Thursday April 24, 2008
Wine-tasting: harder than it looks
It happens about halfway through the first glass of wine. The course leader turns to me, breaks out into a faintly amused smile and delivers a horrible truth. “To be honest, some people just have a more developed sense of smell than others.”
It seems this wine-tasting lark will be harder than I thought.
It’s the first wine of the first day of the “introduction to wine tasting course” at the highly recommendable Wine Education Service. It’s been great fun so far: we’ve introduced ourselves to each other, opened our comprehensive course packs, bought our ISO wine-tasting glasses and taken our seats. Now we’ve filled glass number one with wine number one, a New World sauvignon blanc.
It’s a lovely glass of wine. And to me it smells … sort of winey.
But the women in the class are racing ahead. “Gooseberries,” says one. “Definitely,” agrees the class leader. “Tart fruits.”
I thought I was reasonably middle-class and metrosexual to the core, but I just can’t keep up.
At first I wonder if my sense of smell is bad. I can’t smell gooseberries. So I ask the course leader if there is anywhere special I should be putting my nose, eliciting the reply at the top of this post. Which, when you think about it, is one of the kinder available responses.
Then it dawns on me. It’s not that I can’t smell something. It’s that I haven’t the faintest idea what a gooseberry smells like.
The only place I’ve smelt this smell, in fact, is in a glass of wine.
It seems the secret of wine-tasting is not so much being able to sense the wine – it’s about learning a whole new frame of reference.
Who, for example, knows that there is a shade of red between ruby and brick, called garnet? Every woman in the class, apparently, because it seems that garnet is a kind of gemstone. And once again, everyone agrees among themselves that the red wine we see before us (wine number four) is halfway between ruby and garnet, even though I couldn’t really tell you what a ruby looks like apart from the fact that it is red and it appears in murder mysteries, and I have never even heard of garnet until 90 seconds ago.
But the whole thing is fun. Tremendous fun. Especially by the sixth glass of wine. And my ignorance only makes me want to know more.
I just never thought a wine-tasting course would lead me to visit a greengrocer’s and a jeweller’s next day, just so I could work out what everyone else was talking about.
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