Do you smell what I smell?

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Tom, interesting post today. Before I dig in, a couple comments. 1. That old LIFE magazine (?) photo is funny, but ugh… it was so hard to overcome that and then focus on your post. I didn’t want to think about smelling anything, after I got the armpit image stuck in my brainpan. 2. Why say “humor me here” when, in your example, you tagged Jane as a prominent sommelier? Are there very few women sommeliers? (There’s no lurking gender-bias agenda behind my question. I seriously am just wondering.)

As for wine perception, I’ve been wondering about this issue myself, and I sympathize with the “Dick” in your example. I’m 36 and educated, but very new to wine (only 1 year drinking any wine, believe it or not). I’m now becoming an amateur wine geek. I read online, subscribe to magazines, attend tastings, have a beginner’s “cellar” with 67 carefully picked, reasonably priced (but not perfectly stored) bottles, etc. I’m still inexperienced, and have only tasted a relative handful of wines. But compared to a year ago, I think I am now able to perceive some basic smells and feels. I enjoy it immensely. But I still get lost trying to detect hints of this or that, and trying to articulate my experience using a vocabulary that others will understand. (I would even settle for Cocoa Puffs references, a la Gary V., but I find myself struggling sometimes just to make those sorts of basic associations.)

Every so often, I’ll be in the right mood or state of mind, and I will submit to the experience. The wine will wash over me and I’ll suddenly “get it.” It’s like standing in a room of barking dogs, and suddenly hearing the high pitch that’s setting them off. Or suddenly realizing how a pro athlete feels on the field. He focuses and gets everything extraneous (including himself) out of the way. “Be the ball, Danny.”

When this happens, it clicks. I get the nose, the initial mouthfeel, the midpalate, the finish. This sounds very Zen, this tabula rasa approach - and I can’t count on it working reliably yet… but I’m getting closer. I’m hopeful that one day, every glass will be a vivid, full experience like this - and it won’t require such focus. It’ll come naturally.

So yeah, I do think that Robert Parker, James Laube, Tom Ciocco, and Gary V. experience the same objective colors, tastes, and smells that I do. But subjectively, you do something very different with it. You can flip a switch and get into the zone - and all while enjoying friends, food, music, the chaos and fun around you. That’s partly because of experience, education, memories, associations… but I suspect it’s mostly down to training.

Comment by TagWorld Brian — March 5, 2007 @ 4:02 pm

Brian-

Thanks for the comments! Sorry about the photo - just trying to inject a little levity into what can become a decidedly pedantic pursuit…The “humor me” was just me thinking to myself that I was “making up stories” needlessly - but you are correct that the number of female sommeliers is quite small…that fact aside, the whole gender bias thing never even occured to me…

As far as your analysis is concerned, I think you’re on the mark…it is indeed like “flipping a switch” and what you are noticing in terms of successes coming in fits and starts is I think the way it happens for everyone - it’s a bit like playing an instrument - advances come in leaps, NOT steadily…one day, even after trying the same passage 50 times, you just cannot get it down cold, but pick up your instrument the next day, and somehow what wasn’t there yesterday, today suddenly is…but something STILL lingers with the actual perception aspect, and it involves suggestion…sometimes, I’ll find myself drinking/tasting with 3 or 4 ‘professionals’ and one non-professional ‘novice’. We’ll all stick our noses into our glasses and then taste…on many occasions lots of the “pros” can agree on many of the aromas and flavors, sometimes with uncanny consistency. On occasion, and I’m sure you’ve been in this spot, somebody will toss out a descriptor like “moldy blueberries” and there will be an immediate and hearty “YES!” that comes from the gallery…often, perhaps due simply to the power of suggestion, even the “novice” will say “now that you say it, I DO smell moldy blueberries”. But on occasion, a very honest “novice” even though he thinks he risks being labelled a dullard, STILL doesn’t smell what is so obvious to everyone else…this phenomenon still makes me think that there MAY be some other action that is texturing this experience…”training” is certainly an aspect, but I think that sheer will and the ability to dig your senses into the sensation, and “not take no for an answer” plays in here somehow…

TOM CIOCCO

Comment by Tom C — March 5, 2007 @ 4:51 pm

Very interesting question, Tom. I often think about this when I taste wines with friends or family who have less experience doing so and are sometimes frustrated with their inability to spot the various aromas and flavors that they’re “supposed” to be perceiving.

I guess my response to your question is that perception is indeed very closely linked to experience in wine tasting. Yes, some people have more nuanced noses and taste buds, so they may actually pick up the more discreet elements in a wine. But the biggest factor when tasting wines is experience and confidence.

Think of an analogy to watching a football game. A novice viewer (say, a French soccer fan who’s never seen a football game before) sees a bunch of padded guys running around on a field, throwing and sometimes kicking a ball, constantly starting and stopping, and arguing with men in funny striped zebra outfits who throw yellow flags.

But an experienced fan or sports analyst sees all the various complexities of the game - from the coaching strategy of each play to the athleticism and talent of the players. The sports analyst is watching the same images but is actually seeing (and enjoying) something entirely different. Why? Mainly because the analyst knows what to look for and because he has a frame of reference - neither which the novice has.

It’s the same story for the novice wine taster. While he may be smelling the exact same wine as an expert, he most likely doesn’t know what to “look” for. The novice may not have tasted many other wines so doesn’t have a library of knowledge to refer and compare to. And most importantly, the novice (in your example, Dick) often doesn’t have the confidence to voice what he’s tasting or smelling, espeically in the presence of “experts.”

I find if you can encourage a novice taster to just speak what they’re tasting - without fear of being “wrong” or ridiculed - that they’re often closer to the mark than I would have thought. My girlfriend recently desribed the nose of a Vacqueyras as “muddy rocks” and that couldn’t have been more accurate. Maybe she’s not so much of a novice anymore!

The same quesiton about perception can be asked regarding fine art appreciation: how much more does an art critic see while looking at a Monet than a novice? Probably a lot more, espeically in the technical elements. But on a more emotional level, I imagine a novice can be moved by a painting as much or more as any expert.

Maybe a more intersting question should be: how closely related are expertise and ability for enjoyment when it comes to the fine arts (including wine)?

Comment by Michael Zakaras — March 5, 2007 @ 4:53 pm

Oops - I guess you already asked my question in your previous blog:

“So here’s the question: Does the act of critical analysis of a wine highten, diminish, or simply differentiate the ultimate level of pleasure derived from the experience?”

My fault for not reading all your blogs before responding!

Comment by Michael Zakaras — March 5, 2007 @ 5:04 pm

Tom, thanks. Another issue occurs to me: frame of reference. While it is important to “not take no for an answer” and dig in harder (i.e., intensity of focus), I need a frame of reference in order to isolate and identify the sensations. I need to be able to recall bananas, raspberries, snozzberries,… For me, I have plenty of will and desire, but it gets back to experience and training - training my palate (like Gary V with his dirt and socks).

But even then, my memory is fickle. I don’t remember all senses equally well. From strongest to weakest, I can summon up images, sounds, smells, tastes (and touch fits in here somewhere). I wonder if everyone is different on that scale, the way that some people are “visual learners” or “tactile learners”. My reportoire of smell/taste memories is increasing. Easy for me: leather, earth, tobacco, smoke, coffee, chocolate, butter, certain spices like cinnamon; more difficult: distinguishing dark fruits (blackcurrant vs. blackberry vs. blueberry).

Also, I’m still trying to understand how to weigh and counterbalance factors like acidity, tannins, fruit, sweetness. I’m sure that I’m not alone in this. It gets back to beginner vs. advanced: the basic difference you identified between Dick and Jane.

So I’m not sure what I’ve added here. But I’ll tell you one thing: I’m not afraid of being labeled a dullard. If the shoe fits…

But seriously, groupthink is dangerous. If I don’t smell moldy blueberries, and I think the Emperor isn’t wearing clothes, I’ll say it. I’d rather not get talked into thinking I like (and therefore buying) a wine that I really don’t like. What a waste of money and time that is.

Comment by TagWorld Brian — March 5, 2007 @ 6:32 pm

Tom –

I don’t have much personal experience in this area, having only recently begun down the wine path, but as someone who does research in a neuroscience lab, I’ve spent a fair amount of time learning about sensory perception and learning from a neuroscience standpoint (rather than a philosophical/enjoyment standpoint). Unfortunately for wine lovers, taste and smell are the neglected siblings to their far more studied brothers: vision and hearing. Despite this there are still some interesting studies out there.

I dug around the literature for a little while and found this study (which should be freely available) that discusses this very topic. Here’s a link to the paper:

http://chemse.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/27/8/747

The basic idea of the study was to compare odor identification, memory, and threshold levels between trained wine experts and novices. Here’s a summary of their conclusions:

“Results showed superior olfactory recognition by expert wine judges, despite their olfactory sensitivity and bias measures being similar to those of novices. Contrary to predictions based on reports of an association between odour memory and semantic processing, wine experts did not perform better than novices on the verbal memory tasks. Further, ability to recognize odours and ability to name odours were not positively correlated, although the novices’ data showed a trend in this direction. The results imply that the source of superior odour recognition in wine experts was not enhanced semantic memory and linguistic capabilities for wine-relevant odours. One interpretation of the data is that wine experts were less susceptible than wine novices to verbal overshadowing. When forced to identify the odorants, experts’ superior perceptual skills protected them from verbal interference, whereas novices’ generated verbal representations of the odours were emphasized at the expense of the odorant itself. This has implications for training in wine-evaluation skills.”

This matches my experience pretty well (and seems to match Brian’s too). I would guess that the conclusions apply pretty equally to the other aspects involved in truly experiencing the wine.

Comment by Adamatus — March 5, 2007 @ 8:19 pm

To me its kind of like having to show your work when doing a complex calculas problem….when the novice drinks the good wine he knows its good but does not know the words or fomulas to prove it out

Comment by Matty Van - Tampa,FL — March 6, 2007 @ 9:55 am

Interesting stuff, post and comments. I feel much the same as Brian in that I sometimes, but not often, “get it”. Getting sucked into “groupthink” is certainly a slippery slope issue, but I have found that listening to and reading the reviews/tasting notes of others does give me ideas of descriptors that would not have otherwise occurred to me. In these cases, I do smell the smells and taste the tastes but might not have been able to translate those senses into words without a little help.

Comment by Russ J — March 6, 2007 @ 10:22 am

It seems there’s almost certainly a variety of factors at work.

First, and this is the somewhat discouraging part, we all have different capacities to detect and distinguish flavors. This is very well documented in scientific literature, and it isn’t just a better/worse distinction. Granted, the literature is focused more on food than on wine, but given the thousands of flavor compounds in wine I think it would be silly and wishful to think we have the same capacities. (I, for instance, am quite good at detecting and describing a wide variety of subtle earth and mineral flavors, but am almost embarrassingly bad at distinguishing among supposedly obvious red fruit differences). I suspect we all have our individual quirks in what we can detect or detect well.

That being said, there’s also plenty of evidence to suggest that we can and do often become much better at understanding and detecting flavors upon repeated acquaintance, and repeated concentration helps a lot in this regard. Also, I think that one hits an intermediate plateau unless one is able often to sample various wines side-by-side. Memory is fickle, and a flavor is often best noticed via relatively immediate contrast with another wine (preferably otherwise similar) that lacks it.

Finally, there’s the undeniable socially instilled benefit of inheriting and applying widely used wine vocabulary to describe what is actually experienced.

Just my 2 cents. Love your blog!

Comment by Doug P — March 6, 2007 @ 12:28 pm

The commonalities among these posts are encouraging! It just reaffirms that, the more I practice and sample, the more I’ll probably come to appreciate and understand the wine I’m tasting (and most importantly, the more I’ll get familiar and comfortable with my own wine preferences).

Adamatus’ post was interesting. Does it suggest that wine novices can probably identify and describe sensations as well as anyone, but are simply shy or lack confidence? (And perhaps lack the vocabulary.) Drinking before the tasting could remove those verbal inhibitions… but it could also deaden the palate, thus mooting the exercise. The irony.

A silly thought: what if a novice were administered a truth serum before tasting wine? Would he/she “nail” all the hints and nuances of muddy rocks, moldy blueberries, and other esoterica?

Comment by TagWorld Brian — March 6, 2007 @ 3:26 pm

Great post; great comments. Like many, I don’t’ have a trained palate or, as GV puts it, experience with “flavor profiles.” My practical/applied approach to developing one involves buying wines that have been reviewed (preferably by a few different people), tasting them while reading the tasting notes, and trying to make associations between my experience and those of the notes. Nothing groundbreaking in this approach, but (hopefully) it’ll work for me.

Comment by life's too short... — March 8, 2007 @ 10:44 pm

Hey Tom,
Been keeping an eye on the blog since the Emidio Pepe article…hot stuff! Thanks…also for that Verdicchio you recommended I try last summer.

My take on all this , like Adamantus’, is scientific: Aromatic compounds. These are present everywhere and our noses house receptors which percieve their presence. Now, for example, “blueberries” is most certainly a concert of sundry of these compounds; as such, what one experiences as blueberries, another might experience as black, due to less sensitivity or varying olfactory memory. I believe that the aromas are exact and distinct, but our perceptions are varied due to experience.

We each may have receptors for the aromatics found in wine, but our lack of experience or varied experiences may dictate what we sense, blueberries or black. For example, I might have an easy time identifying/differentiating between blueberries and blackberries because I experience these fruits quite often. But, one who might experience these to a lesser extent would be hard pressed to recall/articulate what he/she is perceiving. Also, one might associate these aromatics with another object, since they could be present in another substance which they could more easily identify. Hence, one man’s blueberries is another’s cheese w/ port for example.

In short, its all due to experience. If one frequently experiences certain stimuli, then surely their receptors will become more adept at sensing their presence. Whether these olfactory stimuli are associated with one object or another is a varying experiential factor which is additionaly culpable for differing tasting notes.

Mr. Zakaras, to answer your query: yes, to some extent. For some, the possession of esoteric knowledge is integral to their enjoyment of some “fine” art. For others, whose enjoyment could be more emotional/sensual, but not necessarily less intellectual, such knowledge is unnecessary. Personally, there are some arts, e.g. opera and wine, for which I require an intellectual key, which opens the door to my enjoyment of the works on a more emotional/sensual level. Others, however, require no such understanding to enjoy the coloratura in the work of Michelangelo or the virtuosic performance of a prima donna.

To say that education is necessary for the enjoyment of the arts, “high” or “low,” necessitates a subscription to elitism, since those with more access to education, in most cases, are socioeconomically well off. Education may improve one’s ability to articulate their experiences, however it is by no means necessary to one’s enjoyment…at any level.

Looking forward to your comments.

Comment by Andre — March 13, 2007 @ 6:20 am

Andre-

I agree with everthing you say 100% until your last paragraph, but I think that much of this disagreement hangs on the very specific meaning of the word “education”. I do not believe that “…the enjoyment of the arts, “high” or “low,” necessitates a subscription to elitism…” though I certainly do not consider myself an elitist. I think that the critical point that you’re missing is that so many if not all of the arts are based on a “protocol” or at very least a continuum of history that enables those who know that prtotcol/history to better contextualize it at least. Here’s an example. You like music and sit down to listen to some. Your passion is jazz. You’ve got hundreds of recordings, and can readily distinguish a Blue Note recoding from an Impulse disc just by the “sound”…you get the idea…Your buddy comes over and brings a few selections from his extensive collection of Indian classical music. After spinning a few jazz discs, your buddy takes his turn and spins some of his records. You REALLY dig the “sounds”, but your understanding of the conventions, figures, styles, that make Indian classical music what it is are fundamentally non-existent in your brain. You can certainly enjoy something that you’ve never heard before, but the depth of your understanding is not what your buddies’ is, and the only way that you can better enjoy (or not) this music is to be TAUGHT the conventions - that for example certain “ragas” are associated with, and should be played at certain times of the day…without being TAUGHT this aspect of the music, you would be EXTREMELY unlikely to discover this very important aspect of this music yourself just by “experience”. Unfamiliarity in no way precludes enjoyment of an art, but REAL appreciation only comes with both “experience” and “education”.

TOM CIOCCO

Comment by Tom C — March 13, 2007 @ 10:06 am

Hey Tom,
I agree somewhat, since in my case education = increased enjoyment. You emphasize understanding and appreciation, seemingly making them synonymous. I truly believe they are not. One may appreciate, enjoy, the movements and peculiarities of the work, musical or otherwise, without any education. Yes, the depth of understanding would be less, but one’s degree of enjoyment does not necessarily decrease. The fact that you said one can “dig” the music emphasizes that enjoyment is a priori to education. Education does not, in all cases, facilitate enjoyment; rather it allows an understanding of WHAT one enjoys. For me, conceptually, enjoyment/appreciation and understanding are not closely related. Being that enjoyment is a faculty which we are all privy to, asserts that understanding is all together different.

It’d be cool if we could get together and discuss some of this stuff over some vino, eh?!

Comment by Andre — March 13, 2007 @ 8:02 pm

Reading several books like the “Wine Bible”, “Kevin Zraley’s Wine Course” along with various wine related web sites have given me knowledge in how others have moved from casually drinking wine to tasting wine with a consistent methodology. Zraley’s tasting approach is particularly rewarding because it challenges tasters to be patient and focused. The “wine wheel” developed at U Cal Davis is another tool that is useful in identifying flavors in wine.

Granted, I have enjoyed drinking wine before I started reading wine books and using a consistent tasting methodology, but my apreciation and enjoyment of wine has deepened. Watching Vaynerchuk also helps because it reminds one
to strive to taste wine with a sense of humor and an open mind.

Comment by luvgrapesqeezings — March 14, 2007 @ 7:53 am

Andre-

If you go back and read my post again I think that you’ll find that our positions are almost identical - that aesthetic pleasure can certainly be derived from a previously unknown expericence, but the more experiences one has (which to me is at very least a PART of “education”) the better one can appreciate or judge future and similar experiences.

TOM CIOCCO

Comment by Tom C — March 14, 2007 @ 9:50 am

Coloratura… a wonderfully synaesthetic word, Andre.

Comment by TagWorld Brian — March 14, 2007 @ 4:50 pm

Tom, really enjoyed this entry. Another analogy is listening to a concerto. Most listeners will let the beautiful music wash over them and enjoy the sensation. Some may even appreciate the virtuosity of the soloist. However, a trained musician can also identify the formal elements of the piece (exposition, development, recapitulation). Now here’s an interesting question: does the trained musician enjoy the concerto more than the casual concertgoer? I’d have to say, not necessarily. Casual listeners may not be able to pick out the soloist’s technical flaws or if the orchestra’s attacks and releases are sloppy unless it’s pointed out to them. So to translate this back to your winetasting example: Jane and Dick taste a wine. They both are able to identify strong barnyard flavors on the nose, some sour cherries on the mid-palate, but Jane being the expert, also identifies something subtle but unpleasant on the finish that Dick misses. When Dick reads Jane’s TN he exclaims, “I enjoyed this wine a lot more until I read your comments.”

Comment by mikeyrad — March 15, 2007 @ 2:18 pm

Mikey-

Interesting example, and I would agree with you and stress the difference between UNDERSTANDING and “KNOW-HOW”. Equating the two would be like saying that only painters could really, fully appreciate paintings, and clearly this is absurd.

Your Dick and Jane example to me is pure a posteriori “influenced by the expert” phenomenon.

TOM CIOCCO

Comment by Tom C — March 15, 2007 @ 3:27 pm

Very interesting topic, it’s something that i’ve wondered about myself. I’m probably about as experienced as dick, and I believe that different people taste different things in the same item (food, wine etc.). I know that in wines I try I can’t taste things that are in the professional tasting notes for some bottles. I also sometimes taste things that others seem to have missed. Also, I firmly believe pre-conceived notions play a huge role in some peoples wine tasting.

Comment by vivaitalia — June 17, 2007 @ 10:05 pm

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