The Science of Wine Tasting
I thought I knew all there was to know about wine tasting: swirl your glass and look thoughtfully at it, sip and wash it around your mouth, spit it out if it stinks and chug the bottle if it’s good, yadda, yadda, yadda. Not to be ignored is the fine art of looking entitled while doing all this. If you can’t intimidate those around you with your poise and knowledge, you might as well just drink White Claw.
Then I got assigned this story about the science of wine tasting and, well, I decided I should read up a bit on it. It turns out I know nothing. Zilch. To start with, wine tasting involves biology. Who knew? Not me. So I ended up with a dilemma: either attempt to become an expert and write an expert paper or go with the light “what you really need to know ” variation. Going with the latter approach has the potential to be both more readable and hide my ignorance. So here goes.
To start, wine tasting pretty much involves all of the senses with the possible exception of hearing. That said, sensory perception differs for all of us. So while we can all become more thoughtful wine tasters, you may never experience that hint of vanilla in your glass of estate Chardonnay that your friend is waxing poetic about. Don’t sweat it.
Now the first sense that comes into play is visual, as in color. The role of vision is controversial in wine tasting. Some tasters will swear by blind tasting in which you are literally only judging by the aroma or bouquet (turns out they are different things), the mouthfeel and the actual sensations transmitted through your taste buds. I’m not going to wade in on the “right” way to taste. Consider though, that color triggers other sensory perceptions in your brain, smell and taste predominantly. So the deep purplish red that you see in your glass actually prepares your brain to experience certain olfactory sensations (that’s a fancy word for smell) and smell is closely tied to taste. In fairness to the winemaker, Tony Rynders in this case, he may well have made barreling, aging, blending and fermentation decisions affecting the color. Why should you not experience the full sensation of the wine as presented by the winemaker?
Next, swirl your wine and breathe in the aroma. Teeny tiny bits of the wine (scientists call these molecules) enter the nose and project to the olfactory bulb. Your bulb, think of it as a big tulip lodged up against your brain, sends signals to the brain that stimulates an odor map which is chalk full of sensations, memories and emotions. Your brain attempts to map this aroma to something recognizable, which is why we might describe something as ripe cherry, even though no cherry has ever come near the wine (so Tony assures us). It also explains why we can all experience a wine differently: we all have our own individual odor map.
Already, our brain is filled with sensations with nary a drop touching our lips. Time to sip and swirl. Now taste and touch come into play. At this point, some tasters will pull air in through their lips to aerate the wine and release more aromas to the nose. If you do so, it is important to not actually breathe the wine into your lungs, causing you to choke and potentially suffer the humiliation of drowning in your own glass of wine. This totally blows the haughty snob image you are trying to project as this writer knows firsthand.
Now feel the wine run across your tongue and palette. Several things are happening at once. First, you are sensing the degree of acidity or level of tannins. Acidity causes you to salivate. Tannins dry your mouth. These are a function of grapes, the fermentation process and aging decisions. Tannins, for example, are one benefit of oak barrel aging. They also come from skin contact and grape seeds and stems which are included in whole cluster fermentation. Both acidity and tannins can be overdone. Tannins, after all, are nature’s method to keep animals, including humans, from devouring certain plants and underripe fruit. Both will also moderate with age. In white wines, the crisp clarity of well-balanced acidity will fade, which is why we usually don’t prefer over-aged whites. In red wine, the puckery, rough mouth feel of tannins (called astringency) will mellow, which is why a red that was off-putting in a three-year-old vintage may be perfect in ten years. Fortunately for consumers, many reds these days are blended and released to be drinkable from the get-go, including at Saffron Fields. They may still improve with age and we may advocate for cellaring (if you can afford it), but they should be delightful at the time of purchase.
Finally, we arrive at the “tasting” part of the science of wine tasting. Our taste buds can differentiate five different sensations: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami. Nobody really understands the latter, because they didn’t teach us about it in grade school, but it’s a sense of rich meatiness better described through foods than words: think parmesan cheese or fish sauce. One source tells us that “while we used to think that individual taste buds or areas of taste buds were responsible for each taste, we unfortunately no longer think so.” Each taste bud can sense all of the tastes as can all parts of the tongue, though the back of the tongue is more sensitive to bitterness. I am struggling mightily to understand why this would be unfortunate.
There could be an entire dissertation on how each of the five tastes impact your appreciation of wine. After reading up on it, I will say that most of what is described in wine tasting is not in terms of the five tastes themselves (other than sweetness), but rather their analogs: cherry, tobacco, licorice, etc. Much of what we look for involves aroma or bouquet, balance, acidity or tannin, viscosity and how much the sensations linger on the tongue or the roof of your mouth.
Is all this meaningful? Some claim that the entire “science” of wine tasting is bunk and that even experts can often fail to blindly tell a Two-buck Chuck from a French Grand Cru. Knowing a wee bit about the tests that sommeliers must pass (and no, I am not at all hinting that I could come even close to passing one), I am skeptical of that view. Someone can tell; it just might not be us.
Ultimately, if you want to understand the science more, there is far more to read. My conclusion is, if you are going to open a $50 or $60 or $70 bottle of wine, take some time to appreciate your first sips. Observe the color. Hold it up to the light. Look at how the viscosity expresses itself on the glass. The legs on the glass give us a clue about the alcohol level and body. Breathe in the aroma and think about what that is signaling about age, variety and alcohol content. Swirl it to aerate the wine and release more aromatic molecules. Then run it across your tongue, observing on sweetness, fruitiness (a fullness in the expression of the fruit different than sweetness, but often interpreted the same by the brain at first taste), acidity and tannins. You may never learn to differentiate a Merlot from a Cab Franc or pick up that note of toasted coconut that your friend is exclaiming about, but you can learn to better appreciate what you like and why you want more Saffron Fields wine.
