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Tasting Is Impossible. Knowing Why Is Half the Battle

Watch an expert pick up a glass, give it a quick sniff and instantly the complexities of a wine or beer are translated into a few choice words. It looks like simplicity itself, but try to do the same thing as a novice and it’s often an epic struggle. Experts may make it look easy, but it takes a long time to get there. There are many barriers, not the least of which is that tasting is a deeply unnatural act.

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Six Things I Didn’t Know About Wine

For the new book, I needed to find something to say about wine that gets to the root of how its flavors are created and change over time. While the stupefying complexities of terroir are undoubtedly central to understanding any one wine, it’s easy easy to get lost in that labyrinthine rabbit-hole, and miss the vineyard by focusing on the vines. Since most people interested in wine likely have boatloads of resources along those lines, I decided to skip it all and focus on a few basic questions I had never seen addressed in my stack of books or in conversations with sommeliers or tasting room staff.

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An Interview with Flavor Experts Gary Spedding and Tony Aiken

GS: “We try to get people to use a standard vocabulary. You can use any words you want as long as they’re consistent and everybody on the team knows what they represent. People use terms related to their experience like: “grandma’s basement,” but I don’t know what your grandma’s basement smells like; I only know my own grandma’s. So you have to common language. And if you’re going to use a common language, it might as well be the industry standard one, so you can talk to people outside your own company. Of course, different audiences have different needs and interests.”

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Is There a Brain Map for Odors?

GS: “We try to get people to use a standard vocabulary. You can use any words you want as long as they’re consistent and everybody on the team knows what they represent. People use terms related to their experience like: “grandma’s basement,” but I don’t know what your grandma’s basement smells like; I only know my own grandma’s. So you have to common language. And if you’re going to use a common language, it might as well be the industry standard one, so you can talk to people outside your own company. Of course, different audiences have different needs and interests.”

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The Experts: What Do They Know?

In terms of smell, humans are often denigrated as being much poorer than bears or dogs. Compared to mice, it’s true we have only a third as many working receptor types, but we have way more copies. It’s a fair bargain, because their extra receptors involuntarily control their behavior, while our cognitive brain does these tasks with far more flexibility—and free will. Each creature has its own lifestyle, and its sensory systems are adapted perfectly to it.

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What’s Going On in the Olfactory Bulb?

Part One: Signal Processing

Unlike manufactured systems, our senses can’t rely on highly accurate and linear sensors to convert external stimuli into usable signals. Biological systems are inherently variable, noisy and limited in range, yet we need clear and accurate information to guide our behavior. How do we manage to do this?

Wine waiter woman during blind tasting various alcoholic beverages. Sommelier exam to study different wine and beer.

Getting to Know Your Malts

It’s obvious that we human beings are all pretty different from one another—in appearance, experience, attitude, gender, and countless other attributes. Each of us has things that come effortlessly and others at which we struggle. It goes without saying that these differences affect our abilities as tasters. But how, exactly?

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