Episode 047

The Nose

After you visually assess what you’re tasting, the next step is to cool your jets! It’s not time to take a swig just yet.

If you’ve had the pleasure of listening to my interview with flavor researcher Dan McCall way back in Episode 7 of this podcast, you’ll recall that flavor has a lot to do with aroma.

In order to get this full flavor picture in the brain, we need to make sure we’re triggering those “lock and key” mechanisms in the smell pathway, otherwise, we’re missing out on valuable information that could make our tasting notes richer and more interesting.

In fact, there’s a cool little mnemonic device in the world of formal wine tasting that can even help you to remember at what point in the tasting process you should take a moment to evaluate the aromatic properties of your drink.

This might not be true for cocktails, per se, but if you’re looking to conduct a tasting of a wine or spirit, giving your glass a swirl before you take a whiff will definitely enhance the process.

Which brings us to another point about smell. If you’re tasting a high-proof beverage – really anything over 45% – it’s often useful to add a small amount of water to the equation to help counteract the alcohol burn and open up the flavor profile. This is an age-old whiskey tasting technique, but it can be applied effectively across the spirit spectrum.

The value of making notes on the aroma of a drink is that, in many cases, what you smell is going to differ from what you taste. And if the purpose of tasting notes is to tell a story, comparing similarities and differences between what you smell and what you taste makes for compelling dialogue. It’s one of the best ways to help build the plot of your flavor story.

Building Your Aroma Vocabulary

The one thing you can really do to change this is to start picking up everything and giving it a sniff. The produce section of the grocery store is a great place to do this, but you can just as easily do it with a nice hunk of aged parmesan cheese or a loaf of fresh baked rye bread. And it helps sometimes if you close your eyes and really focus all your mental energy on the sensation of smell. This blocks out other visual static and associations from messing up the process.

Tasting Tips

And despite what some tasting experts may tell you, there’s no one perfect template for how to taste something. But there are a few general bits of advice that can enhance the process:

• First, be sure to take in some air with your sip. Yes, you can take your sip and then do that obnoxious, comical thing where you slurp air into your mouth and aerate the liquid, or, you can be a bit more normal about it and just take in some air when you sip.
• Also, make sure you take in enough liquid so that all different parts of your palate get to engage with the flavor. This includes all parts of your tongue, your cheeks, the roof of your mouth…everything. BUT, don’t take a swig so large that it’s hard to swallow. Big swigs affect the way you breathe, and that doesn’t help the tasting.
• Next, move the liquid around your mouth a bit. You don’t need to treat it like mouthwash – and you probably shouldn’t – but just like swirling the wine or spirit in the glass will help open it up, agitating it a bit in the mouth without going overboard will ensure a well rounded tasting.
• Finally, as with many things, time is a key ingredient. When you swallow your sip, don’t go straight for another one. Flavor evolves on the palate, and it’s important that you focus on what happens as your primary flavors evolve into the part of the tasting known as the “finish.”

The Finish

What’s the difference between the primary flavors and the finish? Well, it’s actually kinda like the differences between the smell (which many people call the “nose”) and what happens on the palate. You’re dealing with the same liquid, but you’re often picking up different aspects of the overall flavor. Another way to put it is that the finish is a flavor echo. Just like sound waves change as the bounce off of objects, creating that echo-like distortion, flavor is going to change as your brain has time to process what’s going on, and as new information becomes available in the absence of the liquid.

This is the part of the tasting where you can pick up some of the trickier parts of flavor – things like astringency vs. juiciness, spiciness, numbing or cooling. Basically, sensations that are crucial to flavor, but that don’t really fall into the taste buds’ domain.

Putting Flavor into Words

Our next question is – how do you take all this raw data and use it to tell a story? How do you take your first step into the realm of tasting notes?

If you’re just starting out, one really useful tool to have with you is something called a “flavor wheel.” And this is a visualization of some of the most common flavors in wines or spirits that starts general (in the center of the wheel) and then gets increasingly more specific toward the outer edges, helping you to identify specific flavor notes in your tasting.

So, for example, your first impression might be – “fruity.” And your flavor wheel can then prompt you to consider whether it’s a “berry” flavor, a “tropical fruit” flavor, or a “dried fruit” flavor. Then, once you decide it’s more of a “tropical fruit flavor,” you can use the flavor wheel to decide if it’s more of a pineapple, a banana, or a mango flavor.

Here are some links to a few different flavor wheels:

• Wine Flavor Wheel
• Whiskey Flavor Wheel

Telling a Flavorful Story

When you first begin to put your thoughts about flavor into words, it’s helpful to remember that you’re telling a story, and all stories have a few basic elements in common:

• A Plot
• A cast of characters
• A setting and context
• And a place in the wider realm of all the other stories that exist.

The plot structure is just like the tasting procedure we just described – start with visual cues, then move to smell, then observe the taste and finish. The flavors, of course, are your characters. And the cool thing about this is that sometimes characters are friends, and sometimes they have conflicts. The setting and context can be everything from the year on the wine label, the mash bill on your whiskey label, the type of glass your beverage is in, the food you’re pairing it with, and any other number of variables. And all of these features allow you to compare the liquid in front of you with all the other stuff that exists in the world and in your personal bank of flavor memories. Whether you’re simply comparing your red wine to other red wines, or your 18 year highland single malt with other 18 year highland single malts out there.

Pick Your Words Carefully

Ideally, you want to strike a middle ground between generalizing and being awkwardly (and inaccurately) specific.

In wine, “fruit forward,” is a perfect example of a useless tasting note that doesn’t advance the story. It wastes time. Most wines are fruity, let’s move on to something more specific and interesting.

On the other hand, it is possible to go overboard and start reaching for tasting notes that make for interesting reading, rather than actually describing the scene.

Ah, yes. This young, medium-bodied pilsner produced by one of the preeminent brewing families in the country displays vibrant carbonation, which stimulates the palate, paving the way for a seductive malted character, underscored by insinuating german hops, and culminating in a dry finish that betrays its beechwood-aged beauty.

The above quote describes Budweiser.

Just goes to show that flowery language doesn’t always do justice to the subject at hand. Instead, sick with specific nouns and adjectives – and if something seems weird or off-the-wall, it’s not necessarily wrong.

Feedback?

If you have any feedback or questions about tasting notes or how to give them, please hit us up on social media or by giving the podcast inbox a run for its money!

Attributions

Here are the attributions for the music used in this episode:

“Clean Soul” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Mozart, Sonata For Piano And Violin In G Major, K.379 — Thema – Andante Cantabile by Kyoung Im Kim is licensed under a  Creative Commons License.