How to Taste a Wine
We are first aware of our power to taste food when we are weaned from the maternal breast. From that cruel and difficult period we battle to assert our own gastronomical individuality. The going is often hard. We are continually disturbed by the advances in dietetics, in medicine, the never ending development of hygienic chaff or uncooked cereal, the enriching of flour and the sanitary skimming of milk. We learn unenthusiastically what a carrot tastes like raw, what it is like if it’s boiled, creamed, or candied. We learn to rise in rebellion against the smell of uncooked sea food or cooking cabbage.
By the time we have emerged from adolescence, we have been so conditioned by so many foods that the mere mention of any of them brings their taste to mind almost as sharply as the actual food. Without effort we have developed a vast store of taste memories. We have never had these tastes described to us. No one has told us to moisten our lips with vegetable soup, let its perfumes fill our nasal cavities or let it roll easily against the mucous membrane. The order was spare and firm: “Eat it-or else!” And after that order was repeated a few hundred times, we pretty well knew what vegetable soup tasted like.
No one ever bawled out to us: “Drink that Mouton-Rothschild ‘72-or else!” or “That’s perfectly good Chateau d’Yquem ‘20.” The fact is that less than 10 per cent of our adult population tasted wine before it was eighteen years old, and that 10 per cent includes those of us whose introduction to wine was a serving of a purple-black liquid in a coffee cup in the place Joe had sent us to. The taste was hardly something to put into one’s memory book of pleasant sensations. So now it is just because we have such a generous store of food tastes in our memories and practically no memory of wine tastes that we are quite self-conscious about the mechanics of memorizing wine tastes. Like piano lessons, roller skating, or blowing chewing-gum bubbles, learning to memorize tastes seems to belong to childhood.
This, of course, is absurd. For even if we were fed wine on mama’s knee and were reared in a house where the wine carafe was as much a part of the table setting as knife or fork, the chances are quite slight we would be able to identify as many as half a dozen wines and those only as “Uncle Mayer’s wine,” or “Aunt Giovanna’s wine,” or “Cousin Mignon’s” or “the wine from the little cask.” That such wines were Burgundies, clarets, Rieslings, or Chiantis, or that they were of a certain vintage, or were worthy of adjectives other than “good” or “sour,” we would not have dreamed. They went down our throats with the rest of the food, and were no more contemplated than the potato pancakes, spaghetti,or sour-dough bread which accompanied them as the rush was made to be up from the table and away.
No. Wine-tasting is an adult business which comes only with a developing love of food. It did not belong to childhood or adolescence, when food bulk was infinitely more important to us than food quality. The first thing we must do in order to taste a wine, therefore, is to shed any self-consciousness we may have about learning how to taste-now that we are past childhood.
At first the act of drinking a glass of wine appears to be a pretty self-conscious ceremony in its own right. To those of us who are used to thinking in terms of aiming a whisky or gin for one’s stomach and getting it there in the shortest time by the straightest route, the act of drinking wine seems to be a rather stuffy rite. We take the glass in hand and imitate the wine-drinkers around us-we hold the glass to the light, twirl the stuff in the glass, sniff it, sip it, or gulp it, pump it around inside our mouths, swallow it, and haven’t the vaguest idea of whether or not it is good; in fact, we are so involved in the ritual of drinking that we don’t even know if we like the wine.
If the ceremonial of wine-drinkers leaves us stunned, their vocabulary may well defeat us completely. More people have been scared away from the enjoyment of wine by the florid language of the cognoscenti than by the high prices of the bottles. By the time one has heard a glass of wine apotheosized as “rather like the less sweet wallflower,” or patronized as “uncompromisingly Gallic in its patriotism,” or dramatized as “the Peter Pan vintage,” it is far more comforting to head for the nearest beer parlor and be at home with man.
Yet not all the language describing wine is balderdash. To learn how to taste wine, we must know beforehand what qualities to expect. Then we must find out how to discover those qualities. Finally, we will judge the wine on the basis of our findings, for not until then is our tasting completed.
Wine to the poet Keats may have been “a beaker full of the warm South,” to the cleric John Wesley, “one of the noblest cordials in Nature,” but actually wine is a concoction men have been bright enough to create from their knowledge of botany, geology, meteorology, physics and chemistry over a period of more than four thousand years. Wine of some sort has been made in every civilized country on earth. Grapes have been grown under all manner of climatic and soil conditions, in spite of or with the help of various yeasts, moulds and bacteria. They have been crushed by wooden paddles, by stones, by metal rollers, by naked and booted feet, and have been fermented and ripened in vessels of stone, oak, redwood and innumerable other materials. The wine produced has been drunk two weeks after the pressing in some cases and a hundred years later in others, and it has been stored in containers made of clay, stone, leather, brass, wood or glass before it was consumed. The chemical substances of the grape derived from the soil and the processes of fermentation along with the conditions of aging and storing, combine to produce the extremely complex solution which is wine. Water, sugar, acids, minerals, alcohols, saccharomyces, oils, esters and aldehydes combine to make the substance of wine, and naturally enough determine its flavor. Consequently, the taste of wine is as complex as its chemistry. So, if we. are seeking the “perfect wine,” we will be looking for a wine in which all the component tastes would be present individually and at the same time blended into a perfect whole-very much like our criteria for a work of art.