Tuesday, August 26 2008
Taste the Difference
A healthy breakfast, including juice, toast, cereal and nine glasses of wine!
If you're a wine tasting beginner, trying to sort out all the aromatic descriptors that people use can be very confusing: hints of mulberry? Nuances of tobacco, leather and earth (sounds like my uncle's basement!)? While a lot of the arfy-flarfy descriptors run a gamut between the merely personal and the intentionally obfuscative (jargon is designed to exclude the layman so you can charge him more), many of them are chosen to relate the aromatics in the glass to things you may already have smelled--the idea is to place the aromas in an understandable context.
But nobody ever actually talks about identifying the taste components of wine. Oh, they'll throw off sweet, tart, bitter, etc, but what does that really mean? Ask a dozen people to taste a wine with too much tannin and half will describe it as bitter, the other half will say sour, and a few will say 'puckery', which isn't something you run across in daily life.
But there is a little activity you can undertake to educate your palate, and the palate of anyone you can get to sit still for a little bit of Mr. Wizard Kitchen Chemistry.
Wow Mr. Wizard! Toxic fumes are swell!
It is very difficult to distinguish between the characteristics of oak, tannin, acid and alcohol: after all, where do we encounter the unalloyed flavor of oak in our daily life, much less tannin? Likewise, unless you enjoy the taste of battery terminals (no comment here) you won't have encountered pure acidity to pick it out of the crowd, and most people think they know what alcohol tastes like, but really don't. Here's a very simple exercise you can do to educate your palate on these flavors, and learn how to pick them out of your wine.
Materials
- Distilled water. Drugstores and supermarkets stock it: don't use tapwater.
- Five one-litre glass containers. Mason jars work a treat if you don't have lab glassware.
- Small saucepan
- Stove
- Strainer
- One ounce winemaking oak powder or chips
- Winemaking tannin powder
- Tartaric acid
- Sugar (Fructose if you can get it from a health-food store, table sugar if not)
- Small bottle of 80-Proof Vodka
- Seven tasting glasses
- Spit bucket
- Glass of water
- An un-oaked white wine (New Zealand Sauvignon Blance is good because of the forward fruit and obvious flavors)
- An oaked red wine (Whatever you have, but Aussie Shiraz works a treat)
You'll be preparing five solutions with the distilled water. Each will mimic the characteristics of the single component in the wine, isolated to make it easier to identify and compare it to the flavors in the wine.
- Bring four cups of distilled water to a boil in the saucepan. Toss the oak powder in and take it off the heat. Stir, let it sit until cool, and strain it into a container.
- Bring another four cups of distilled water to a boil. Dissolve one-quarter teaspoon of tannin powder into the water, take off the boil and allow to cool. Pour into second jar.
- Pour four cups of water into another jar and dissolve one-quarter teaspoon of tartaric acid into it. This will take a few moments of stirring.
- Pour one cup of vodka in the jar and add three cups of water, stirring well.
- Pour four cups distilled water into a jar and add two teaspoons of fructose (or sugar), stirring to dissolve.
(Note: These amounts are all set up for convenient measurements, and make enough solution for dozens of tasting sessions. Quarter-teaspoons are also pretty tiny measures to work with, but if you have an accurate eighth-teaspoon measure, you could halve the quantities of water. If using up a cup of Vodka runs counter to your thrifty sensibilities, you can use a quarter cup of 80-proof Vodka and three-quarters of a cup of distilled water. Cheapskate.)
Lining Up the Tasting
Pour a couple of ounces of your red and white wine into glasses, and an ounce and a half of each
of the prepared solutions. Start by tasting the white wine, and write down your
impressions of the flavors.
Next, take a sip of
the acid solution, spit it out, and after a moment, take a sip of the wine. Try
to pick out the acid flavor. Surprise! It's pretty easy! Feel free to go back
and forth a couple of times between the two if necessary to sort out your
perception of acidity. The white will have a lot more acid, while the red, suddenly wimpy tasting, has less.
Take a drink of water
to clear your palate, and move on to the oak. Again, start with the white wine, and
then try the oak, going back and forth as necessary. The woody, slightly drying
character of the oak is quite easily distinguishable from the acid, and will seem mightily out-of-place with the white, while it's definitely a supporting character in the red.
Clear your palate with more water, and repeat the process with the tannin. This time you will not find as clear a character in the white wine–it won't have much tannin , but the red will. The astringency will leave your tongue dry and your teeth 'squeaky'. While it's reminiscent of the oak, it's not precisely the same sort of perception.
Clear your palate again and repeat the process with the fructose/sugar solution. Whites can have a lot of residual sugar in them that isn't mentioned on the label, so the wine might not be strongly affected. The red, however, will usually be completely dry, and will taste pretty awful when compared to the sugar solution.
Finally, clear your
palate one more time and move on to the alcohol. The big surprise this time is
that alcohol doesn't 'taste' of anything: it mainly seems to sweeten the water,
and is perceived very much like sugar in the 10-12% concentration seen in wine. The big contrast this time will be with the red: the sweetness you perceive is obviously derived from alcohol, not sugar!
I've conducted this component tasting process for over a thousand people in the last ten years, and it seems to be particularly helpful in sorting out perceptions for people. In a nutshell it shows that the structure of red wine is supported by oak and tannin, which both work to balance the sweetness of the alcohol and the fruit character, and whites are balanced mainly by acid counteracting residual sugar, alcohol and fruit.
If you try this out, be sure to let me know if it works for you.
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