New wine tasting methods
You know the gesture, the sommelier looks at their glass, leans it, notes the color and clarity, sniffs the wine, one time, swirls the glass, and sniffs again, finally, the taster puts some wine in his or her mouth and inelegantly stir the liquid in the oral cavity. Seem familiar? This is the way most people taste or try to taste wine. Describing the color, aroma, and the taste of the wine.
The procedure, even if it appears ancient, is very recent. The analytic tasting is less than 100 years old and became important during the 70’s. It is the principal method they will teach you on WSET (Wine and Spirit Education Trust).
The objective elements of the analytics tasting were created in the 50s and the 60s with the understanding of chemical reactions responsible for the aroma of the wine. That makes the method focus mainly on aroma analysis. The INAO (or ISO) glass was invented to maximize this aspect.
Focusing only on aroma and taste can be a problem. Human has 347 genes for olfaction, but there a great variability between two individuals. My perception of an odor is not the same as your perception. The ability to recognize and translate aroma into words is a memory-intensive activity, you can train yourself, but it depends a lot on your genetics. The tasting depends on the taster.
Focusing on wine aromas can raise a problem. A tasting is a comparison, if you taste Macon Village, you will combine the aroma and taste in your glass with all other Macon-Village you have tasted in the past. You simply make a standard on how a Macon-Village should taste. It is not a bad thing in itself. But it may kill, any atypic wine you will have as it will be outside of your analysis grid.
Is there a way to overcome these two problems? Recently, two other ways to discover wine have been experimented the intuitive and the geo-sensorial methods. These two methods do not come in opposition to analytic tasting but as a complement to analytics tasting.
The intuitive method was “invented” by a French sommelier, Franck Thomas (one of the best European sommeliers). This method is young, 2015, but is now learned around the world and taught in some universities.
The principle of this method is, as everyone has a different perception threshold, how can we analyze a wine differently? One of the goals of the intuitive method is to substitute one sense, sigh with intuition to amplify the tasting approach.
The taste of wine (and any other liquid or food) is formed in our brains, and all our sensorial pieces of information are analyzed in our brains. But our senses are not made equal, sigh use more than 15% of the cortex zone, taste, and olfaction only 2%. The intuitive tasting is made without a sigh, by clothing eyes.
Then the wine must be poured into the mouth, but unlike the traditional way, the wine is not stirred in the mouth. The wine stays in the mouth for a few seconds and we can answer the question, is the wine good for me? Then emotions, sensations, images, representations, and ideas appear These elements are fed by our memories and our experience, they help us to analyze our senses. It is like emotional intelligence; from an intangible matter, we can rationalize the taste. These images can be translated into words that can act as clues for the last step in the intuitive tasting. Words found during the tasting can be grouped by category, location, aroma, weather and climate, and emotion.
It can be esoteric, but it works. During an introductory session on intuitive tasting, every person has a different set of words and images, but most words could be grouped under the same lexical fields. We had words linked to movement, sun, and warm, cold, mountains, farm… if each word were different but described the same things.
That is the point where we use our emotions and our memory to build an analysis of the wine that can be linked to the analytic tasting. Warm, can be associated with a wine from the South (Italy, Spain, Mediterranean France) for example.
The second method, the geo-sensorial tasting, in its primitive form, is far older, as it came from the middle age. In this time several corporations in France and elsewhere in Europe were created. They have multiple roles in the wine industry, but one of the most important is to taste wine to ensure its origin. The tasting was a guarantee that a wine truly comes from a particular wine region or terroir.
The tool they used for this task was a tastevin, a sort of small cup in metal. This container doesn’t allow to see the wine, difficult to swirl the cup too. The main organ in play with a tastevin is the mouth. These people were able to recognize wine by the tactile sensation it gives in the mouth.
The habit of using the mouth as a main tool to analyze wine was abandoned during the Industrial Revolution when the notion of terroir started to fade.
But in the 2000s winemakers and universities revived this practice. They started some research programs and created several diplomas. Geo-sensorial tasting is about the wine of place and terroir and allows the taster to discover the geography of the tasted wine.
The geo-sensorial tasting is based on touch sense. How the wine affects the mouth. This can be challenging, as we have this habit of automatically analyzing the aroma in the mouth but not the tactile sensation. Just like in the intuitive tasting, the sigh must be eliminated (temporary elimination of course). If smelling the wine is not excluded, it is not recommended to do so in the geo-sensorial degustation.
The reasons why smell is excluded are multiple. The main one, as we have seen in the intuitive tasting, humans are not equal. The difference in perception of aroma between two individuals can vary from 1 to 10000. A second reason is that smelling will impair the tactile sensation of the taster.
The geo-sensorial tasting is all about tactile sensations in the mouth. The first sensation is the salivation. All wines cause salivation, analyzing this salivation is the first step in the tasting process. If you have a short and acre salivation, it is certainly a varietal wine, not a wine, not a terroir wine. In the geo-sensorial tasting, we analyze the type of salivation, its localization, its warmth, its level, and its texture. It lets the taster indirectly understand the wine.
Besides salivation, the geo-sensorial tasting looks after the energy the wine gives in the mouth. The feeling of energy is an emotion, not a direct signal like salivation. But like in the intuitive tasting, it is a doorway to understanding the wine.
Making the link between salivation and energy with a terroir is not an easy task. You will need to exercise with several terroir wines so you know the soil composition. Then we create an evaluation grid.
| Cold | warm | low salivation | High validation | fluid salivation | sticky salivation | smooth texture | rough texture | localization | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| limestone | |||||||||
| clays | |||||||||
| marls | |||||||||
| graves | |||||||||
| sands | |||||||||
| pebbles | |||||||||
| granite | |||||||||
| basalt | |||||||||
| shales |
When you drink a wine you know the soil composition, can add a mark in front of each soil type for each sensation.
After some time, you will be able to link sensations to soil composition and link a wine to a particular terroir. With more experience, you will soon be able to recognize more and more wine regions by just tasting a glass of wine.
The intuitive and geo-sensorial tasting methods are tools to better understand the wine you drink, make links to where it was made, and its quality. These methods require you to limit your sigh and your smell. It will open new sensations and improve your understanding of wine.
If you need more information on this new tasting checkout this page (only in French).