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.
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.
I was a wine and food critic and writer before the Wine Trials (Book: The Wine Trials, a cross-country experiment in blind wine tastings), and was trained as a sommelier. I really felt I was not a snob or a bullshit artist. But after the trials, it became apparent to me that there was absolutely no relationship between wine price and drinker preference, except maybe that most people preferred inexpensive wines to expensive ones.
I was involved for a couple of years with a group that was trying to put some logic and science into the often fuzzy thinking around beer and food pairing. I think we made some progress, but one of the things we knew we needed was a literature search. This meant combing through a ton of scientific papers to look for proven interactions, which was not an easy task, since they tended to be buried in research about particular receptors and other biological systems.
If you’re the kind of traveler who loves to catch a selfie at the iconic sights everyone knows about—the Leaning Tower, Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo’s David—there’s precious little in Valle d’Aosta for you.
If, on the other hand, you like diving into uncharted territory to discover your own iconic wonders, this might be your place.
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.
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?
This upcoming book took six years of mostly full time effort to write and edit.It was transformative for me, and I hope the information will be for you as well. Here are some of my major takeaways about our amazing chemical senses and the ways they are processed in the brain.
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?
Beer is more complex than any other beverage known. No one’s keeping the master list of odor chemicals, but it’s huge. Hops alone contain more than 1000 terpenoids with citrus, floral and other aromas, with many other chemicals, too. In malt, Maillard and other browning processes create hundreds more. Fermentation and subsequent maturation creates a third enormous family of aromas, yet there are more. Add them all up and you get far in excess of the widely quoted number of 600–1000 odor chemicals in wine.