A Procedure for Noticing

Left alone, a taster forms a global judgement in about two seconds and then spends the next minute finding reasons for it.

The systematic sequence (appearance, then aroma, then palate, then structure and finish) exists to interrupt that. It is not a route to a correct answer and it is not a ritual. It is a procedure for forcing attention onto each dimension in turn, so that something gets noticed which the first impression skipped.

The same reasoning produces a checklist in a cockpit. Experienced pilots know how to configure an aircraft; the list exists because knowing is not the same as reliably doing under pressure, and because the item you skip is by definition the one you did not think of.

Two mechanical facts make the procedure work better, and both are worth understanding rather than performing.

Swirling increases the evaporating surface. Aroma is entirely a matter of volatile molecules reaching the olfactory epithelium at the top of the nose, and a still glass offers them very little area to escape from. Coating the sides of the bowl and letting it drain multiplies that surface substantially. It is also why a large bowl helps, and why a wine served too cold smells of nearly nothing. Volatility falls sharply with temperature, so a fridge-cold white has locked most of its aroma away.

And most of what people call taste is smell. The tongue reports sweet, salt, sour, bitter and umami, plus texture and temperature, which is a very short list. Everything else (the fruit, the earth, the spice, the mushroom) is aroma travelling up the back of the throat from inside the mouth, which is called retronasal olfaction.

This is why food is flat with a blocked nose, and why noisily drawing air across wine in the mouth is genuinely useful rather than an affectation. The two routes are processed somewhat differently, and the same compound can present differently depending on which way it arrived.

Then there is the evidence about what tasters are actually doing, and it is not flattering.

Frédéric Brochet ran two experiments at Bordeaux in 2001. In the first, he added odourless red dye to a white wine and gave it to fifty-four oenology students. They described it using red-wine vocabulary (tannic, dark fruit, notes of crushed red berries) and none reported that it tasted like a white wine.

In the second, he served the same mid-range wine twice: once from a bottle labelled as a grand cru and once from a bottle labelled as a cheap table wine. The grand cru version received praise; the table wine version was described as weak, flat and faulty.

These are not people being dishonest. Expectation is an input to the perceptual process rather than a commentary added afterwards. The brain-imaging work on price and wine pleasantness makes the same point from another direction. The wine in the grand cru bottle genuinely tasted better.

Which is why serious comparative tasting is done blind, and why a note written from an open bottle is a note about an experience rather than about a liquid. Both are legitimate; they are answers to different questions.

Finally, the word that does the most work in Burgundy writing and holds up the least.

Minerality is used constantly, and the geological story attached to it, that a wine carries the flavour of its bedrock, does not survive scrutiny. Vines take up minerals as ions in quantities orders of magnitude below any taste threshold. There is no mechanism by which limestone gets into the glass.

What tasters are responding to is real. It clusters around high acidity, low pH, certain sulphur compounds, and reductive winemaking, and different tasters appear to mean somewhat different things by it. Research asking professionals to define it has found no agreement.

So it is useful shorthand among people who share a reference, and it is not a claim about geology. Which is roughly where a great deal of tasting vocabulary sits, and saying so is more honest than either abandoning the word or believing the story that came with it.