Crushing Some Myths of Wine Tasting
Many years ago, when I visited London with, sadly, much greater regularity than I do now, we used to stay with a friend of my partner's. He was - and doubtless remains - a lovely bloke. The son of a small UK wine importer, his kitchen table forever presented a cluster of bottles in varying states.
The majority were close to empty, one or two might have been suspected of TCA (cork taint) and were waiting – folornly – for an improvement of their situation, two or three were unopened, a lesser offering had been popped for the ragu simmering away on the range, there was a Roberto Voerzio perpetually in the offing, and perennially in attendance would have been a bottle or two of vintage Madeira hanging around for much, much later on.
A glass had been poured from the ragu bottle and he was telling us, in his soft, earnest, RP accent, that he was trying to stop himself swirling the glass before tasting it. Now, if you're not in the wine trade in any capacity this is an unusual move. In terms of habitual actions, saying one doesn't swirl a glass of wine before sniffing it is akin to not testing the shower water, or crossing a road without looking up – it's odd. If you want a laugh, put water in a wine glass and give it me and I will swirl and sniff it absentmindedly. It's a thing. There's a certain logic to it (you get taught it at beginner wine courses): swirling a glass releases more aroma compounds in the wine. The wine glass itself is designed to funnel these compounds towards your snout. But why would someone forgo this? Why was it an issue?
The professional wine world is full of these received ideas like having to swirl before having a sniff. There are movements (I use the term loosely) on social media dedicated to pointing the finger at people who hold wine glasses by the bowl (not by the stem, darling). This is – apart from any snobbishness related to the act – purportedly to avoid over-warming the wine or to aid swirling. The latter is incontrovertible (a bowl-hold demands the full use of the lower and upper arm to create a vortex, a stem-hold no more than a little wrist).
The former, while thermodynamically plausible, is pretty much only of concern if the temperature of the wine at serving is absolutely spot on. Firstly, the heat exchange across our glass membrane is unlikely to be significant; secondly, agressive swirling in an ambient atmosphere not correlating to the wine's temperature will likely have a greater effect than your mildly warm digits; thirdly, warmer wine releases more aromas anyway; and, lastly, the length of time the original sample spends in the glass (and the speed of its subsequent depletion) is fundamental to the dynamic. In short, there are too many variables to simply state that holding a glass by the stem is the "right" way to do something – and it certainly isn't if your wine is too cold.
With that in mind, let's get back to swirling. Swirling is great if you have a limited amount of time with a glass or wine sample and really need to wring out all the aroma compounds you can in the shortest possible time. However, as a chemical entity, there are only a finite amount of compounds the wine can release. I'm not saying wine will stop smelling of anything if you aggressively swirl a glass non-stop for five minutes, it's just that, as we know, aromas evolve, even in the glass, and that it might pay to not simply focus on the first ones.
I'm not saying swirling wine or holding a glass by the stem are totally misguided. But I want to contrast what wine professionals often do with what your common-or-garden wine consumer does, and try to make the case for bringing the two closer together.
A lot of time and effort goes into (and a fair bit of money is also made) teaching the great unwashed how to know what hue the barrel-aged Viognier is in their glass, or just what type of forest fruit they smell in a Beaujolais, or, of course, why to hold a glass by the stem. But if we think a bit more basically about it, this is all completely unecessary because – let's be honest – everyone knows how to taste stuff. Those of us who are lucky in this world taste food and drinks daily. We use our eyes, nose and tongue all the time. Everyone I know who drinks tea (the vulgar type, where milk is required) knows the perfect hue for their cuppa. They might not have the Pantone number or correct shade of light brown, but they know it when they see it. And most of us know when we've made a coffee too weak, or when the neighbor has cut the lawn.
We don't necessarily need to present our entry-level consumer with a WSET tasting sheet or a couple of Wine Folly printouts and ask them to pick aromas. We just need to get more of them doing what wine professionals do all the time – tasting. There needs to be more comparative tasting at the point of sale. Consumers need to be able to make discerning judgements on the basis of their own tastebuds, not only on the basis of price or branding. And they don't need to write anything more formal than "this one is better than that one" (which is all that wine tasting is about, really).
Of course, I'm talking about the more populist, less aspirational end of the market – those who might not necessarily be hugely into wine. But this end should not be left to economies scale, brand design think-tanks, and the dismissal of our experts. If we can get consumers here to taste more (where experts and wine writing generally reside), then there is a better chance they will begin, in their own time, to seek out wine writers because they are talking the language of taste (albeit not technically per se), and not the language of label with a pretty footprint or a pair of cocks (apologies Gallo) or the shelf sticker that says 50 percent off.
I still remember being a kid and asking my dad what I should be looking for in a good wine. I think I got some answer about smoothness and something about tannins (a concept I barely understood). But he should have just pointed at my dinner plate and asked me what made that meal good. Essentially, it's the same thing.
What's happened with wine is that we can wrap too much aura around the stuff that people know how to do already (holding the stem and swirling your wine are Rococo embellishments of simply holding and smelling your beverage container) and not placed enough emphasis on the fundamental aspect of it: tasting the stuff. Rather than giving beginners aroma wheels and a stopclock to time the length, we should make sure they can spit with confidence and give them a pen and a piece of paper - that's all they need. Individuals quickly codify their comparisons and preferences without wondering if they should look for the smell of bananas or strength of the tannin.
And so, pedagogically, I think our efforts are going in the wrong direction. A consumer is no less than the first draft of an MW. That doesn't mean professionalism is out of place – indeed, I'm sure most people would like the idea of a tea hue swatch so they could correctly define their shade of tea (mine is "Totally Tan" on the Sherwin-Williams range, by the way). And while those of a populist bent mock the outré pronouncements of the tasting note, it is also easy to forget that, along with things like the WSET protocol, these are simply attempts to create a sort of eno-esperanto (for example, we all know what lemons smell like, but if I write "the aroma of my Grandmother's patio" that's not going to trigger much).
Cathy Huyghe's recent piece in Forbes mirrors this piece somewhat and concludes that wine professionals need to talk the same language as those who use "smooth" as a descriptor but this rather misses the point that formalized tasting notes are, by design, meant to be, at the very least, a nod to a universal laguage based on the science of taste. I, on the other hand, think we just need to encourage people to taste more.
Short of the obvious fix of getting an economy in which people are paid better wages, we want to get more people into wine. I don't pretend to know how we force supermarkets to host more regular general tastings. But I know from bitter experience (wines loved at a tasting aren't always loved after the second glass at home), we learn our best lessons alone.
The reason I wrote all of this was because I recently saw a hulk of a man lumbering out of a supermarket with a bag-in-box of non-regional red wine tucked under his arm. Maybe – hopefully – he was going to use it for a vast family ragu. But what if it was to drink? I am the last person to convince him to even try buying a bottle of wine (if only for the selfish reason of keeping me and my winemaking colleagues in a job). It's also highly likely that he's perfectly happy with that wine. The branding is immaterial and it costs as much as a pack of industrial lager – what's to argue with? Well nothing.
And there's only one person that's likely to get him to try another brand or even a bottle of wine – even a single-variety wine – and that's him. Would a supermarket tasting of a range of wines change his purchase? I don't know, but if it does, at least he's beginning to talk the language of wine – even if he is a "smooth" criminal.
Just maybe don't tell him he's got to swirl the glass more.
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