Wine

Monday, Aug. 03, 2009

The Grapevine: Matters of taste depend on the taster

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A reader e-mailed the other day to ask for some wine advice. Even though he knew from reading my column that I didn’t like oaky, buttery chardonnays, he figured I might be able to recommend some.

He was lamenting that winemakers were eschewing this style in favor of leaner, even unoaked wines. I agreed that many winemakers were playing down the oak — these days, I find that the “heat” from high alcohol is my chief chardonnay complaint —but I still taste plenty of woody chardonnays. So I made a few suggestions.

I heard back from him a few days later. He’d tried one wine and hadn’t found it to be oaky at all. I suggested that maybe we had different oak thresholds. But it also got me thinking about how different tasters perceive the aromas and flavors in the same wine.

Such factors as the environment in which you taste wine, the temperature of the wine and the glassware you’re using can make a difference in your perceptions of a wine. But the taster himself is a critical factor.

“Every one of us has compounds that we cannot smell at all,” says Hildegarde Heymann, an enology professor and sensory scientist at the University of California, Davis. “The same is true of taste.”

Most of the reason lies in genetics, she says; each of us has specific receptors that allow us to smell and taste certain compounds. Training and experience can sometimes help you understand what you’re tasting, Heymann says, but “if you don’t have the proper receptors,” no amount of training will make a difference.

“Every single sensory perception is extremely variable between people,” Heymann adds, and scientists are still learning how this mechanism works.

Researchers have found hundreds of compounds in the aromas of wine, which opens the door to vastly different perceptions.

There are some things I’m very sensitive to. Cork taint is one. Similarly, the burn of alcohol in some wines is very off-putting to me, while some experienced tasters don’t detect a problem. There are other aromas and flavors that I’m less sensitive to.

All of which brings me to the subject of wine critics and reviews. Most critics I know make a good-faith effort to describe the characteristics of a wine. But their descriptions will often include words that are hardly neutral.

A big, ripe, high-alcohol Paso Robles syrah might be described by one critic as lush and hedonistic, while another might find it over-ripe and lacking in liveliness. Some of this is almost certainly the result of personal preferences. But it could also be that their ability to smell and taste different components of the wine isn’t the same.

So if critic A and critic B disagree on the merits of a wine, that doesn’t mean that one of them is wrong. And if you buy a highly touted wine and find that it isn’t to your liking, you’re not necessarily wrong, either. It’s likely that everyone has different preferences. But it’s also possible that the critics — and you — simply can’t perceive the wine in the same way.

E-mail Laurie Daniel at ladaniel@earthlink.net.