A MATTER OF TASTE

Together with a couple of clients, I was recently invited to the charming estate of Château Angludet in Margaux for dinner with James Sichel. James, who owns both Château Angludet and the more famous “super second” Château Palmer is a charismatic man who never fails to impress with his intimate dinners and great wines. The food we were served was relatively simple but extremely tasty and it was obvious that the focus was going to be on the wines.

Seven wine decanters were neatly lined up on the sidetable, but no bottles were in sight. I instantly understood James’ plan. He was going to serve all seven of the wines he prepared that evening in a “blind” format. We were going to be served wine directly from a crystal decanter without seeing the label, and having to identify the country, region, subregion, vintage and possibly the exact Château. It was going to be a dinner of swirling, sniffing, sipping, and swishing. Blind tasting is always a humbling experience, and this time was no different. I admit to missing the mark many a time, though I did get pretty close on a few.

Tasting blind is notoriously hard and, in my own defence, many of the world’s best sommeliers often get it wrong, such that only 10% of Master Sommeliers – the highest wine accreditation – get it correct in the first try, but it is a unique event. Despite a great chance of being wrong, you get to eliminate all preconceived notions and work with just the glass of wine handed to you. This means that, when served a wine and we’re told what it is, we have certain expectations.

If we are served a Chablis, we would expect high acidity and mineral or steely notes, and any different other flavours may leave us disappointed in the wine. If we are served the same Chablis without seeing the label – therefore, blind – and we get the same unusual flavours come through, we are thrown off on the original idea of Chablis. To further complicate matters, most Chablis don’t have any oak influence, but this also means that some Chablis, especially Premier Cru or Grand Cru may have some oak influence, so evaluating whether the wine is simply a Chablis can still be a complicated affair.

As in sports, training and practise in wine tasting are key to improving. While there are people who enjoy the proverbial shooting from the hip, blind tasting is a process that usually requires the careful detection of a wine’s characteristics, and access to a mental and experiential database of which traits match which wines. Most sommeliers like to use the WSET (Wine Spirits Education Trust) method to evaluating wines.

Visual

The first step requires you to look at the colour of the wine against a white background. We may already start to make up assumptions such that Pinot Noir is lighter in colour to Cabernet Sauvignon and Californian oak-aged Chardonnays are darker than their un-oaked French cousins, Chablis. A brown tinge or tawny colour in a red wine often means the wine is on the mature side, but a visual examination is only a part of the process and the next steps should reconfirm your first impressions.

Swirl & sniff

Swirling the wine in the glass is akin to turning up the volume of a loudspeaker, and, as you can imagine, we want the volume turned up to the maximum level when blind tasting. The more you swirl, the more you oxygenate the wine and release all the scents, smells, and flavours. When smelling the wine, look for a reconfirmation of what was first seen in the glass. If the wine was a tawny colour, you wouldn’t expect big fruit flavours but rather tertiary smells such as barnyard, earthy notes, or cigar-box smells to be dominant. If this is the case, you can be confident that the wine is rather mature.

Pinpointing the scents is a surprisingly difficult affair. Sommeliers need to dig deep into their memory bank to recall the scents and put them into words. There are special sommelier kits that one could use to train the nose on simple scents such as vanilla, pepper, toast, cranberry or blackberry but training the nose on more complex scents such as used leather, freshly cut grass, cedar, or lanolin, can be quite hard. It’s not unusual to hear of sommeliers specifically looking for such items to smell and record in their memory bank. Next time you’re at the supermarket, you might catch me at the fruit section smelling the citrus fruits and comparing the scents of lemon, lime, or grapefruit.

Taste

When finally tasting a wine, we first look at the wine’s structure. This broadly consists of the relationship between its acidity, alcohol, glycerol, and tannin and is the first, and sometimes most important, thing to learn when analysing wine, especially vintage wine.

Unless we are being served wines at a wine tasting or blind tasting, we try to avoid making funny swishing and sucking noises with our mouths, but this is such an important part of the ritual. Just like the swirling of wine in the glass is likened to increasing the volume on the stereo, I would equate the swishing and sucking noises to putting on the surround system.

Our tongue is covered in taste buds and we want the wine to hit each part of our tongue several times for us to determine the flavours in the wine. Sometimes a flavour, though obvious, tends to overpower more subtle flavours, and we tend to repeat the swirling process to try and coerce other flavours to emerge. The sommelier would then make mental notes of each of the primary, secondary, and tertiary flavours to try to deduce what the wine may be.

Recognising different scents and flavours is not easy and many wine experts like to use an elimination method when tasting wine. Having enough knowledge in the memory bank, they would go through several flavours and scents that could possibly be found in the wine and they start by eliminating or confirming each flavour in their memory. So, if wine has an orange-brown tint to it and I am expecting notes that point me in the direction of a Bordeaux wine, I would start working through the flavours I would expect from Bordeaux. Do I get notes of cigar-box and blackcurrant?

While this may sound a bit like hocus-pocus, our memory and palate can be trained. When I was younger, I remember trying to guess the ingredients my mum used in her cooking. As I got older, after going to a restaurant, I would often go home and see if I could recreate a dish I had tried. It is not only important to be exposed to certain flavours, but to intentionally take note of what we are tasting. This helps to pinpoint them at a later stage with greater ease because they’ve subconsciously or consciously entered our memory bank.

Sometimes, we taste a wine that is so memorable the flavours are imprinted in our memory bank. It just all comes together. When we came to the last wine that night, I knew it would be special. I swirled, sniffed, and tasted. It was definitely special. The structure was serious and the balance on point. The flavours were precise, delicate, and ethereal. It was immensely complex, yet so familiar. I looked at James and told him that I felt this was up there with the greatest wines of Bordeaux. He nodded and smiled.

I didn’t hesitate at calling out Château Palmer 1983. I didn’t need to go through to the whole process of picking up notes and flavours. I had tasted this legendary vintage of Château Palmer some three years ago and it was imprinted in my memory. It was the only wine in which I was correct, but what a wine it was.

Some may say that the point of a blind tasting to get the wine right, but I disagree. The most important point is to have fun and learn about yourself and ultimately the wines you taste. In sommelier exams, your mental process of getting to what you think the wine is, is in fact more important than the final answer.

A fundamental part of learning from blind tasting is for the wine to be revealed before you finish your glass so that you can go back to analysing the wine once the label is exposed. Now is the time to memorise all those flavours that relate to this particular wine. If it’s served to you again, will you guess what it is next time? n