A good friend was going through his cellar and asked for some advice on some of the wines he had been holding for a long time…probably too long. I found some online reviews from the release dates of some of the older wines. I copied the reviews and sent them to him, mostly for the aging advice. But he got a big chuckle out of some of the more florid reviews (“crushed stones”, “muscular dried fruit”, “mincemeat pie”, and so forth). It got me thinking (again) about how frustrating it can be to taste a wine, and have one of two things happen: 1) nothing; and 2) the smell or taste equivalent of “tip of tongue” phenomenon, and I just cannot put a name on a particular taste or smell. The latter is thankfully more frequent for me.
In my experience, wine drinkers fall into four categories. The first are people with very discerning palates, who can fully appreciate even the most complex wines, and also put a name to what they are experiencing. Let’s call them the “virtuosos”. I don’t actually know any virtuoso’s, with a possible exception or two. Virtuoso’s probably are, or should be, in the wine or food industry as a maker, taster, critic, writer, etc. The second group are people who appreciate wines with some level of depth and discernment, but either cannot or do not put that appreciation into words very often. Let’s call this group the “good tasters”. The third group are people who either cannot or do not get much at all out of tasting a wine, and are usually perfectly happy with that. And the fourth group are people in either the second or third group, but who think they are in the first group. Vivino, in my opinion, is littered with thousands of examples of the fourth group.
I consider myself a mid-range good taster. I’m neither the best nor the worst palate in the room for most wine-involved gatherings I attend. I guess the fundamental question I’m trying to answer in this post is: can I move up in my group, or, heaven forbid, jump groups altogether and be a virtuoso taster? I have doubts about the possibility of jumping groups–virtuosos are a extremely small group, and I think most of them have innate talent I lack. But I would like to move up the ranks of the good tasters, and both appreciate wine more and be better able to name what I’m tasting.
Some really interesting journalism came out in the last couple of years on COVID-induced loss of taste and smell amongst wine and food professionals. I encourage anyone interested to google their way to one of the many stories, but a link to an NYT story is provided below. Some stories had happy endings that involved victims re-training their sense of smell and taste. There are variants of re-training regimens, and again, tons of “how to” stuff out there online, youtube, etc. Many of the regimens were based on repeated sniffing of a set of four scents. In the scientific studies, the four scents are usually clove, rose, lemon, and eucalyptus. These four were chosen to get a broad range of scents (spicey, floral, citrusy/fruity, and resinous). Most of the regimens focused on associating these scents with deep, long-held scent memories as a way of re-triggering the smell pathways to the brain. Clinical research on these regimens is scant, but the CDC put smell re-training in the “can’t hurt/might help” category.
Therapy for loss of taste and smell focused on smell because it is such a major component of taste. That’s why food is so taste-less when we have a stuffed-up nose. The interplay between the hardware (taste receptors on the tongue and smell receptors in the nose, plus their connections to the brain) and software (our brains ability to integrate sensory input from the mouth and nose, plus compile vast memories of things we have smelled and tasted in our lives) is incredibly deep and complex…but most people who study these things say that the majority of the nuance of flavor comes from our sense of smell.
So far, “smell-training” has focused on rebuilding the sense for those who have completely lost their sense of smell. That’s not me. I’m interested in smell training sort of like my physical fitness workouts, enhancing what I think is an “OK” sense of smell, and training it up for the long term. I’m assuming the idea of exercising my sense of smell might sound sort of comical. It’s really not. I’ve observed the decline of my father’s sense of taste and smell as he ages, and it is sad. He is essentially growing deaf to a lot of flavors he enjoyed his entire life, and the shared experience of a delicious meal is greatly diminished for him. If I can forestall that decline with some intentional effort now, please sign me up.
I reached out to Frauke Galia, one of the better-known proponents of smell training (link below), and asked about smell training as an enhancement activity, rather than a therapeutic one. Turns out she is developing just such a regimen, and I got recruited to be a beta-tester, starting mid-March.
I’ll post again soon on this, to let you know how it is going.
Links:
Talented Amateur 