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July 8 - July 19, 2017
“There’s this whole issue where if people spend $350 for a bottle of wine, they don’t want to admit they don’t like it.”
Each year, 14,000 winemakers and grape growers descend on the Sacramento convention center for the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium, a trade show where producers go to buy their bungs, barrels, bottles, corks, capsules, centrifuges, concentrates, color stabilizers, crush pads, flavoring agents, enzymes, electrodialysis machines, infusion tubes, tanks, presses, and pumps. The only winery staple not on offer: romance.
The reality of winemaking in the twenty-first century is frequently less Little House on the Prairie and more Gattaca.
Wine too thin? Build fullness in the mouth with gum arabic (an ingredient also found in frosting and watercolor paint). Too frothy? Add a few drops of antifoaming agent (food-grade silicone oil). Cut acidity with potassium carbonate (a white salt) or calcium carbonate (chalk). Crank it up again with a bag of tartaric acid (aka cream of tartar). Increase alcohol by mixing the pressed grape must with sugary grape concentrate, or just add sugar. Decrease alcohol with ConeTech’s spinning cone, or Vinovation’s reverse-osmosis machine, or water. Fake an aged Bordeaux with Lesaffre’s yeast and yeast
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“Sure, God will make wine. You just might not like it.”
cloudy, algae-smelling weirdness that seems like it was made by unwashed French hobbits,”
Some producers pride themselves on using “preindustrial” methods that reject all additives—with little regard for the fact that the ancient Romans were doctoring their wines with pig’s blood, marble dust, seawater, and even lead, a source of sweetness.
“It is one of the ironies of the wine market today,” writes Robinson, “that just as the price differential between the cheapest and most expensive bottles is greater than ever before, the difference in quality between these two extremes is probably narrower than it has ever been.” The industrial revolution in the winery has effectively democratized decent wine.
If we don’t have the vocabulary to describe an experience, our struggle to convey that encounter in words—and it will be a struggle—corrupts our impression of it, a phenomenon known as “verbal overshadowing.” Asked to talk about something like a glass of wine, people who lack the terminology to do so later become far worse at recognizing the same wine again than individuals who weren’t pressed for words.
“The pretense that we shall be able to discern all those tastes and aromas is pure bullshit and only a bullshit artist can claim to be able to do that,” declared Richard Quandt, a Princeton University economist, in a different paper for the Journal of Wine Economics.
Talking about wine as a medley of spices, plants, fruits, and other specific smelly things is such a solidly ingrained practice that it’s easy to imagine it always having been this way. That King Tutankhamun, Louis XIV, and Benjamin Franklin—all wine connoisseurs in their day—were also gargling their wines trying to decide if they picked up black, sour, or Maraschino cherry in their glass. In fact, this naturalistic, food-based lexicon is about as traditional as disco. It took root in the 1970s, and Ann created it.
The ancient Greeks and Romans, who extensively documented the culture and cultivation of the vine, gave only succinct “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” assessments of their wines, evidently finding little reason to delve into the nuance of flavor. In The Learned Banqueters, the Greek rhetorician Athenaeus pithily praises wine from the Setine grape as “first class” and Caecuban as “noble,” while Horace, in The Odes, sums up Sabine wines as “humbly cheap.”
More than a thousand years later, wine snobs were still mostly mum when it came to the tastes and smells they savored in bottles. Samuel Pepys, a high-ranking officer in the British Royal Navy, needed only a paltry half sentence to describe a Château Haut-Brion he tried in 1663: It was, he wrote, “a good and most particular taste that I never met with.” (Fast-forward three hundred years, and Robert Parker’s review of a 1983 Haut-Brion would run on for six sentences.)
After she took over as the class’s professor, Ann combed through her cabinets for everyday odors like blackberry jam, vanilla extract, and dog fur, then placed them in glasses. She made her students blind sniff and memorize these “standards” in what became—and remains—a mandatory crash course in putting consistent labels to around 150 odors.
In forty years, no one’s ever aced the test.)
Ann eventually formalized the vocabulary into a circular chart of six dozen descriptors she called the Wine Aroma Wheel.
This was a red flag. It suggested to me that the pros might not have stopped to think critically about their tasting notes. They too mirrored what they heard others doing and repeated the same bad habits. It was like the wine world was stuck in a giant game of telephone, and the message had become an indecipherable mess.
Saying “blackberry” is essentially our way of communicating that we’ve picked up a smell that we know other people have called blackberry in the past.
Although some Syrah really does smell distinctly of bacon and olives, and some Tempranillo of leather, there is also a standard set of terms we know to attach to these grape varieties.
Morgan is nose-blind to rotundone, the chemical that gives Syrah its black-peppery scent. And yet that wouldn’t stop him from saying he smells rotundone, if all other signs point to Syrah. Failing to do so would cost him points.
“Used to be when they dried alfalfa in Dixon, the wind would come up howling from the south and it smelled like there was a marijuana bust.”
(The French are a notable exception: Evidently viewing an astute palate as a critical life skill along with grammar and math, in 1990 the French government launched “taste education classes” throughout the country’s primary schools. These included lessons on describing odors, smelling via retro-nasal olfaction, and savoring the distinctive character of French cheeses.)
Nature, the ultimate perfumer, doses their bewitching scents with trace amounts of indole, a chemical that, you’ll recall, is also found in human feces and on pubic hair. There’s something poetic about this: Timeless beauty arises from the complex intermingling of both the putrid and the divine.
To investigate whether nature or nurture is to blame for our olfactory muteness, linguists in the Netherlands conducted a study involving English speakers and members of the Jahai, a Malaysian hunter-gatherer tribe that has a rich lexicon for scents. The participants were asked to identify a set of scratch-’n’-sniff odors. The tribespeople, who grow up learning to discuss smells the way most Americans do colors, labeled the aromas quickly, easily, and consistently. The Jahai needed around two seconds to name each odor. The English speakers each fumbled for an average of thirteen seconds, and
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Adrienne Lehrer, a linguist and the author of Wine and Conversation, told me about a wine critic who approached her after a book signing. The man confessed that in his reviews, he often extolled bottles’ subtle aroma of quince—not because he’d smelled that fruit’s apple-and-pear perfume, but because the word sounded fancy. “I figured no one could challenge me because no one knows what quince is,” he admitted. “But I’ve never smelled a quince either.”
A study at Oxford University coauthored by Charles Spence fed people either a tossed salad, neatly placed at the center of their plates, or an artistically arranged version of the same salad, styled to resemble a Kandinsky canvas, with mushrooms juxtaposed at right angles to shredded carrots and asymmetric dots of orange dressing. Diners rated the second dish as far more delicious, and were willing to pay more for it.
My morning workout now consisted not only of reviewing the fifty-odd essences in my kit from Le Nez du Vin, but also blind tasting, alone, in the kitchen, before breakfast. To be sure I was sensitive to tiny variations in alcohol, acid, and sugar levels—the secret to nailing a wine’s structure—I plunged into a palate-refining regimen devised by UC Davis sensory scientists to train professional wine judges. Per their instructions, I ordered enough beakers, scientific scales, and powdered chemicals to land myself on an FBI watch list. Next, I made Matt blind test me on precise dilutions of
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With a beautiful, quiet fart, the bottle surrendered its cork.
If Marea was the wine shrine in the holy city where sommeliers, monklike, retreated to mull the mysteries of fine Burgundy, Paul was the feverish evangelical preacher speaking in tongues and performing outdoor baptisms.
The Cornouaille is a mind-altering mess of blue cheese, cider vinegar, and Shetland pony that stinks and is phenomenal and utterly perplexing.
Wait till you get a hold of the Tempranillo that’s like sucking on an old saddle, in a totally wonderful way.
The original fMRI study from 2005 had concluded that three key regions of the brain show more activity in sommeliers than in amateurs while tasting wine. Two of those areas—the left orbitofrontal cortex and the left insula—are thought to collaborate in processing odors, tastes, and other sensory information, then turning them into an impression of flavor. Both of these regions also tackle complex tasks, like decision making and deductive reasoning, as well as ascribing value and pleasure to tastes.
Final diagnosis? I talked like a cork dork, walked like a cork dork, and, the fMRI scans had confirmed, I processed the world like a cork dork. All that practice and training had actually changed my brain.
Rather, the results suggest that honing the senses is a prerequisite to fuller, deeper experience. Sensations no longer waft by unnoticed and unrecorded. Instead, they are grasped, explored, and analyzed. They evoke curiosity, critique, associations, appreciation, and feelings of repulsion or ecstasy or sadness or astonishment.
Far from smell and taste being primal, animalistic senses, it turns out that learning to cultivate them engages, in a literal way, the very part of us that elevates our reactions, endows our lives with meaning, and makes us human.
Drink for thirst, but taste with purpose.
Cement, hosed down at dawn by doormen, unleashed its petrichor;
