When you drink wine, you use 6 senses

Did you know that when you drink wine you are using all your six senses? Wait, did I say six senses? I bet you thought we only had five! I was reading a blog today about understanding your senses and relating them to drinking wine. This article is very good and you should check it out to learn more. The title of her article is "Your nose knows - But Can We Trust It?" Jill Sloan of CorkSavy.com writes it. What I found interesting is that she covers four of the six senses. Smell, taste, touch and sight. But she doesn't talk about the fifth and sixth sense.

The fifth sense is to hear. Now, when talking about wine and the actual tasting experience I can understand why she left it out, I mean you don't have to hear wine in order to taste it or enjoy it. But when you are at a winery tasting, you are usually with friends or family. There is the person behind the counter pouring your wine, and most times other people are their tasting too. If you were to imagine tasting the wine at a winery with earplugs in your ears do you think that you would have the same experience as you would hearing others talking about the wine, asking questions, the clanking of the glasses, etc. Personally I think it would be a completely different experience. If I wanted to concentrate on the flavors of the wine I was tasting, it might be a good thing to have total silence. But to get the whole experience of why we go to wineries; to taste the wine, talk with whom you came with, ask questions about the wine, listen to the birds in the trees. If you don't want that experience then you should just go to the store, buy a bottle of wine, bring it home and taste it there.

There is a sixth sense. Some believe that it is like having e.s.p. But, while I was attending a seminar back in the late 90's at a conference for the ACF, American Culinary Federation, I learned about the Asian belief of the sixth sense. And, I became a firm believer of it. It is a combination of some of the senses, mostly scent, sight and taste. What this sense does is, it puts you in a place in time that comes forward from the back of your memory bank. For example, when you go home to mom's and she is baking chocolate chip cookies, once you smell them it would instantly bring back a memory of you as a kid eating those cookies right when they came out of the oven with a tall glass of milk. You remember the smiles all around, the kitchen exactly as it was then, the apron mom was wearing, and best of all, the happy times you were having. A good sixth sense memory of mine happens almost every summer. When I'm outside reading a book or gardening, there is a beautiful blue sky, and one of those small two-seat airplanes flies by. All of a sudden I'm taken back to the mid 60's at my at my aunts house in L.A. My brother and I are in in the backyard and are playing in plastic dish tubs filled with water, measuring cups, and rubber ducks. While we were having a great time cooling down, a few small airplanes kept flying by, as she lived in the flight pattern for Van Nuys airport. So when I hear that sound I associate the fun time when I was four/five years old and oh so innocent.

Smell - Did you know that the sense of smell is 1000 times more sensitive than the sense of taste? The sense of smell is unique in that the scent message passes directly through the brain allowing your conscious to identify the scent. Although our sense of smell is most easily stimulated, it is also the most easily fatigued. For example, when you smell delicious cooking aromas in your kitchen after a few minutes the scent is no longer noticeable. If you left the room and came back the aroma would be fresh again. Scientists have cataloged over 10,000 smells that humans can distinguish. Since the chemical make-up of wine frequently has a combination of these smells, our memory may suggest a subtle recognition of familiar scents.

Taste - Today it is known that the entire tongue surface senses all the tastes. The tongue has about 9000 nerve receptors called buds that sense the different tastes. Taste, unlike smell that has over 10,000 variables, has really only four basic categories: Bitter, salty, sour, and sweet. The sense of taste can become tired in much the same way as the sense of smell. In fact, it can take as much as ninety seconds to recover from a bitter or astringent taste in your mouth. Chocolate and cheese also have very long aftertastes and can cloud the ability to taste wine. So the next time you are at a winery tasting wine, don't have any cheese with the wine. Have crackers or water to help cleanse the palate. Many wineries have dark chocolate pieces for you to try with their red wines or dessert wines. This is o.k. as long as it is the last wine you will be tasting for awhile.

Touch - Feeling often described as the sense of touch, affects taste. For example we can feel a difference between ice coffee and hot coffee, or between carbonated soda and non-carbonated fruit drink. When wine is described as “full-bodied,” it is not meant that the weight or texture of the wine is “full”; it more often applies to wines that are high in tannin or alcohol. Tannin is a very significant element of wine flavor, but it is not so much a sense of taste but a sense of touch. It makes your mouth pucker. The interesting fact about tannins is that it is one of the few flavor elements in wine that cannot be smelled. Similar to tannins, alcohol is mainly experienced as a sense of touch. Wine served cold may taste less sweet and more acidic then the same wine served warm. For that very reason fruity wines are recommended to be served chilled while dry wines are served closer to room temperature.

Sight - With wine we frequently use color as a predictor of what we expect in taste. When we see white wines that are bright clear and pale green we expect a young and dry wine. When we see a golden brown, we might be anticipating nectar –like flavor, etc. In other words in tasting wine, you anticipate the tasting experience first by looking at the wine and then you confirm the wine experience after smelling, tasting, and feeling the wine. The next time you have some friends over try this experiment. You need to have a blindfold, a chair next to a table, two red bottles of wine, bagged, two white bottles of wine and some dry crackers (unsalted). Try to have the wines at the same temperature because if the white wine is cold and the red isn't that could be a dead giveaway. Have one person at a time sit down, blindfolded, sample one of the wines and see if A) they can tell you what color they think the wine is, B) they can try and tell you what varietal the wine is. Complete all four wines with this person then start on the next person. After everyone has had their turn, reveal the wines and see who had the most right answers. This opens up conversation and laughter for quite awhile.

People are not born with a wine palate; it is literally an acquired taste. By developing sensitivity to different flavors and aromas, then by determining your specific preferences, and finally creating a memory of these tastes, you begin to develop your individual wine palate. Don't be frustrated at first, this becomes easier once you can identify the flavors and smells in the wines that you taste. Have fun exploring using all your senses the next time you go and taste wine.