The tasting notes told me to expect a “sparkling body with stone-fruit acidity, kumquat, honeydew melon and jasmine notes and a floral finish”, all of which sounds delicious. What, I wondered, could provoke such a diverse and abundant medley of flavours?
I am no expert on wine, merely an enthusiast for the phenomenological enjoyment of wine-drinking, particularly in good company with well-prepared, flavoursome food. A bottle shared is a pleasure doubled. Or, in the words of the Chinese poet Li Bai, whose lyrics Mahler used in his song-cycle, Das Lied von der Erde: “A full glass of wine at the proper moment / Is worth more than all the riches of the world”.
I know that Californian chardonnay is sometimes said to taste of melon, and a little research informed me that rosé from Provence also has that reputation. Jasmine, by contrast, is more often associated with dry white wine from cooler regions, German grown riesling being a good exemplar. Yet it is another grape varietal altogether –viognier – from which connoisseurs most reliably find a hint of stone-fruit. A combination of three different grapes, potentially from three different regions, might therefore be required to produce this complex balance of flavours; and, less we forget, we also have been promised kumquat.
The trick, however, is to gather not grapes from the vine but beans from the bush. More particularly, to secure some Ethiopian coffee from Werka Wuri, a washing station located in the Gedeb Woreda, a small district in the region near the town of Yirgacheffe, internationally famous for coffees abounding with floral and citric flavours. In the Gedio language, werka translates as “gold” and wuri as “high altitude”, so I am reliably informed by Caravan Coffee Roasters, from whom I obtained my beans, with their enticing description.
I repeat, I am no expert on wine: I am not confident that I could distinguish a Californian chardonnay from an Australian, nor that I could pick a Rhone viognier from a marsanne, but I am sure – very sure – that I can distinguish a glass of wine from a cup of coffee, despite the fact that the tasting notes might be almost identical.
My point here is not to mock the writers of tasting notes: I am sure that some drinkers – better trained, more alert than me – regularly distinguish these flavours in both wine and coffee. What interests me is that our sensory faculties function in such a way that two radically different experiences of taste can be appropriately – that is to say, competently and credibly – described using a shared vocabulary, without anyone thinking that drinking hot black coffee and chilled white wine are otherwise similar.
Our experience of wine and coffee – and of food and drink more generally – is almost always the product of two rather different forms of sensory experience: taste and smell. Although we refer to tasting notes, wine tastings, and the cultivation of good taste, much of the richness and precision of our experience of wine comes from not from our mouths but from our noses. We sense more variety, discriminate more finely, remember more clearly that which we smell compared to that which we taste. The knowledgeable drinker always uses their nose first, when the wine is poured. That said, to leave the wine in the glass, smelled but not tasted, would be an unconscionable waste. The gourmet engages both nose and mouth, takes times to notice the range, intensity and balance of the sensations they produce, and finds pleasure in the apprehension of the world’s rich bounty through the combination of their messages.
The receptor cells on our tongues – and in the sides and roof of our mouths – can detect five main types of taste: bitter, salty, savoury (umami), sour and sweet. While these provide important high-level information about what we are about to consume, they offer us a very limited vocabulary with which to discuss the finer points of wine consumption. Our mouths can also provide us with information about a drink’s viscosity – important for our appreciation of port – its effervescence – important for champagne – and its tannic qualities – important for my fellow drinkers of barolo – all of which is valuable, but hardly sufficient to sustain a meaningful conversation about the relative merits of one vintage compared to another, or of an unusual but pleasantly striking paring of wine and food.
If we think that “terroir” matters, we must educate our noses. Our olfactory neurones are stimulated by molecules from our drink entering the front of our noses, directly, and from the back, via our mouths. These molecules provide detailed information about their source material, which is transmitted to the brain through our limbic system, which connects our sense of smell closely with our emotions and our memories. Smelling is, by comparison with tasting, more detailed, more intimate and more memorable. It is also more amenable to training and refinement: almost everyone can easily identify sweet tastes on the tongue, but it takes practice and concentration to distinguish stone-fruits on the nose.
We start with a basic ability to discriminate tastes and smells. From an evolutionary point of view, these senses functions to protect us from forms of ingestion that would be harmful, but like other evolved capabilities, they provide us in addition the opportunity to enhance our enjoyment of being in the world. What is needed to prevent harm can also be put into service to create pleasure. Just as our ability to see colours or hear pitch varies from person to person, so too, owing to the individual physical qualities of our sense receptors and neurone system, we all start with our own distinctive appreciation of taste and smell. But we are all able to develop these faculties, to improve our detection of the sensory qualities in the glass – and on the plate – and to store memories of smells and flavours, which we can draw upon to make comparisons with new experiences.
Learning requires us to attend closely to what our noses are telling us, and this is not always easy. Several years ago, I attended a wine tasting event in California. After four whites, we tasted four reds, one of which puzzled many of us. It was hard to put into words what was wrong, but what we saw in the glass and what we felt in our mouths and noses were incongruent. Characteristically, we gave priority to our vision, and tried to think of a red grape from the region that might have that lightness, that hint of butter, that suggestion of oak, which the wine presented. Finally, the host confessed that we were drinking a fifth white – a local chardonnay – that had been dyed to look like a red wine. He assured us that if we had been blind-folded we would have picked the grape, but we had all allowed our sight-perception to over-rule our tasting memories: a trick of the eye causing a failure to remember.
All this proves – some might say – is that we should read the label on the bottle, which will tell us where the wine came from, which grapes were used, the year that it was made, the approximate alcohol content and, perhaps, some tasting notes that will prepare us to discern flavours that some other, more knowledgeable person, thinks are there. What is the reward for all the investment of time and energy – because paying attention to our senses of taste and smell in a sustained way over many years, must consume a considerable amount of intellectual energy – that it takes to educate our palate? Why not simply rely on others to tell us what to expect, what to enjoy, what to look out for?
The quick answer is that relying on others to tell us what to experience is almost always a bad idea, particularly once we get beyond early childhood. I am happy to defer to the expertise of horticulturalists and oenologists about the cultivation of vines and the technical production of wine, and to neurologists and philosophers about the way in which the brain interprets the sensory information sent from the tongue and nostrils. I am not happy – not at all – to defer to anyone else when it comes to what I feel when I smell and taste the wine from my glass. My experience of the world is my experience: I am its owner, I am its authority. I want to understand it better, more thoughtfully, more deeply, but this is work that only I can do.
There are two reasons to think that relying wholly on the taste judgments of others is a mistake. (I say “wholly”, because the process of improving our taste involves listening to and learning from the judgments of others: connoisseurship cannot be learned from books but requires practice and – at least to a certain extent – apprenticeship.) One reason concerns the role of the memory in the cultivation of our sense of personal identity, which in turn plays a central role in the development of our sense of happiness in life. I will return to this point in a later text. A second reason concerns the intrinsic pleasure of drinking wine (or drinking coffee, or eating flavoursome food), preferably in the company of others. If we are to participate fully in our own lives, and to share the lives of others, we need to be able to develop our own ability to capture the full flavour of the world.
There are some who drink to forget, for whom the principal pleasure of alcohol consumption is the alcohol itself: it numbs the senses, dulls the memory, takes away the pains of living, at least for a while. This is a way life to be avoided, to be pitied. But it would be a mistake – albeit one made seductive by the dogmas of religion and the prohibition movement – to assume that modest consumption is always the prelude to over-indulgence, to argue that the only responsible attitude to pleasure is to avoid it entirely from fear of excess. Too little can be as bad as too much. As Aristotle taught, the virtuous life is lived at the mean, with just the right amount, taken in just the right way, and for just the right reasons.
Much of the pleasure of drinking is social, reminding us of another of Aristotle’s great themes: friendship. When we share wine and food in the company of others, we jointly connect our senses – of smell and taste – with our shared world. Drinking and dining together provides us a means of opening our minds and our hearts, alerting us to the great range of taste combinations in the world, and to the pleasure of discovering how these combinations are perceived by others, whose tastes overlap, but also differ in interesting ways from our own. Wine reveals to us to the variety that is in the world and, at the same time reminds us of our common humanity, that everywhere others also take great pleasure from exploring variety. By becoming more alert to the richness of our own experience we are better placed to understand, and respect, the wealth of experience of others.
There is an old Latin saying, in vino veritas: in wine there is truth. Conventionally this is taken to mean that because the consumption of wine lowers our sense of restraint, reduces our control of impulse, that under its influence we are more likely to say what we really think, or to disclose information that we might otherwise have kept to ourselves. I suggest that there is another meaning to this saying, perhaps more profound, which is that in our experience of educating our taste we come closer to the truth of the world. Not only do we learn to embrace more attentively the precious fruits of the earth, but we become better able to share more deeply with our drinking companions the qualities of these sensations: we come closer to the truth about our habitats and our friendships.
Now, it’s time for me to see if I can find that hint of kumquat …