This wine tastes sexy like a racehorse…. or does it?
The comment about a wine tasting sexy like a racehorse is paraphrased from a winemaker that I used to work with. Those of us tasting with her wondered… wtf does that even mean? Has she tasted a racehorse? Do they really taste sexy? If a horse smells like a barnyard… then I would probably not use it as a positive descriptor myself. But hey, that’s just me.
Wine tasting – is all about perceiving a wine. We call it tasting, but it is really more involved than that. In the human mouth we are really only able to perceive sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami. All of the other ways that wines are described have to do with how the wine smells. About 80% of wine “tasting” is actually smelling. You initially stick your nose in the glass and smell the wine. Tasting begins with this step. Once you take a sip then the wine warms up and odor molecules go up to your nose via the opening between the back of your throat and nose. This is the same passageway that allows people to squirt milk out of their nose when they laugh after taking a sip. This is called retronasal olfaction, and can be thought of as mouth smelling.
Wine tasting is a very subjective thing. Many things come into play when tasting wine.
To begin with, what kind of food did you grow up eating. Were you raised on fast food, or Indian curries, or Mexican food? The types of food you consumed during your formative years absolutely set a foundation for the types of wine you will enjoy as an adult. They give you a reference of flavors to recall when you taste wine. This aroma reference is what I think of as your wine vocabulary.
If you have an idea of your starting point then you can understand that when someone tells you they smell, or taste for example, lychee in a Sauvignon Blanc you don’t have to agree with them. If it is something you have no experience with then you have no reference for that character. You may, on the other hand, have a different word for the same character.
Another thing that influences how you taste a wine is what you ate that day. This will impact your taste buds and how you perceive a wine. Salty, spicy, fatty foods, or food with strong aromas that linger will all have an impact on how a wine tastes. This is the reason that most wineries only provide a bland cracker in tasting rooms.
If you cook often, typically you will have a wider vocabulary of descriptors to use when describing a wine.
The anatomy of your tongue will also make you a better, or worse taster depending on the number of taste buds.
Some people are very sensitive to certain tastes and aromas while other people can’t taste them at all, no matter how strong the character is. Sometimes this can be valuable if the smell is offensive.
There is also an emotional component involved with tasting wine too. If you first taste a wine while you are out with your favorite group of friends and you are having an amazing day… then that wine is going to taste even better in that moment. When you get a bottle of it home you might think you bought the wrong wine, or that there is something wrong with the bottle. I have seen this over and over again throughout my years in the wine industry
The temperature of a wine will impact how it tastes. Warmer wines seem to have stronger flavors and aromas. This is because there are odor molecules that go are easier to smell at warmer temperatures.
Keep in mind that you are unique in how you perceive the world and this is particularly true for wine. There are many things that will influence how a wine tastes to you. The most important thing about tasting wine is be openminded, and if you don’t like it… move on to the next one. You are not wrong.