Salut/Hi Vincent,
le/on Sun, 11 Jul 2004 05:15:08 GMT, tu disais/you said:-
>As I read descriptions of wines, many flavors are mentioned.
Yup, as the person tasting tries to describe, using analogy, the flavours
that they find in the wine. There are only four "pure" flavours for which we
are physiologically equipped to taste. Sweet, sour, salt, bitter. ALL the
rest are in fact smells.
If you think about it, how many words do we have that describe smells?
Unlike colours, or sounds we have NO vocabulary for smells at all. ALL the
words come by analogy. So we say "Lemon" or "flowery", but these are simply
saying "this smells like a lemon" or this smell reminds me of flowers.
Without any common experience these analogies are useless. Sounds can be
described by the frequency, as can colours, and you can "reproduce" the
exact same sound (shurrup Hi Fi nuts) and colour, simply by using the same
mix of frequencies as the original. Smells are not like that.
So in fact if I were to say "Aha, this wine has cherries on the nose", what
I really mean is "there is a component in the smell of this wine that
reminds me of the smell of cherries". (usually used for the taste, by the
way).
> Do they add these "flavors" to the batch when making the wine,
One hopes not. That said, I've heard dark rumours of the consumption of
strawberry and banana essences in wine making areas. More openly, I've read
here of fruit juice flavoured wines on sale.
> or is this just the wine taster's imagination?
Well, it can be, I suppose. I've read some pretty far fetched descriptions
sometimes. But in the examples you've chosen,
>Examples: Blackberry, chocolate, tobacco, leather.
I've had all these, quite clearly.
Youngish wines made with the Merlot grape often have a distinct
blachberry-ish component on the nose and in the mouth.
Chocolate is most commonly used in conjunction with sweet wines, Maury from
the mediterranean coast of France is often said to have a chocolate element,
and I can't disagree, I've found it on other wines of the same time. I've
also noted elements reminding me of chocolate (and tobacco too) in Tokaji
Aszu as it gets older.
Leather. This is pretty common. In Australian wines, it's sometimes
described with the attractive phrase "sweaty saddle"! Wines with loads of
flavour, and made from very ripe grapes - I've found it along with plums and
plum jam in Oz Shiraz based wines - seem to be prone to a leathery sort of
smell/taste.
But all these are the result of people groping to describe something for
which there's no real vocabulary, and therefore trying to find a common
experience pool to help others share their impressions. One last example is
the expressions "Cats pee" and "Gooseberries" used to describe (caricature)
Sauvignon wines from New Zealand. If you've never tasted gooseberries,
that's completely useless as a description of course, and cat's pee isn't
exactly a recommendation. Nevertheless, anyone who knows NZ sauvignons knows
_exactly_ the sort of flavour profile we're talking about, and agree that
these expressions are the best short cut descriptions we've found yet.
--
All the Best
Ian Hoare
http://www.souvigne.com
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