Basics of “palate” training

Keying Up - the Court Jester.

I am a strong proponent of the idea that education is the best way to empower people as wine consumers. That certainly is a challenging task, which is why so many take the lower-resistance path of “democratizing” or “de-mystifying” wine.

These approaches often end up oversimplifying the subject as to not challenge anyone. Many approaches end up telling people that there is really no consensus about wine character and thus there is no way to organize and assimilate information which would quality benchmark for wine.

Combine this with the idea that wine writing must somehow be entertaining and you either end up with material straight out of Idiocracy, or find yourself putting more of your efforts into the shtick rather than the message.

Nevertheless, all approaches seem to endorse some notion of training one’s “palate”. Now, it’s been a while since I graduated from med school, but I’m pretty sure that the palate is not an organ of olfactory or gustatory sensation. Read More

Giving away the store

Trade secrets.

Recently, I had a conversation with Bruce Bryant, Ph.D. (Senior Research Associate at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, PA) as part of my research for a series called “What wine pairs with red herring” (published on PalatePress.com). During that conversation, Dr Bryant reaffirmed a fundamental idea I have repeated (but which has been rejected by internet wine “gurus”): tasting ability is a function of language. Naming something makes it stick out in your memory, makes you able to identify it repeatedly and consistently. This is not at all unlike learning music theory (very few musicians have perfect pitch while most have learned relative pitch and yet there are many excellent musicians in the world). Read More

Today on PalatePress.com

I am proud to announce that the first of my (hopefully) three-part series on the science underlying food and wine pairings is now available to read on PalatePress.com.

The series is called: “What wine pairs with red herring” and aims to understand the foundations of food and wine pairings through picking apart the chemistry and sensation neurophysiology aspects at play.

I know when people hear (or read) “chemistry and sensation neurophysiology”, they might get a bit intimidated. Don’t worry. I make it quite easy.

This first article focuses on tannic wines. With the help of a sensation researcher, I look at the chemical interactions between wine and food and how that is perceived by our sensory hardware.

Have a read.

Is wine advertising limiting American wine culture?

Pretty esoteric stuff.

The other night, I saw a Samuel Adams Beer commercial in which the brewery’s founder, Jim Koch, talks about the color of the glass used for his beer bottles. If that is not esoteric enough, he then goes on to say clear bottles can allow light to spoil beer and make it “skunky”. Wine buffs know he’s talking about the beer being “lightstruck”, but how many mainstream wine ads get down to this kind of nitty-gritty?

Why is it that Samuel Adams can take this kind of message to prime time audiences and a wine commercial will not dare delve into this kind of stuff? Read More

A nickel’s worth of truth

Res ipsa loquitur

WineBusiness.com reports today that a class action filed in San Francisco last month claims BevMo raises the prices of the wines in their 5-cent sale so that in some cases, customers are paying more for the two bottles than they would at regular price.

From a business standpoint, this is a great way to make money. After all, value is perceived, right? All you need to seal the deal is an 88-point or higher rating from the wine critic hired to be as your in-house cellar master. Read More

Little ditty, ’bout moldy corks

Moldy cork.

The recent silence on this blog has been due to something of a perfect storm of difficulties – both in the family and with pulling together material fundamental to several posts I’d been developing. All storms clear with time, however, and I am starting to settle back into my groove.

Recently, I broached the subject of improving cork processing and production to reduce the incidence of T.C.A.-tainted wines. It is cork taint that hindered me from completing a piece on a rather rare variety. Two separate samples of the same wine provided by the same (very reputable) importer were corked. Bummer. Read More

Free idea

Boontling

While looking at the back label of a wine my wife received in one of her club shipments, I recently learned about Boontling – the obscure American English dialect which has 1,300 unique words and originated in the 1800s in Anderson Valley’s Boonville.

I’ve recently been speaking with a winemaker friend (not operating in the Central Coast) about improving the visibility and success of his brand. This made me think of one key fact: in a landscape where everyone makes as much noise about themselves as possible, being understated is going to present problems in one’s ability to compete. By extension, being conventional makes one prone to getting lost in the noise or being overshadowed by more distinct and unique branding. Read More