It has been said that one does not drink wine so much as experience it but not everyone experiences wine, and fewer still really taste wine because taste resides within the mind of the taster, not in the wine. Taste really is just a name we give to our memories. Wine is just water, alcohol, tannin, acid, and other chemical constituents. When we examine wine seeking its taste, no matter how hard we look, we cannot find anything in the wine we can call taste independent of the taster. Cause and condition, duality, no self. It’s all very Buddhist, actually.

Nor is taste the same thing as flavour. Flavours are names we invent to describe our response to chemical properties of certain molecules that we can discern. We call them salty, sweet, sour, bitter and savory. When the nerve endings in the papillary of the tongue and olfactory bulb of the nose contact flavour constituents in wine, they trigger an impulse in the brain we describe as taste. Like taste, the flavours we perceive have no inherent existence of their own independent of the taster.

From our childhood we are cataloguing tastes and building a library of memories and associated names for all sorts of food and drink flavour sensations. Our brains are hard-wired to desire carbohydrates and salt, and to reject anything bitter or sour, in order to help us seek out calories while avoiding anything potentially poisonous.
Remember learning to like the bitterness of hops in beer for the first time? Sooner or later we all go through a process of noticing and confronting tastes that are new or that we are unsure of. Our parents, our peers, our culture and our life experience teach us what flavours we like or dislike, and so the taste of anything, as it turns out, is unique to each individual taster. That explains why some people like beer and others don’t.

Interestingly, we rely a lot on our vision for taste. For example, when you eat a banana, you see the banana and your mind is prepared to confirm the taste of banana upon receipt of the flavour sensations from your nose and mouth. But in the case of a clear beverage like wine, there is no banana to see. Our mind must go looking for the flavour in the beverage. In this respect, wine tasting wine is a bit like eating food while blindfolded. Not to be kinky, but it is definitely more difficult to recognize taste when we are denied the opportunity to see the source of the flavour unless we are experienced. And this is why experienced long-time tasters can carry on with elaborate descriptions of complexity and nuance in the wines they taste while beginners might only be able to say the wine tastes like ... wine.

Good tasters like to observe a wine before tasting. They note how the wine moves. A good wine has viscosity. They consider its beauty and fiery colour, its luminescence. Few things are as easy on the eye as the fire of a wine next to a candle. It moves in the glass with a will of its own and it has legs: those tears that run down the insides of the glass. One can get lost in its appearance of wine before even taking a sip and this can heighten the senses and even predispose the mind to favour the taste of a particularly attractive wine.

A good taster also will swirl the wine around to introduce some air to open up the aromas. They take care to smell the wine from a distance, slowly working their nose down into the glass. They observe how the wine’s aroma changes knowing that aromas, like flavours, are chemicals with different molecular weights and the fat ones are slow to get out of the wine while the smaller ones are much faster getting into orbit and so they tend to sort themselves into a strata based on their respective sizes, like an invisible Neapolitan ice cream of aroma we can only see with our nose.

By the way, you cannot taste if you cannot smell. The two are linked together, and its one reason why our appetite is so dull when we suffer from a bad cold and cannot taste. Smell is also a very powerful memory trigger. I once drove through the smoke of a sugar cane farmer’s fire, and the smoky smell instantly transported my mind back to my 10th birthday party at the beach in California. Long forgotten memories including the kind of cake I got, and even the clothes people were wearing vividly returned with just one whiff.

Steven Roberto is a wine maker and wine consultant from California. He is the managing director of enVision Phuket Co., Ltd, a local wine importer and consulting company. stevenroberto@lycos.com.