Retired wine importer and active wine writer Terry Theise weighs in on the matter of bottle – and taster – variation…
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http://www.jancisrobinson.com/articles/bottle-bottle-sip-sip
Terry Theise mentions a variable in tasting that I have never seen mentioned at all, but which is absolutely critical for me: the time of day of the tasting.
The conventional wisdom is that our palates are the most fresh and at their peak of perceptiveness in the morning. Which is when many tastings get scheduled. And that may be true for most, but nothing could be further from the truth for me.
I am an incorrigible night person, and always have been. I never got an A in a class that started before 10:00 am; my most productive studying in college was between 10:00 pm and 2:00 am. I have often quipped that I’ve seen sunrise at the end of my day far more often than at the beginning.
When I took the examination for Certified Wine Educator (Society of Wine Educators), it was administered in the morning, and consisted of three parts: a timed factual multiple choice test with added essay, a tasting test for wine faults and imbalances, and a varietal identification tasting test. It was the faults and imbalances test that I was most concerned about, and the varietal identification that I was least concerned about. But in fact, the faults/imbalances was the part I passed, and the varietal identification that I failed. When I retook the varietal identification again a year later, I failed again.
The third time I took it — again, in the morning — I changed my strategy. I got up much earlier than I was accustomed to. I started drinking wine as soon as I was out of bed. I went out to breakfast at a place that served steak and potatoes. I did everything I could think of to trick my body into thinking it was later than it was, so that by the 10:00 am tasting it (almost) felt like afternoon.
And that time, I passed. Easily. Morning tastings are completely lost on me …
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It’s good to remind wine lovers, as Terry does, of the many factors that influence our perception of wine. And he doesn’t even get into some of the more surprising cross-modal influences that have been successfully demonstrated by sensory scientists, such as the influence of music on taste perception, nor does he discuss how the description or name under which we apprehend a wine influences our expectations and thereby also our sensory experience.
But I fear he risks encouraging his readers to conclude that one can’t claim to “know how Château Latour 1990 tastes” and sending them down a skeptical path toward insisting that when we appear to be describing wine, we are (to quote Jamie Goode) “actually describing a conscious representation of [our] interaction with the wine.” There is a long history of epistemological theories that argue from “What we perceive and can describe are representations (or sense data ideas, or ideas)” to: “We don’t really perceive nor can we really talk about those objects that common sense takes to be the furniture of the universe.” This argumentative move always comes at a heavy price: if we give up believing that we are perceiving or talking about shared objects and experience, we end up in a solipsistic dead end.
Don’t get me wrong. Focusing on one’s reaction to and interaction with a wine – which is the Copernican Turn that Terry’s extensive tasting notes and his critical accounts of “tasting notes” as a concept seem designed to achieve – could certainly have its benefits. But we also can and do talk intelligibly and usefully about the wine itself, and I submit that this will always be the primary interest for wine lovers.
To say that I know how Château Latour 1990 tastes is simply to say that I have had the experience of tasting it. The situation is no more (if also no less) fraught than one in which I say that I know how avocados taste or know how Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony sounds. In the case of the symphony, there isn’t a definitive description of how it sounds any more than there is a definitive performance or “true” interpretation, and I cannot imagine that someone who reads the account of a critic would imagine that such a claim is being made or could be made.
What Terry promises as the “second part” of his answer to what we can know about a wine is that “what we can know we can know close to absolutely.” Searching his text, I can’t definitively discern what it is that he claims we can know about a wine with near-certainty, but he appears to be referring to what he describes as “the evanescent tasting moment.” I’m wondering how literally Terry intends to take “moment.” It’s another time-honored philosophical strategy to seek certainty in singular instances of sense data, but even if the postulating of such entities can be convincingly defended – and the historical record is not encouraging – the requisite certainly would be irrelevant to our appreciation of wine, which concerns organizing and reflecting on a vast array of temporally overlapping sensations. Not to mention that any remotely plausible instances of sense data – such as the proverbial red patch – have no counterpart in the realm of aroma, text and texture, for describing which we lack the requisite linguistic primitives of color and extension.
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Also very important in shaping our tasting experience, is our psychological state of the moment, which can bias, enhance, or inhibit sensory perception, both through our brain’s neurological pathways and through physiological changes.
Emotional processing and sensory evaluation have been shown to strongly impact one another, most probably due to the fact they share neurological pathways such as the amygdala, the hypothalamus and the orbitofrontal cortex. Negative moods have been linked to reduced perception of sweetness and increased perception of sourness and bitterness, when compared to positive moods. The latter have also been shown to lead to perception of higher flavour intensity.
With regard to our olfactory system, it is so intimately connected to the brain’s limbic system (which processes emotion), that hypervigilance triggered by stress makes us more sensitive to unpleasant smells. On the brighter side, especially when blind tasting in a competitive context perhaps, increased levels of cortisol (stress hormones) are associated with better odour identification performance.
I’m sure we can all relate to at least most of these scientific findings if we reflect upon our own varying states and findings when tasting under different psychological conditions.
Personally, I am particularly fond of the way people like Jancis, Julia and Tamlyn write in their tasting notes published on this website, where personal emotion shines through their words so brightly, bringing the wines to life there and then. So-called inconsistency across several tastings of the same wine (sometimes even just a day or two apart) is but a reflection of scientific reality and of something we all know all too well within our intimate selves: you never set foot in the same river twice.
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