This 'Course' is about a shift from mouthfeel (traditional) to the new aroma / flavour-based wines mixed with some sensible consumer information.
The following is a list of exercises that will enable the reader to make the transition and benefit more from their wine experience.
Take a bottle of dry white or red wine, a small and a large wine glass, a tumbler of water, a spittoon and even some plain water biscuits.
It seems to me that wine style and wine quality are often confused, not only in the minds of wine consumers but more importantly in those of wine judges. The added complication is that ‘style’ is related to ‘fashion’.
When Brian Croser became president of the Winemaker’s Federation of Australia and also Chief Judge of the Adelaide Wine Show during the 1990’s, he commented that ‘exhibits are increasingly cloned to meet … style preferences of the judges’. He went on to state that ‘the broad objective … should be to create the opportunity of a greater diversity of style representation’ for the wine entries in the shows.
Wine was regarded in Ancient Greece as a gift from the Gods, one of life’s great pleasures. The exciting world of wine can be opened to you too, if you know a few of the basics. Firstly, wine is a beverage that is mainly water, with 12 – 15% alcohol (which is sweet), food acid (sour), red tannins (which are bitter) and many flavour compounds in micro amounts; as you would expect from a fermented fruit juice.
Secondly, it is important to know how your eating system works.
There are two competing senses involved – the mouth/tongue and the nose.
Even wine professionals use the word “palate” for taste and mistakenly interpret that to mean only its mouthfeel, whilst contrariwise foodies have a habit of regarding anything that goes into the mouth as having “flavour”. Each is half right.
Taking wine as an example, we appreciate the aroma in the glass and then we place it in the mouth where the water soluble part (extract) interacts with the lining to give varying impressions of sweetness, acidity, bitterness, warmth etc. and the volatile part wafts away and is drawn up as you breathe out, past the nasal sensors.
Hence there are two almost concurrent sensory experiences but people appear to talk and write as if it is one.
