Bad hair days for wine

At this stage, there's something I need to tell you. It adds another level of complexity to wine tasting, but we can't ignore it.

It's the fact that wines show differently on different days. It's not clear why, but the same bottle opened on a Tuesday might taste different to the same bottle opened on Friday. It's known in the trade as 'bad hair days' for wine. Well, actually, it isn't but it should be. I've only heard the phrase mentioned once, by winewriter Simon Woods (pictured), and I like it.

What's the explanation? I can think of several. First, it could be that we change from day to day in our ability to taste. It could be our hormones; it could be our mood; it could be whether we have the beginnings of a cold; or it could be the other wines we've just tasted, or food we've recently eaten, that have affected our palate.

Context could matter: where and when we are tasting the wine.

Atmospheric pressure may have an effect - wines could taste better on bright days with high pressure than they do on cloudy, low-pressure days. Ambient temperature and humidity are likely to factor here, too.

And there's also the biodynamic calendar. Stop sniggering at the back: some UK supermarkets actually schedule their press tastings to take into account whether it is a shoot day or a root day. I'm not sure which is best.

The long and short of it is that experienced people in the trade think that there's something real about the fact that wines have these 'bad hair days', although personally I suspect this explanation is marshalled more often for wines with the 'right' labels than it is for humble wines.

Different levels of wine appreciation

One of the keys to being able to make sense of wine is understanding that there are two different ways of appreciating wine. If we fail to realize this, then all sorts of contradictions and confusions creep into our discussions.

Both these forms of wine appreciation are valid, and there's a degree to which they overlap, but I reckon the distinction is still an important one.

The first level of appreciation is, to use a posh, rather pseudy term, the hedonic level, which basically means how much we actually like the wine – this is a sort of first-pass sense of deliciousness or disgust, or even ambiguity. This is the level at which most people operate in their taste world: they like something or they don't like it. If you press them further, they might say that they really liked it, or really hated it, or that they didn't mind it, but that's as far as they can go in their description.

I can think of lots of foods that have elicit this immediate hedonic response. Sweet things are a good example: I love the taste of ice cream without thinking about it too much. It just tastes nice. I love the taste of chocolate in a similar way. I hate the taste of marmite (a yeast extract spread known elsewhere as vegimite), again, without thinking about it.

Moving to wine, some wines have that immediate hedonic appeal, particularly when they have ripe, sweet fruit and perhaps a bit of residual sugar. Many branded reds and whites are designed to taste 'nice' without the drinker having to think too much about them. Other wines, however, can require a bit of effort, and have flavours that novices find a little off-putting. Let's face it, wine itself is a bit of an acquired taste, isn't it? Wines such as Californian rosés with sweet, fruity flavours reminiscent of alcopops are designed to appeal to a broad audience – and particularly non-wine drinkers.

The second level of appreciation involves learning and experience. As we think about the flavours we are encountering, there emerges a new way of appreciating these flavours, and we realize that we have the capacity to learn to like things. Thus even flavours that we fail to appreciate at a hedonic level (those we are unsure about, or don't like) can grow on us. Interestingly, it is these acquired tastes that are often the more enduring ones. We rarely go crazy about flavours that are easy to like, but those which we've grown to like are frequently compelling.

Let me give a personal example. Some five years ago I never ate cheese. I didn't really like it, to be honest. But I kept getting exposed to it, most notably on trips to wine country. One time, tasting Queijo de Serra – a Portuguese sheep's cheese from the Dao – I decided that this rather pungent, intense flavour was one I was going to make an effort to get along with. Now I really, really like cheese. Not every cheese, mind you, but most of them.

I reckon that it's only as we add this learned element of appreciation to the initial hedonic level that we can really get going in tasting wine properly. So much of wine appreciation involves learning to like strange flavours, thinking about what we are experiencing as we taste and bringing all these elements together in rich combination. I don't think that someone who is new to wine can 'get' the world's finest wiines, because there's much more to them than just deliciousness. It's only when you come armed with the proper context, built up through repeated exposure to lots of wines, that you can 'get' the difference between a truly great wine and a merely good one.

Satiety is another posh pseudy term that needs to be mentioned here. In some senses, this is a third level of appreciation, and it relates to how hungry I am for a particular flavour experience. Here's an obvious example of satiety: it's a scorching hot day and I've been walking in the hills, and i'm incredibly thirsty. That first, cold glass of water tastes absolutely, mind blowingly delicious in a way that the third or fourth won't. This is because after I've drunk some water, my thirst has been sated. Repeated exposure to any particular flavour can induce what is known as 'sensory-specific satiety'. This means that even if I am still hungry, I don't really feel like eating, say, a banana, if all I have to eat is bananas. We can become sated (have had enough) of one flavour even though we haven't had enough of other flavours. I guess the application for wine is that there are occasions when we just want a glass of wine – say, for example, we've just got home from work, or we've sat down for lunch outside on a summer's day – and almost any drinkable wine will do. But after a glass or two our need for just any wine is sated, and whether we continue to drink or not is then driven by other factors such as whether the wine tastes nice to us or is of interest.

Tasting wine: an introductory video

Here's a slightly different approach. You've been reading about tasting wine. Here's a short introductory video where I talk about how I approach wine tasting.

The taste of wine, part 1

Now it’s time to put the wine in your mouth. Whereas sniffing wine involves just the nose, putting it in your mouth involves input from both the tastebuds on your tongue and also the smell receptors in the back of your nose. Thus the sensation is a combined one.

There are five basic tastes: bitter, salty, sweet, sour and umami. [The last one may need some explanation: umami refers to the sense of deliciousness or savouriness we experience when we taste the amino acid glutamate, which is a component of proteins. Apparently, some wines have this umami flavour. It’s a recent addition to the tastebud repertoire in that until a few years ago we didn’t know about it.]

Now these five basic tastes, in terms of information about what is in our mouths, are rather basic. Think of them as the lines in a child’s colouring book. The colour is added by the smell receptors in the nose, which are activated when volatile components of what’s in our mouth travel through to the nasal cavity from the back of our mouths.

For this reason, when we are tasting wine we swish it around in our mouths a bit, or do a sort of closed mouth chew. Some people take air in as they are doing this, but it’s noisy and I find it really annoying at wine tastings when I hear it because it’s kind of ostentatious and a bit pretentious, I reckon. And it sounds disgusting. [End of mini-rant.]

One more thing to add about taste, while I’m in nerdy mood. It’s about the tongue taste map. You may have seen this in textbooks, or even wine tasting books: it consists of a diagram in which the tongue is split into zones, each of which is supposed to be where one of the primary tastes is predominantly detected. Wine glass manufacturers who offer a gazillion wine glass shapes, one for each type of wine, have used this map as a part-justification for why you must have a separate glass for each wine style: they have claimed that the different glasses direct the wine to different zones of the tongue.

Well, I hate to be a party pooper, but this map is apparently a myth. Yes, different bits of the tongue are more sensitive than others, but they are more sensitive to all tastes. But the myth of the tongue map is a surprisingly enduring one: even though Professor Linda Bartoshuk of Yale University, who is a taste expert, has debunked this map on several occasions in print, you still see it around.

A brief aside: wine glasses

Do glasses matter? The short answer is yes, but probably not as much as some people seem to think. I’ve enjoyed great wines from tumblers in the past. Having said this, if you try the same wine in three very different sized and shaped glasses, it will taste different, although you’ll probably still recognize it as the same wine. I guess it’s like seeing someone you know in different photographs. They look a little different in each, but almost always you know who it is in the picture. It’s also true that different shaped glasses can suit different styles of wines better—Austrian glass manufacturer Riedel has built their business round this concept—but for most people who aren’t ultra-serious about their wine, one suitably shaped and reasonably generously sized glass should be good for all wine types. Avoid the squat, hemispherical glasses known as Paris goblets (the left-most glass in the picture), and instead go for something bigger and more tulip shaped.

Why do glasses affect the way a wine tastes? The main effect seems to be on the way that the aromas are released and then trapped. If you drink from a small beaker or a glass that’s pretty much full to the brim, there’s no opportunity to swirl the wine in such a way as to encourage the release of the volatile aroma molecules. And any aromas that are given off will rapidly dissipate into the air. With a larger, tulip-shaped glass, modestly filled, you can swirl the wine around, releasing aromas which are then caught—to a degree—within the headspace of the bowl. Putting it simply, the wine smells more. And if it’s a nice wine, then that is a good thing. Don’t despair, though, if all you have to hand is a tumbler or a mug: you can still taste the wine, and while it is in your mouth it will give off aromas that are then picked up by your nose through the back door route. This is known as retronasal olfaction. Thus the wine will still give you much of which it has to offer.

But there’s another aspect to wine glasses that is separate from the way that the wine is detected by our nose and taste-buds: aesthetics. Nice stemware is beautiful. If you are drinking out of a really attractive glass, this adds greatly to the wine drinking experience. This is because of expectation. If I go to my cupboard and select what I believe to be exactly the right glass for the wine I’m about to open, then this enhances the level of expectation that I bring to the wine drinking experience. And this is something not to be sniffed at; it can powerfully affect the way I perceive the wine.

Sniff my wine...

Take a good sniff of your wine. We get a lot of information from our noses in tasting. In fact, the nose is involved both in sniffing the wine, and also when the wine is in the mouth, at which point you’ll be receiving information from both your tongue (taste buds) and the olfactory receptors in the back of your nose – a sort of smell known by scientists as retronasal olfaction (normal smell as you sniff is termed orthonasal olfaction).

We have an impoverished language for taste and smells, and this makes the next phase difficult. This is the process of beginning to put words to our experience as we assess the wine. Why are words necessary? Because it’s only as we begin to think of descriptors for our sensory experience that we are able to make sense of it. These words act as pegs on which we hang our impressions, or, to use another metaphor, they are like drawers in a desk in which we file our impressions away. Not only do words enable us to structure our perceptions in such a way that we can write them down, they also focus the tasting event in such a way that we can get more out of the wine.

This all sounds a bit theoretical and complicated. What I’m saying is that developing a language for wine is a vital step in being able to appreciate it. More on this later. For now, let’s stay practical, and think about some of the smells you might experience.

Dr Ann Noble, emeritus professor at the University of California, Davis, is famous for developing a wine aroma wheel. This is a circular dartboard-like chart, broken into rings and segments, which groups all the sorts of aromas you might experience in smelling wines into similar categories. This aroma wheel is a useful tool for developing a vocabulary for describe wines with. It begins with broad category terms, such as ‘fruity’, or ‘earthy’, and then offers a range of more specific descriptors for each category.

But let’s not get too carried away with aroma wheels. While they are very useful for analytical tasting, their very nature carries with it a danger. The problem with these sorts of winetasting approaches is that we become ‘reductionist’, breaking the wine down into its component parts. In this sensory dissection, it is very easy to lose sight of the whole. Wine is more than just a sum of its parts.

Let me try to use a rather stretched metaphor to explain this. Think of one of these reductionist descriptions of a wine as a CV. There’s a world of difference between reading a CV – which gives factually correct and useful information about a person – and meeting the person themselves. If I were to ask you to describe a good friend of yours, you could send me their CV, but this wouldn’t tell me what they are really like. It would be better for me to meet the person, but if I couldn’t do that, then you’d be better off writing a few paragraphs about what the person is like, than jotting down facts about them in CV-like fashion.

When we come to try to write down our impressions of a wine, it’s important not to get too carried away by just listing descriptors. Yes, I’m impressed that you’ve spotted three different fruits, two distinct earthy components, another two different spices and that you’ve nailed the way the tannins are showing. But what does the wine taste like? What is the overall impression? Don’t lose sight of the whole as you look at the bits. That’s what I’m trying to say.

Before we put the wine in our mouths, we’ll dwell a little on the ‘nose’, which is the term used in the trade to describe what the wine smells like. Is it aromatic (particularly smelly) or muted (not showing a great deal)? Is it predominantly showing fruity aromas, or are there what are known as ‘secondary’ aromas, such as earth and spice? Is there any evidence of vanilla or coconut or toast, which could indicate some oak? Is there some greenness (herby or grassy aromas)? Is it sweet or savoury? Is it complex or simple? Is it nice? Is it weird and a bit funky? These are just examples of the sorts of questions you can ask yourself which will help you tie down some of your sensations so that you can put them into words.

The eyes: looking at wine

It's time to taste. So pour a glass of wine. The colour tells us something – and appearances matter, because expectation does seem to guide our perception to a degree. If we’re expecting a wine to be great, or we’ve spent a lot of money on it, we’re more inclined to hunt for complexity, and give the wine the benefit of the doubt. If it’s a really cheap bottle we’re usually a bit more honest about its shortcomings.

In brief, with white wines, the darker the colour the more likely it is to have some age, or to have been given some oak treatment (such as being fermented in barrel). Richer, fatter whites tend to be more yellow/gold, while brighter, crisper whites tend to be more transparent, or have glints of green to them.

With red wines, as you’d expect, the darker the colour the more intense the flavours generally are. Warmer climate reds tend to be darker; younger reds also tend to be darker. Redder wines tend to be fresher and more acidic; blacker wines tend to be more lush and have lower acid. Oaked wines are generally darker. Bright purple is the sign of a very young wine. These are all generalities, but they can be useful cues if you are tasting blind.

next...take a sniff