Taste This

   So you might be wondering why I would begin to talk about wine tasting and then choose to write about smells (as I did in the last post).  Good question, because being diverted from what started out as writing about our sense of taste and watching it turn into that of writing about our sense of smell caught even me off guard.  Perhaps it was because smell was the underdog and taste, well, who doesn't know taste.  This tastes good or that taste bad, we say; yet our tastes can also travel quite far away from our tongues and onto our views of fashion or music, or countries and cultures.  But underneath all of that lurked this fascination with watching someone be able to do something so different when it came to tasting something.  Once I was with a friend of mine, a person I'd laugh with and consider just an ordinary run-of-the-mill guy on the street, that is until I went to tour a few wineries with him (this when I lived in the Bay area and jumping off to the Napa or Sonoma valleys were just a mere diversion and less than an hour's drive away); as we walked into Rodney Strong's tasting room, down went most of the bottles on the counter and up came an entirely new set of bottles (it was something I noticed but I'm not sure if my friend did, dressed as we were in tee shirts and jeans and for all intents and purposes, looking as if we had just walked in off of the street...which we had).  As it turned out, his palate was fairly well known and restaurants hired him to make up many of their wine lists (and here I thought that he basically was just dabbling in his work at a winery, perhaps sterilizing bottles or moving boxes around).  It was my first time hearing terms such as toothpaste and chocolate to describe a wine, and likely a wine that I couldn't begin to afford (I never knew what he was being paid but just assumed that he was rather broke, as I was).  I was that doofus American named Jack in the movie Sideways who tasted a wine and blurted out "tastes good to me" (or not...truth be told, I'm still not much of a wine drinker).

    And this was the case with journalist Bianca Bosker who wrote that she preferred wine in a bottle but was certainly open to having it from a box as well.  So when she witnesses a blind tasting among a group of supertasters (again, she writes that this description encompasses 25% of the population, whether they know it or not) and has one of them narrow a red wine down to a specific type and country and region and river and date, she is amazed (in the competition, he was eliminated because he misidentified the wine as coming from the south side of the river instead of coming from the north...he was off by just five miles and just one year in nailing the wine).  One of our friends is actually like that, one year coming in third in the all-European wine tasting competition (he continues to run his own wine shop).  And my wife and I got to witness first hand this sort of challenge among such tasters, the hiding of the wine bottle in a brown bag and having them only smell and sip then  deconstruct the intricate and delicate flavors.  This is from Italy, a Torgiano Reserve, some Canaiolo there, his friend would tell him, Umbria I believe, around 1921 or so (he was correct except that the wine was from 1924).  It was the first time we had witnessed such an ability in someone.  And in the scheme of thing, such wines would be wasted on my wife and I, our palates about as dulled as an overdone steak and something which we discovered at the grand opening of our friend's wine shop.  Taste this, he told us, handing over two small glasses of a chianti...delicious, full of berry and heavy-bodied, right up our alley as we nodded to each other our chests puffing out as if we knew exactly what we were talking about.  Now this, he said, handing us another two glasses...the wine lighter, barely there, its flavor seemingly diminished and subtle and honestly, not to our liking at all (which we told him).  That's exactly what most beginners think, he told us, with most wanting that heavier feel and thicker sweetness...the second wine is a much better wine, he said, much more expensive and a reserve.  We slunk back into our chastised cave.  But wine is like art, he told us as well, you like what you like and price or critics or reviews don't matter.

   Other people we've watched can deconstruct (that is, start at the finished end and begin working backwards to the item's essential composition) things such as whiskey ("I can smell the rye in there") or coffee and food (as a simple experiment, taste a dish at a restaurant and see if you can break it down to it's essential flavors as if you were creating it's recipe backwards, a task that once puzzled former food critic Ruth Reichl until she recognized that subtle flavor in a dish as squid ink).  Another friend of mine described the intricacies of crafting beer (top fermenting and bottom fermenting) and even whiskies (interestingly, he described gin as little more than vodka with additional herbal flavors and considered the high pricing of both liquors to be ridiculous due to the simplicity of making each when compared to other aged whiskies).  The point of all of this is that virtually all of the sommeliers the author encountered told her that anyone can learn to distinguish such tasting notes with a bit of practice and awareness, much of which begins with a cleaning of our palates (she has to start by eliminating most strong flavors such as coffee and toothpaste in order to "awaken" her taste buds, she is told).  They also tell her that their knowledge (learning what wines are genetically similar and within your price range and likely certain grape varieties that you're unaware of) can be passed on to you, and that that is what their true goal is (okay, besides helping to sell wines for the restaurant in which they're working).  So I began to take this a bit further...

    In an episode of Science Friday, they talked about self-repairing fabric (the comparison was in cooking spaghetti with the cooked pasta once separate but later clinging together), and exoplanets being discovered by the Kepler satellite (in scanning just a tiny, tiny dot in our Milky Way galaxy, over 4000 exoplanets have already been found, many of them considered to likely be habitable).  But here was what got to me...scientists believe that there are more planets than there are stars, and that for every exoplanet they discover, they are likely missing 200 others (as they say, do the math).  Look up in the night sky and imagine the number of stars...only imagine all those stars being dwarfed by the number of unseen planets in the dark, each circling those stars as mimicked by our earth.  Author Bosker writes that sommeliers tell her they wish customers would expand their mindsets and to break her out of their comfort zones when it comes to trying different wines.  And while I likely won't jump into that field, I did think of all of the possibilities of expanding our knowledge in so many other areas and how locked we are in so many other fields of what we know...if it's simply a matter of clearing our palates, perhaps it is also simply a matter of clearing our minds as well and letting others in by having them share some of their expertise.  Who knows what we may discover, from zillions of habitable planets to an aged wine from Umbria, the world --our world, itself a hidden exoplanet-- awaits.