How to Sense and Taste Wine
Wine and food have evolved over the centuries from a necessity to stay alive into a sensory thing. We use our five senses to enjoy foods and wines in today’s world. Unlike hundreds of years ago when food and wine were just something to consume to stay alive, our world has provided we consumers the ability to readily acquire and sense to enjoy such creations. We use our sense of sight, smell, touch/feel, hearing and palette to enjoy from our perspective all that the food and vino have to offer. With our eyes, we look at the beauty of the wine and food. We can see the color and clarity of the wine as we sense characteristics in the wine we love. The straw color of a Chardonnay indicating a buttery wine or the lighter red color of a Pinot Noir indicating less tannin or the shrimp color of a Rose’ bring pleasure to our mind through our eyes. With our ears, we hear the popping of a cork while opening a new bottle of wine to hearing the babble of wine as it trickles down the side of a glass or hear the soft fizz of a sparkling wine sending up bubbles to the wine surface. Our nose provides some additional enjoyment to our minds in the enjoyment of wines. Once we pour that first glass of the “God’s Nectar,” we can smell the components of the wine. Those elements come out as we swirl the wine around in our glass (careful not to spill) which aerates the wine and allows the esters and aromatics of the wine to escape into the glass and beyond. Our nose can sense around 4,000 sensations communicating to our mind a myriad a sensations from peach to pear to green apple to dark cherry to tobacco to leather to vanilla to a dry desert after a morning rain. Your nose actually picks up more sensations that you can understand. Your palette aka mouth and tongue can only pick up five sensations being sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and savory. However, your mouth and nose are linked so close together which provides the sensation that you are tasting peach when you tongue says sweet and your nose says peach telling your mind PEACH! The foods you eat and pair with your wine are so interchangeably intertwined between your tongue with five sensations and your nose with thousands of sensations that your mind senses the end product of the combination of food and wine. The final sense is touch which is felt at the back of your mouth. Is the wine light with a sensation of a second or two or does it have a heavy feel where the back of your mouth on your tongue can sense the wine for a while giving an impression to your brain of weight.
We can take these understandings of how our senses works with our mind by evaluating and judging wine using the technique of swirling the wine in your glass to release the esters and aromatics within the wine in your glass, Smell the wine with your nose. Sip the wine into your mouth where the tongue and nose can sense the wine simultaneously, then swish that wine in your mouth to open up the vino, and then sense the wine on your tongue as to its weight while carefully inhaling across the wine on your cupped tongue to exhale through your nose to use your full sense in enjoying your wine. These are called the five “S”’s of wine. I hope you are enjoying your wine and foods more with this understanding.