Judges prepared for tasting. A blue star commemorates long-time tasting organizer Jeanne Mozier, who passed away last year.
As I pulled into town, I was suddenly beset with uncertainty, trying to recall my 2019 training as I thought to myself, “Did von Weisenberger say judges should take no coffee on tasting day?” The water master himself dispelled my spoiled-palate worries, when we judges met him for lunch at Tari’s Cafe, an upscale-casual dining institution in Berkeley Springs. I was relieved to be reminded that we’re only asked to abstain from coffee (or anything else that could alter our taste senses) for a few hours before serving as judges. After lunch, we reconvened at the Country Inn’s Parkview Garden Room, a conference-andwedding space notable for the three living trees around which the room was built. Training took about an hour. It started with von Weisenberger explaining the two-step process of getting bottled water. “Some water is rainfall and snow melt, some of it comes from geysers, some of it comes from springs and creeks—from geothermal sources like we have right here in Berkeley Springs, even icebergs,” he said, “so the origins of water is the first step. The second step is what that water goes through before it ends up in a bottle. Most of the time it goes into the ground. The terroir is what gives water its character—those minerals, those trace elements are coming from rock strata, and those may be imparted into the water over eons. Sometimes water surfaces after five, 10, 15 years; other times it might be thousands of years.” The result, he said, “is like a fingerprint. No two natural waters are the same.”
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Recalling the skepticism I’d had before the 2019 water tasting, I asked von Weisenberger if it might be best to reward the waters that failed to alert my senses at all? “You’re using all your senses,” von Weisenberger replied. “Your goal is not to find anything that’s distracting or disagreeable. You don’t want to have anything that’s not pleasant, and if you find something that you see or you smell that you like, then you give it the scores you want. But then when you get into flavors, aftertaste, mouthfeel—all those are things that your senses pick up that they like a lot, or not.” The judging system von Weisenberger teaches is derived from the one he employed in a 1980 tasting of San Francisco-area tap waters undertaken by the San Francisco Chronicle. “I went around with a reporter, and we collected these waters,” he recalled, “and we brought them to the Fairmount Hotel, and we put together a panel of judges, overseen by a man named Professor William Bruvald,” a professor of public health at University of California, Berkeley, who had developed a water-tasting system for NASA to evaluate “the acceptability of minerals in water for astronauts, as far as taste goes, because they wanted to find out how much they had to purify recycled water for drinking.” The judges at the 1980 event were recruited from water-related occupations. “They had a SCUBA diver, someone who worked at an aquarium shop, a guy who was selling waterbeds,” von Weisenberger said. “The point was, when you sort of focus in on water, it doesn’t matter what background you come from, those differences in taste stand out.” At the Berkeley Springs event, the judging goes on for hours. Thanks to the pandemic, the number of entrants this year was less than the 100-plus seen the past, but 13 municipal waters, 13 sparkling waters, 39 spring waters, and six purified waters from 19 states, three Canadian provinces, and 14 foreign countries still added up. We entered our scores on tablets, but also
