by wine reviewers. But to those of you who are skeptical, I say to you that the sound of glasses clinking together, the voices of those around you, the sound the wine makes going into an empty glass—-all those and more are part of wine tasting and all of those influence the taste of the wine.

Music and wine

In passing I should mention that for a few years my brother conducted experiential seminars where, had you been there, you’ve could have tasted the difference in the effect of music on your perception of taste. Wine tasted while listening to Mozart doesn’t taste the same as the same wine tasted while listening to Twisted Sister.

Curious isn’t it? It’s not just opinion. Everyone in the seminars recognized the same changes in perception of how the wine tasted based on written tallies done before anyone could talk to someone else and compare notes. There have been a few University studies too.

Most people don’t know that because most people don’t think about it. You know who does think about it? Restaurateurs do. What music they play (or not) while you’re eating directly effects their profits. Retailers know that if they spray vanilla through the air vents sales go up.

Our senses are interconnected and changing one part of the experience changes all the others. Just like those cool little mobiles they put over babies cradles. You can’t move just one. Move one and everybody else moves. Including the baby.

Tasting wine is actually smelling wine.

There are only five tastes. Four if you live in the United States. We will talk about the tastes in another issue because it’s too much to handle here.

So, today we will talk about how to talk about wine aromas.

One trillion smells, five tastes—you see what I mean. No smell, no wine. Smell is the most basic building block of wine. Wines are almost entirely smell.

So, suppose you want to make a nice little Mouton Rothschild 2018 like we talked about in an earlier issue or an aromatic Italian roast of Hawaiian Kona Coffee.You need a consistent vocabulary to communicate with anyone else about how much you want of that blueberry pie and crushed rock aroma in there.

There is a basic way of approaching this, and a whole bunch of variations on that way.

The basic modern way to talk about wines was created by Professor Emeritus Ann Noble at the University of California at Davis. She noticed that some smells fell into obvious categories, for example, oranges, apples and pineapples are fruit. Roses, Jasmine and Violets are flowers. Cardamom, Cinnamon, and Vanilla are spices and so on.

So, the first way to learn about tasting wines, or tasting wines better, is to remember that you already know a lot of these smells. You recognize them in your food and you cook with them. Or walk by the flower bed in the backyard.

Dr. Noble did something about putting them into groups that everyone has used since. She put them in their categories (fruit, flowers, spices, etc) and she laid them out in a circle—what she called the Wine Aroma Wheel.

After that other people came out with their own aroma wheels. We’ll get to those in later issues.

By referring to the Aroma Wheel, or to your own experience you can begin to recognize more and more specific smells. A vague fruity smell at first might become a specific fruit, apple maybe, or it might become more like berries—-say blackberries or raspberries.

Winemaking mistakes show up in the aroma as well. If that wine is smelling of nail polish, or vinegar, or a wet dog, something went wrong in the making of it. Without aroma there would be no way to figure out what went wrong and correct it.

How James Bond does it in the movies

If you practice, at some point you will learn which smells come from the earth (terroir if you’re in France), which from the grapes and which from how the winemaker handles the wine after the grapes are crushed.

Pine or cigar box smell are smells produced by the oak barrels the wine is stored in. Smells like butter or butterscotch are produced during malolactic (a second) fermentation in those barrels.

Cherry smells and cinnamon can be signs of carbonic maceration—a technique where whole berries are fermented instead of just the juice.

With practice you too can pick up that glass and say “obviously fermented in French oak. It’s clearly been through malolactic”. See ? Already your neighbors are stunned and amazed. But all you actually did was smell pine, vanilla and butterscotch.

As for 007…

Cool. And here’s something not at all like James Bond. It’s an old video of Ann Noble talking about the wine aroma wheel. Not great production quality but I figured it’s worth it for you to hear from Ann herself. If it’s any consolation, if James Bond were real he would have learned what Ann is talking about: