For a while now, a column on tasting wine has been rattling around loose in my head. Since the subject has too many moving parts to address in one sitting, I’ll focus on just two: how our brains “map” wine, and the nose as a key tasting tool.
In August 2012 at the Wine Blogger’s Conference in Portland, Ore., I had the pleasure of listening to master sommelier Tim Gaiser lead a seminar titled “The Neuroscience of Wine Tasting: Unlocking the Tasting Strategies of Genius.”
(The article I subsequently wrote can be found by clicking here.)
When each of us examines, smells and tastes a glass of wine, our eyes access information cues we’ve stored in our memory as an “internal map or grid,” Gaiser explained.
Not a believer? At first, neither was I. Yes, wine is “just a beverage,” but consider this:
Folks who taste wine for a living — judges, sommeliers and master teachers — employ such cues and imagery at an unconscious level. The rest of us, Gaiser said, have these tools at our fingertips — but may not know how to put them to use.
The challenge in teaching “regular” wine tasters comes from “trying to give students our own experiences and vocabulary of wine while knowing that everyone has different neurologies, memories and life experiences,” Gaiser told seminar participants.
In 2009, Gaiser, former education chairman and director of the Court of Master Sommeliers of America, led a team of researchers that included Karen MacNeil; Evan Goldstein, MS; Tracy Kamens, Ed.D., DWS, CWE; Emily Wines, MS; Doug Frost, MS MW; Peter Marks, MW; and Brian Cronin, MS.
What they discovered: Each expert taster utilized the same eye positions and patterns as they sipped through wines, Gaiser told our group of seminar participants.
In other words, the position of our eyes — whether we look upper left and right, center, or down to the left or right — is vital to the imagery we “see” when we smell and taste wine.
Quite simply, we taste by unconscious association, Gaiser said.
I recall being super skeptical of Gaiser’s theory — until we put it to the test with red wine.
I relaxed and let my eyes “focus” into my natural position — about two feet straight out and slightly down.
We were told to detail what imagery we envisioned; I wrote that I “saw” black cherries. Alright, he continued: Now, old your head steady but move your eyes in any other direction — and pay attention to what happens.
I looked straight up at the ceiling, and immediately the nose of black cherry vanished. But when I repositioned my eyes back out and down, my perception of black cherry returned.
To this day, I still “position” in the same direction — straight out and slightly down — when I first sniff a glass of wine. And that brings me to my nose.
If you taste a lot of wine, you understand how vital your sense of smell is to the process.
Enter Gaiser, again, who calls our sense of smell the most important when evaluating wine. “While one can only taste five things — sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami — scientists tell us that we can smell over 100,000 different things.”
Herein lies my favorite factoid: “Smell accounts for as much as 85 percent of the sense of taste. No mystery here if you think about how bland everything tastes when you’re dealing with the mother of all head colds,” he wrote on his blog.
As far as how to smell, Gaiser said he employs several “short” sniffs, or one long, gentle one, “or something in between.” Whatever works for you, gentle reader, is ideal.
I’ve encountered folks who routinely hold off sipping a wine until a good 15 minutes of just sniffing and swirling have ensued. Part of their reasoning may be that a wine’s character changes in the glass.
I have been known to postpone a first sip when sampling a flight of wines; experience has taught me that once wine hits my tongue, my sense of smell gets overwhelmed. And since I trust my nose more than my tongue, I want it to get first dibs.
— Laurie Jervis blogs about wine at www.centralcoastwinepress.com, tweets at @lauriejervis and can be reached via winecountrywriter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are her own.