Class: Le Nez du Vin Part II

Last night was my second and last class for “Le Nez du Vin”: The Nose of Wine, offered by my local community college “Cooking & Wine School." It is a class designed to help improve one’s ability to identify smells in wine, with last night focusing on red wines.

Our lecture for the evening was about taste. Taste and smell are different senses in the fact that our bodies are having reactions to chemicals in order to sense. Another odd thing is that 75% of tasting is actually smelling. Together, they help us identify if something is safe to consume.

Recently, there is a group of people being identified as “supertasters.” About one quarter of the population seems to have more of the smaller taste buds, making them more sensitive to tasting things. There is a simple test of consuming a harmless chemical called propylthouracil (PROP), which will taste bitter to a supertaster, while a nontaster will taste nothing. I’ve always doubted that I was a supertaster, but they said that supertasters avoid coffee because it is too bitter, which I do. Looking at the list on Wikipedia, I also avoid grapefruit juice, only consume spinach in a lettuce mixture, I don’t care for soy, and I love gin but cannot handle tonic water. Maybe supertaster explains my aversion to goat’s milk products, when others cannot tell the difference? My instructors did indicate that sometimes supertasters avoid alcohol because it “burns,” so maybe I’m not a supertaster. I’ll have to try and find PROP and find out for sure.

Back to wine – besides actually tasting wine, there is also how it feels in the mouth, which can be broken up into a few categories:

• Body – sometimes thought of as thickness. Ideally, wine should be silky, not thin.
• Temperature – consuming any food cold masks flavors. If a vendor is having you taste refrigerator cold wine, then there are flaws that they are hiding.
• Texture
• Tannin – tannins create a bit of puckering. A little bit of tannins open up the taste buds, while a lot of tannins close down the taste buds, sometimes even leaving the mouth feeling dry. Initially, tannins are short chains which are not exactly pleasant tasting. As they age, they bond to make longer chains, which taste better.
• Alcohol

Somehow, I had a wine smelling reputation from the previous week, and it kind of spooked me when a clerk came in and said I was the one to beat, and I had never seen her before. Plus, I didn’t really think I was that good as I had a list go guide me before. Well, after last week’s 14/17 correct on smelling jars, it was decided not to give us a list of what smells there were to challenge me. I still ended up with a 14/17, with one very close one of being marionberry jam (a thornless blackberry hybrid developed at OSU in 1956), and I thought it was blueberry jam. I had a little harder time with the flaws, and said one was like plant rot, but more pleasant, and he said it was actually the water drained off of a can of mushrooms, so he was trying to get us to smell fungus.

When we started drinking the wines, I had a hard time, as all of them had a black pepper nose to me, and it was difficult to get past that to smell any fruit. Maybe I’m not a supertaster.

Class: Le Nez du Vin Part I

My local community college offers workshops in their “Cooking & Wine School,” in which I just took the first off a two series class titled “Le Nez du Vin”: The Nose of Wine. It is a class designed to help improve one’s ability to identify smells in wine.

They started us off talking about how sight affects our perception of wine, as it gives the first impression based on color and haze. For instance, age changes the color of the wine, which we then perceive and it sets up expectations on our part. They also gave a 5 minute talk regarding the science of seeing.

From there, they gave us a grape wine aroma wheel designed for Washington State wines. It was a copy of what was originally a small flip book, where the wheel was limited just to smells common to this state, and then each page talked about a specific wine style. It gave a brief description, an ideal food pairing, indicated the usual flavor characteristics, and then indicated where they were on the wine wheel.

They then took us into another room where there were 17 foil covered jars with lids. Each jar contained either a mashed up food in it covered with tissue paper so you couldn’t see it, or cotton balls dipped in a liquid. We were to smell these jars and identify what they were, such as honey, pineapple, orange, apple, hazelnut, vanilla, etc. These smells were characteristics of white wines. They had briefly flashed a list of what the options where, so I got 14/17 correct, messing up three of the citrus and mixing up pear and apple. However, if I hadn’t seen the list, I’m not sure I would have gotten that many. They also included four “flaws” for us to smell – acetone (nail polish remover), vinegar, pickle juice, and sulfites.

They explained that if you google for “Le Nez du Vin,” you would find a kit of 12, 14, or 54 vials representing wine smells. These kits cost between $120-500, so this class’s “kitchen approach” method of jars was much cheaper, though not as long lasting since the items would parish.

They brought us back to other room and talked a little bit about smell. They said that the average person can smell 20,000 smells, and wine typically has 200 or more (cider has about 163 aromas determined by Long Aston Research Station in 1975). In order to smell something, the “smell” has to be able to evaporate, and it has to be able to dissolve in oil. This is part of the reason wine drinkers swirl their wine – it increases the ability to evaporate and therefore be smelled. Again, they talked a little bit about the science regarding how we smell.

We then went and tasted seven known white wines and just tried to identify smells in them. There were no right or wrong answers, just what you perceive. Unfortunately, our culture does not really encourage the development of a vocabulary for smell, so sometimes it would be frustrating that I might know a smell but would be unable to give it a name.

Next week’s class will talk about red wines.