How to Taste Like a Winemaker (Part 2)

Tasting With Your Mind:      Wine, Coffee, and Volcanoes

Oranges.

A thousand oranges dropping from the trees into a high mountain stream.

Dropping, dropping, dropping endlessly into the water while the scent of them hung everywhere over the stream and weaved in and out of the miles and miles of coffee plantations around me.

I was 4,000 feet up the side of a volcano near the tiny village of Boquete, Panama, where some of the world’s greatest coffee is grown. I fished a few oranges out of the freezing stream, took them back and put them in the new sunlight on a wooden table in kitchen.

By then, the room was filled with the smell of fresh coffee being pressed from the beans that grew all around the house. Squeezing the oranges let loose a flood of smells that permeated the whole room and floated out over the mountain stream.

My clothes smelled of oranges and coffee for days afterwards.

See image of the coffee aroma wheel from the “Smell the Coffee”

Wine tasting is in your mind, not in your mouth.

The chances are, when I tell you about that morning on the volcano something like the smell of oranges and coffee appears suddenly in your mind. Maybe you can smell it even though it’s not actually there at the moment. Maybe the visual image of all those oranges spinning and bobbing down the stream appears too, and you might even identify with the oranges and feel something of the cold and the dizziness of rolling off a mountain in a freezing stream.

The point is that wine tasting is just like that. Wine tasting is an act of the senses. Wine tasting is in your mind and not in your mouth. The sensory recognition of smell at all is in your mind. The naming of that smell is in your mind. The remembering and comparing of smells past and present are in your mind.

If you lose your sense of smell that smell may still be there for others, but it’s not for you. Remembering past aromas and comparing them to aromas in the moment rising from the wine in front of you is the very foundation of wine tasting.

Everybody has a different sensitivity to different smells, a threshold at which the aromas become conscious for you. Practice can improve this a lot. Practice doesn’t mean drinking yourself into a coma for this purpose, it means spitting a lot and having the pepper, or cigar box or whatever available to compare to what you are recognizing in a wine.

Even if you are having memory problems for any reason, your ability to taste wine is compromised. This is why you might want to think twice about trusting winemakers (or experts) over 75-80, no matter how famous they are. My father didn’t drink but he loved to cook in his later years. He could smell lemon and pepper and taste salt. That was about it. So everything he cooked was salt, lemon and black pepper flavored. Lots and lots of black pepper.

“Wine had such ill effects on Noah’s health that it was all he could do to live 950 years.” - Will Rogers

It’s the same with wine. It sounds obvious at first, but the wines you like are because of the aromas you can actually detect. The ones that pass your personal threshold for any given aroma. Of those, you then select the ones you like. If you can’t tell the difference in vanilla and strawberry ice cream, then what difference does it make?

Smell is such an intimate part of our personal experience of life that we hardly notice how it shapes our understanding of the world around us. Had my father chosen to try to season his cooking with things we could smell but he couldn’t, it wouldn’t have worked. It literally would not have existed for him.

Critics can tell you there’s blueberry pie and crushed rocks but if you can’t smell and name blueberry pie or crushed rocks, then they don’t exist for you at the moment.

When I was in my twenties I backed into getting in a lunch with Baron Phillippe Rothschild (who never knew I was in the room—or cared) where I was astounded to taste a Madeira bottled in 1860, the year Abraham Lincoln was elected President. Wines over 100 years old are rare and, for me at least, a near ecstatic experience.

The smell of that wine lingers with me today just as if I tasted it this morning. It was totally unique in smell and texture—a texture like lace—and brown as a paper bag. I’ve never again had anything like it. Decades have passed since then but just the thought of that wine brings it back to me as if it were in the room now.

I have the memory of that wine to compare everything else I have ever tasted with if I want to. That’s why awareness and memory are existential stuff of all wine tasting. Like Elvis, that wine left the room a long time ago. But it’s still there with me today because it lives in my mind and in my senses, not in the physical world.

Aromas—smells—like those in the kitchen are the building blocks of wine and coffee both. A winemaker has to organize them, remember them while tasting up to 300 wines at a time and tell them to the workers in the cellar, the salespeople and the winery owner all in a language they will understand and can act on. View Wine Aromas Explained from Vinified.com.

Wine and Coffee

I was on the board of directors of a small family owned coffee roaster which makes some of the best coffee in the world, Thanksgiving Coffee. It sits in Noyo Harbor along the ocean in Mendocino County in California. The company is run now by the founders’ son, Jonah but was originally founded by Paul and Joan Katzeff. It was Paul who gave me the first coffee tasting kit of smells that I had ever seen.

That kit was a revelation. It gave me the experience of training my sense of smell for wine and coffee at the same time. The contrasts and comparisons were striking but not exactly the same. But is was the sensual experience of aromas that lay in the center of them both.

Coffee aromas are produced by different levels and methods of roasting just as wine aromas are produced by different levels and methods of fermenting. The fermentation and handling of the grapes determines which of their innate aromas are released.

The coffee industry uses the same diagrams with a lot of the same categories because in the end we are really talking about the smells of nature and of the earth. View The Importance of Aroma from Smell the Coffee.

Your sense of smell is unique to you

Of course, in the end you are talking about yourself, you just haven’t realized it yet. You’re describing the reality that you are actually aware of.

What is more you than your senses? The sense of smell is unique in that the olfactory nerve that runs from your nose to your brain doesn’t take the same route that other senses take.

Smells bypass the neocortex and go straight to the amygdala where your instincts and instinctual reactions lie, far away from your thinking mind.

If you watch closely, you’ll see that no one can actually lie about whether they like a particular wine or coffee either one because the muscles in your face react long before the rest of your brain even knows it’s there.

Just watch people’s faces and don’t listen to what they say, just notice how their face reacts. You’ll know what they really think about that Pinot Gris/Seyval Blanc blend from West Virginia your favorite aunt gave you for your last birthday.

It is the primal experience of smell that informs and creates at lot of what we unconsciously know about the world and about ourselves. Not to mention a lot of what we act on never really knowing why. Later, we rationalize our instinctual reactions because, well you know, that’s what we do.

Developing your ability to recognize and name new smells will open a new world for you—not just wine—but food, coffee, tea, and more. Paying attention to your senses will give you a new experience of your own body, and it will lead you into the world of other arts which will further enrich your life and the lives of those around you.