In the last two weeks, I’ve talked about improving your sense of smell and improving your sense of taste. Because the taste article focused entirely on Wine Folly’s recommendation for a wine palate training exercise that you do in your home, I wanted to do another one focused on taste and smell.
The Science Behind Tasting
Washington Tasting Room talks about the complications associated with taste. They say that “this is mostly due to sensations that arise from food and wine, in addition to aromas that are detected on the palate. When you think that you’re tasting food or wine, you are actually smelling it. This happens once the wine or food is swallowed, as those same molecules that you smelled are also traveling up through the back of your throat. The wine or food that you swallowed is interpreted a second time from your palate. The second important factor is the sensations that you experience on your tongue where your taste buds are located. And the amount of taste buds will impact your tolerance to certain foods. More taste buds will generally mean that you are highly sensitive.”
When you’re tasting, there are five categories that you look for: sweet, salty, bitter, sour and umami (also called savory). Washington Tasting Room goes on to say that “our taste buds have receptors that trigger nerve impulses which travel to your brain. These categories vary in each of us and impact how we enjoy or are repulsed by food and wine. If you don’t enjoy bitter flavors, it may mean that you are sensitive to astringency. Red wines can have varying levels of astringency, depending on the tannins in the wine.”
Great Information from Wine Enthusiast
Monica Cardoza wrote in Wine Enthusiast about Beverly Tepper, a professor of sensory science at Rutgers University. “Tepper admits that flavor isn’t all about taste. ‘When I talk to my classes about what is flavor, I say it’s about 90% aroma, about 5% basic tastes and about 5% trigeminal sensations.’ Trigeminal sensations refer to the feelings foods give you, like a cooling sensation from menthol or the feeling associated with red wine’s astringency. We smell wine via our noses in a process called orthonasal olfaction. What is less well-known is that we also experience wine aroma from inside our mouths, which is referred to as retronasal olfaction.” Woah, woah, woah. I’m learning all kinds of new vocabulary.
“We smell through our noses, but we also smell via our mouths. Some wine aromas get released when they activate with saliva, while others are only released after you swallow. These are different aromas from the ones you smell via your nose. Understanding how to differentiate these aromas can help you improve your sense of smell.”
Taste and smell is a wonderful topic. Don’t you agree?
