Wine tasting is a relatively modern discipline, although it has always played a role in the history of wine. From ancient Egypt through the Roman Empire and right up to Bordeaux in the 18^th century, the skill of wine tasting has played an important role in deciding the quality of wines.

More recently, the tradition has been for oenologists to show and teach about the qualities of the wines produced by their wineries, but without necessarily taking into consideration the consumer’s point of view – whose expectations are not only to appreciate the wine and the cultural background to it – they also wish to develop their own sensorial potential.

Keeping this in mind, the intention of this paper is twofold: to try and provide original outlooks that lend accessibility and meaning to wine tasting, and secondly, using common sense, to emphasise the individual and their use of the senses.

The first two of the orthodox phases of wine tasting: sight and smell, will be dealt with by this paper, while a follow-up article will deal with palate and “holistic” aspects, for a total appreciation and enjoyment of wine, using more than the five senses.

Key words:-

original outlooks

develop sensorial potential

holistic aspects

“total enjoyment” of wine

more than the five senses

INTRODUCTION

Our sensorial organs are the gateway to perception. Through them, we communicate with the outside world, and at the same time they echo our inner drives. Furthermore, what we really perceive to be the real world is rather a “model”, regulated and adjusted by the information provided by our senses.

On the other hand, wine, as another expression of the possibilities nature offers, is a fantastic way of continuing to explore life forms. The sensations we feel after drinking it contribute powerfully to facilitating the invaluable process that gives meaning to life – after all, what more is there to life than the constant assessment of our surroundings using our senses? Our senses convey forms of energy to our brain: colours are an invention of the brain, perceived thanks to a specific protein; smells are surrounded by a complex network of sensorial modules that permit us to make numerous associations related to the original smell, while the five flavours fulfil a purely survival role in the continuation of the human species.

1. SIGHT AND COLOURS IN WINE

The previous section might sound metaphysical, but is necessary to introduce what is really involved in tasting or sensorial appreciation. The latter occurs when particles full of energy reach specialised receptors in our sensorial organs. These provoke stimuli via electro-chemical impulses, which reach our brain through our nervous system. The brain generates a complex image which we catalogue as “red”, “warm”, “aromatic” etc. We like to believe that we perceive and feel the same as other people. But the truth is that two people can never prove that they perceive the same thing when they say “green” or smell “musk”.

The eye, among other functions, serves to gather impressions of the exterior. Our eyes are the great “monopolisers” of our senses (we close our eyes when we smell wine or kiss in order not to be distracted by the processes of visual analyses). Our vision is not produced in our eyes but in our brain (the blind Spanish painter César Delgado creates his colour compositions in his mind). The colour we see is a reflection of what is not absorbed when light is refracted into its different wavelengths. As such, when we see a red apple, it will contain every colour except red. Nevertheless, we can still identify between one hundred and fifty and two hundred colours.

Eyesight is of great assistance to our wine tasting abilities. Our acute sense of smell is weakened when we cannot perceive the colours of the wine in question; a similar thing happens if the luminosity is not adequate. The wine glass is also important in fully appreciating the colour and aspect of the wine. The shade of a wine is the mirror from which we can see its “soul”; but at the same time, the eye quickly gets bored with the colours of a wine because, as with the rest of our senses, it loves shifting stimuli. For this reason, the limited variation in shades of a wine, together with the fact that colours do not instantaneously change as aromas do, cause the brain not to be challenged to process the information and it tends to enable the other senses to take over.

A study by a panel of Spanish experts attempted to standardise the colours of Spanish wines, and they concluded that there are two criteria when defining a colour: both the sensation of colour perceived, and the luminosity or radiant energy emitted. In addition, three further factors intervene: light source; the behaviour of the object exposed to the light, and the observer’s capacity to interpret a sensation.

Three psychophysical facts need to be considered when distinguishing the colour of a wine: clarity, shade and tone, and the degree of colour saturation. This gives us the following relevant points:

1. Observe the perceived tone (raspberry pink, strawberry pink, red currant pink, salmon pink, salmon and onion skin) to define these six groups or intervals of colour in rosé wines.

2. Consider that the scale used to perceive the yellow colours in white wines is based on difference in intensity and not in tone. This difference in intensity is a result of the degree of oxidation the flavonas undergo, ranging from the paleness of a more recent white to the copperness of a very evolved one, passing through light straw, straw, gold, deep gold, amber…

3. Highlighting in red wines the concept of saturation and luminosity to define the colour intensity closest to black in the first case, and the evident evolution of tawny tones in the second. There are eight definite groups of colour: violet, purple, garnet, cherry, ruby, tawny, chestnut and brown. A certain amount of confusion appears when explaining the tonal range of purple red and garnet red, and also between cherry and ruby – hence they can be categorised in the same tonal range, the difference being in the purity of their colour components.

According to the above, it is clear that the number of perceived and accepted colour tones is less than has been written by prestigious authors up to now.

What we need to bear in mind when analysing a wine’s colour is that its principal purpose is to evaluate its degree of evolution, and since nowadays most wines have impeccable colours, it is not worthwhile trying to appreciate all the possible tones (this requires a high level of skill); what really matters is that a wine is clean, bright and attractive at first sight.

WHAT DOES A VISUAL APPRECIATION OF WINES TELL US?

This is a slightly more slippery field if one wishes to try and discover the “soul” of a wine; naturally many diverse factors need to be considered, each of which contain highly subjective components. Let us just consider some of these with respect to a) the wine and b) the wine taster.

a) The wine.

Polyphenols convey aromas and flavours. But prior to that they are evident as powerful red and blue pigments in red wines, and delicate and pale yellow in whites; nearly all of which originate in the skin, although there are some remains that come from sugary fruit – which fade as the wine ages at the same time as the anthocyanins and flavones oxidise – a natural process in old wines. But to demonstrate how each type of wine is different, certain wines (olorosos, px and others) made from white grapes (Pedro Ximénez, Moscatel and others), due to their evolution, become more concentrated and develop deeper colours. A forty-year-old wine thus has more colour than at twenty years. In the case of sparkling wines, we have to consider all the information that give us their tiny bubles.

b) The wine taster.

Human beings only remember 5% of what they see. So we need to be very cautious in placing importance on what we see in wines. But for those who wish to, we shall briefly state possible psychological relationship between colours and the sensations they transmit: yellow – intelligence, low vitality; light green – youth; red – transmission of energy, emotion or movement; blue – exhibition/fantasy; black – power, rebellion.

Finally, from the point of view of serving a wine, the first visual impression that a customer gets at a restaurant table, is very important. Care needs to be taken with details: the colour of a table cloth can cause different effects on the colour and appearance of the wine. In general, a white table cloth is the most suitable to fully appreciate the wine’s colour; but if it is beige, a young or richly coloured wine could appear older; if it is light straw yellow, whites and sparkling wines become more attractive; if it is red, red wines become more vivid, and appear not to be as old as they really are; if it is blue, rosé wines appear to have grey tones.

2. SMELL, WINE AROMAS AND THEIR APPRECIATION

We smell because we breathe. And smelling makes us think. Our sense of smell, is of primary importance to our lives. Breathing is smelling. So just why have us humans lost part of our potential to smell, so much so that it is no longer our “reference sense”? Let us try to understand what deciphering the aromas we find in wine implies, as a genuine means to enjoying them.

The air we breathe goes into our system and facilitates the process of metabolic function, and at the same time, enables our smelling: the transfer of odorous molecules into impressions with informative or emotional meaning. Molecules with different geometric shapes (different aromas) need the watery-fatty environment inside our nostrils, in order to be inserted and fit the appropriate neuronal niches with their identical shapes. As soon as they adjust, nervous impulses are triggered to the brain (thus activating unique patterns of nerve ends), where they are collected, decodified, and instantaneously converted into pieces of information.

Several scientific studies have shown that there is a direct link between our olfactory bulbs (the sense of smell) and the emotions we feel (smelling means differentiating, evaluating, remembering). In the area of the brain where odorous messages are decodified, emotional signals are also registered. It is either here or also throughout our extensive and intricate nervous system, that neuronal highways are constantly conveying mixed pieces of information. The sense of smell is of prime importance here.

However, and in a different way, one thing is crystal clear: what we are not able to perceive through our smell is irreversibly ignored and lost. It is not lived. For us humans, not being able to detect an odour is not a matter of survival anymore, but it is a fact that this kind of anosmia we suffer does not allow us to live our life with all its grandeur and expression. This in itself is depressing, but on top of that, we are only able to remember some 35% of what we smell.

If it is true that our senses define the act of living, then why don’t we pay more attention to our nose and exploit it in order to obtain more richness in our lives, as well as helping us to appreciate wine better? Acquiring the ability to appreciate wine is an ideal therapy to practise this lost skill. And the nose is its most valuable tool.

A first consideration. We should not despair if, in the beginning, we cannot recognise different aromas within a bouquet. This is normal. We assume that our nose has already lost its two main faculties: to be vigilant and precise, like animals. It is just a matter of re-acquiring its use, as a hedonistic means of enhancing our capacity to enjoy.

Let us define and concretise what the aroma of wine is: it is the sensorial perception (and subjective interpretation) of odorous molecules, or families of them, that were synthesised by the vine, and stored in the inner part of the grape skin as aromatic precursors… and later were released by the yeast cells metabolism during the fermentation process.

We hope that this has been understood, since it is of primary importance to realise that aromas are nothing but natural substances produced by every living being (fruits, vegetables, etc.)

In addition to the former, in a recently published scientific paper it was also stated that yeast´s autolysis generates a series of compounds which releases aminoacids as aromatic precursors. These, associated with the other substances ( ethylic esters or frutal notes, terpens, different alcohols with grassy, floral and medicinal notes, aldehydes, sulphite compounds, lactones…) make up the main aromatic families.

There – or sometimes simultaneously, where fermentation takes place in a wooden vat – oak barrels play an important and beneficial role in that substances (free phenols, furanic descents, phenolic aldehydes, and others) from the oak are absorbed by the wine. This process then modifies the aromatic profile of the wine, and also – through polymerization – together with the resulting evolution, provides the wine with more complex aromas.

The genesis of aromas in wine has already been explained. Let us now focus on how we perceive them.

A second consideration. In wine tasting courses a common question is: what is the secret to acquiring and developing a good use of our olfactory sense? The answer is always the same: there is no secret. The secret is that there is no secret. It is all a matter of familiarization.

According to our personal level of perception, we either need a bigger or a smaller amount of a certain odorous molecule for it to be perceived. There are probably in excss of one thousand different aromas that have already been discovered and named. But we need no despair since we can only recognize about sixty of them. Aromas that are found in every wine. This is still a lot, but in a professional tasting note appreciating six aromas is enough.

CHARACTERISTICS, LISTS OF AROMAS AND SYSTEMATIC APPROACHES

In the past, different authors classified the aromatic precursors into six groups: alcohols, acids, carboniles, esters, terpenic descents and other compounds. From these classification, and according to their origin and when they arise (?), the classification systems still in use in wine tasting manuals have been derived: primary aromas, those coming from the fruit; secondary aromas, arising from the fermentation process; and thirdly, the ones produced by the aging process first in oak in the oxidation phase and later in the bottle in the reduction phase. A combination of these three make up the bouquet.

All right. It was not a bad approximation for the time. But what does really happen when we hold the glass of wine in front of our nose and perceive an omniun-gatherum of aromas (or our presumption of them perhaps) and feel we have no clue as to where or how start getting anything clear?

Let us look into the matter all at once. On the one hand we have at our disposal the wheel of aromas created by A. C. Noble; very nice and descriptive. A rounded and consensual compound of the different aromatic families together with their descriptors. There are also all kinds of lists published everywhere with the same descriptors placed at ease either in a family list or in another. Considering what? It is not clear unless it is the result of their author´s opinion.

On the other hand, in a more appreciative way, other studies carried out analyses of aromas in a laboratory, demonstrating that a more accurate classification of aromas would be: base aromas that can be found in any kind of wine, and which make up the generic wine aroma. Then, a second group of more complex and subtle aromas can be perceived within any of nine aromatic families that were established. And finally the so-called “impact” aromas would be those substances that appear in a higher concentration and are easily perceived and provide the wine with its particular profile.

At this point we are going to suggest a more accessible way of achieving the recognition of wine aromas.

The matter is to do it in such a way that the wine fan does not feel hopeless at the time of trying to decipher the smell of a particular wine in the glass. So, the point is: do certain aromas necessarily have to appear because oenologists and scientists say so? The clue turns out to be: how do we feel about that wine? Sensorially blind? Disorientated? Lost? Disappointed for not being able to recognize anything they say we should? Well, that is not the case. All we need is to put our nose there, sniff… and enjoy if we smell nice things. With time we will be capable of distinguishing aromas little by little.

The aromas usually found in wines are:

– Base or simple aromas that are easily perceived as they are mainly frutal/alcoholic notes. These aromas have a tendency to assimilate with each other resulting in a sort of an aromatic compound within the wine in the glass. This is commonly regarded as the “smell of wine”. Needless to say what really matters when tasting a wine, is to bear in mind that an aroma is only perceived as an element in its family, and not in an isolated way. This is how we can define the aromatic profile of a wine.

– Mixed, complex or subtle aromas whose molecular weight is heavier so they emerge more slowly. These aromas are the result of aggregating other aromas (mainly those coming from oak) with the base ones, plus the effects caused through the aging process. They are naturally more intense and incisive, so they can actually “break” the aromatic compound that we initially identify in the wine glass. When this happens, very definite aromas emerge in such a way that, when we perceive them, they can sometimes lead us to ecstasy. Some of these aromas are conveyed by monoterpenos, or provide intense varietal notes, or they can even reveal negative odours such as the well-known mercaptanos.

In order to fully appreciate the smell of a wine the procedure is as follows:

1. First smelling to ensure the clean condition of the wine.

2. Second smelling to calibrate the degree of its aromatic intensity.

3. Third smelling to define the aromatic profile of the wine. Which aromatic family prevails there? Are there any subtle aromas?

4. We swirl the wine in the glass so that we may notice hidden aromas that will gradually reveal the essence of the wine.

5. In the mean time we can let both time and air play their role, so at the end we will be able to draw out the real characteristics of the wine.

Please note that all these steps can be reduced to just two smellings.

FINAL CONCLUSIONS

Once we have discovered the spirit of the wine, the next step is to put it in our mouth. ( We shall see in detail that phase in the next paper ), By way of rounding off we will add some considerations concerning the whole process we have tackled here.

Word-descriptors.

The real fact – when trying to decipher what we perceive in the nose – does not consist in any problem with our olfactory potential, but rather it is our scant possession of relevant vocabulary (aroma descriptors), due to lack of practice. Think of this aberrant situation: we breath some twenty-three thousand times a day, every single day of our lives; millions of odorous molecules constantly entering our systems and mark our lives… and then we are unable to find names to describe what we are smelling. Why is this so? Because, among other possible reasons, our sense of smell is a silent one; it is mute; very intimate. It is hard for us to verbalize impressions that, in some cases, we imagine to be indescribable.

It should not be like that. The sensorial appreciation of a wine is just a task aimed at defining the amount and richness of its constituents in order to fix their degree of balance within the wine. Its enjoyment is a different issue that will come later on.

Qualities, functions of aromas.

Our perception of the vital environment we live in is tied to that of the odours around us. Therefore, our olfactory memory is constantly increasing. An odour/aroma may then be associated with something we have experienced. This is the reason why aromas instil our lives with peculiar functions. Here are some examples: frutal aromas tend to be exciting; floral ones work as stress reducers; balsamics are calmants; some animal aromas (musk, grey ambar) can play a role as aphrodisiacs; lactic aromas can imbue us with feelings of tenderness, while spicy ones transmit masculinity, agressivity; earthy ones may suggest melancholy, and the fine aromas of a rose are commonly associated with feminity.

Wines, by no means, transmit these emotions. But we have to bear in mind that, in the end, the possible addition of different aromatic components (its ultimate expression) can only be found in the balance and harmony of a wine.

The concept of a “Wine closed”.

“This wine is closed”, is often used to describe a modern-style wine, deep and rich but whose aromas are not available. And we proceed to swirl the wine repeatedly. Sometimes, these kind of wines, deep and undeveloped, do need time and air. But it is no less certain that, plainly speaking, the person who is judging that wine has to also gradually “open” their senses to perceive/understand/familiarize themselves with the possibly hermetic aromas of that wine.

Finally we need to state that what we have expressed so far here, related to the aromatic evaluation of wine, is all relative. Something to meditate upon: wine descriptors (and the sensitive impressions they transmit) used by individuals in the so-called western world, turn out to be not valid for those in the east since their sensorial references (due to their feeding habits,etc;) differ from ours. So, we ought to be very cautious and not lose perspective.

Acknowledgments: special thanks to Mark Johnstone at Active English for correcting my English.

References:

– A. Morata, “Crianza sobre lías…” Enólogos, nº 34, 2005

– A. Ortega, “Contribución al estudio del color…” Vitivinicultura,1993-94

– Diane Ackerman, “A natural history of the senses”, Vintage Books, 1990

– Eduardo Punset, “Por qué somos como somos”, Edit. Aguilar, 2008

– Emile Peyneaud, Jacques Bouin, “Le goiut du vin”, Edit. Dunod, 1996

– Juan Cacho, “El aroma del vino desde el factor suelo”, Cursos Rioja 2008

– Richard Dawkins, “The God delusion”, Hougton Miffling, 2006

– Steve Grand, “Creation: life and how to make it”, Kindle Edition

– Thornwald Dethlefsen, Rudiger Dahlke, “Krankheit als Weig”, C. Bertelsmann GambH, 1983