It's all down to personal taste y'know

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It's all down to personal taste y'know

From: Mark
Category: Wine
Date: 22/04/2007
Time: 10:53:07

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Wine buffs often use standard terminology to describe wines in order to help convey flavour, style or quality. I often find their vocabulary, whilst helpful, a little dull and overused. How many more times can I say that a wine tastes of blackcurrant, red fruit or plum?

Those of a certain vintage may remember the pairing of Jilly Goulden and Oz Clarke and their outrageous descriptions. How can a wine be like walking barefoot through freshly cut grass in the morning dew?! But as pretentious as it sounded conveying how something tastes is a very personal experience. It unlocks all kinds of memories, feelings or images. Not just smells. This is because things that taste good often make us feel good. These tastes are often embedded in the experience of the time. For instance, remember those Greek holidays and cheap Retsina with local sardines? A scorching day in Santorini? Fab. A drab day in Didcot? Hmmm.

When I was a rookie taster, equipped with plenty of textbook facts but precious little experience I bemoaned that I had no sense of taste. Nursing a bruised ego I grumbled this to my local wine merchant. He asked, reflectively, if I consciously ate much fruit? Then the penny dropped. How could I describe a wine without tasting the flavours they are describing? From that day on I have eagerly molested the fruit ‘n veg at the supermarket. Everywhere I go I scratch and sniff: leather chairs, kitchen cupboards, filing cabinets, old wood pub-tables, bushes in the park, autumn leaves in Ashclyst Forest….even the odd person (with their permission).

There are so many flavours and smells it opens up all manner of ways to describe a wine or the feeling it conjures up. I get the sense of a wine when someone describes a Sauvignon Blanc as smelling of cat’s pee on a gooseberry bush (even though I have not actually smelled these things together!). But it need not stop there. I have known people describe wines as shapes – chunky and foursquare, smooth and round, or with refreshingly spiky acidity. A wine therefore can, in part, be described as a square, circle or star. I have recently found out that Dartmoor gorse blossom smells just like coconut. I know that some Riojas have been aged in American oak – that sometimes imparts a coconut flavour to the wine. Now I use Gorse as a description. My world is not a palm-fringed Island. I feel more comfortable describing it in terms I am familiar with, everyday.

You might think this rather self-indulgent, but personal taste is king. I have known someone who described a wine (a rather tannic, astringent Claret) as mean and tight as his mother-in-law; similarly I know someone who said that his wine (a mature Chateuneuf-du-Pape) smelled like his Verger’s closet. But this probably raised more questions than it answered.

In the hot summer of 2005, at the bottom corner of a watermeadow, I had a picnic. The air was thick with smell of hedgerow. I was cooling my heals in a watercress choked brook drinking a glass of ice-cold English Bacchus. To this day I equate this excellent grape variety with the smell of English hedgerows, herbs and the refreshment of cool running water. Similarly I had no idea that some white Burgundies had the scent of talc on the back of a baby’s neck…until I had a son. So describe a wine in a way you feel comfortable with. Don’t worry if not everyone ‘gets it’. If you feel that the wine is as refreshing, invigorating and pure as standing under a mountain waterfall or is reminiscent of the ozone rich air of a hot summer day after light rain then I invite you to do so. Tasting is a personal thing and it belongs to you.