Why 90% of wine training is half mental

From the chapter: Service, service, service

When teaching “wine 101” to staffs, the first step is the tasting process itself: If we can’t taste wines properly, we can hardly present them as professionals.

Teaching sensory perception is easy enough. Or is it? The issue isn't going through the tasting process with staffs, it's getting them to remember what they taste. Half the reason is because, in most restaurants, staffs are not required to take notes. There is no way around this: If you want them to remember anything, they need to take notes. Preferably with a notebook (paper or digital) they are required to keep and maintain as a reference.

And besides, remembering the taste of wines is essential for the formation of what Michael Broadbent has defined as “taste memory,” since like baseball, to use a Yogi Berra-ism, “90% of the game is half mental.” This goes, of course, for all wine professionals, especially sommeliers and restaurant wine managers. Unless you are among the lucky few born with a photographic memory, you need to take notes.

Let's take that thought further: When you taste wine, are you using your eyes, nose and mouth? Obviously, yes. However, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that you are not so much using sensory receptors as your actual brain, because it's the brain that tells you how everything tastes. Your nose and mouth are simply the instruments used by your brain to interpret sensations. This fact has a huge impact on how we perceive wines, and thus how wines are grown and made.

Consider this: In India, Hindu customers once marched in protest at a dozen locations of McDonald’s. In India, because of dietary restrictions of the majority of the population, McDonald’s sells no beef product (only vegetable and lamb burgers).  What raised the Hindus' ire? They had heard about a lawsuit in the U.S. brought by a group of vegetarians against McDonald's for flavoring their fries with a "natural flavor" derived from beef extract, which the Hindus were also unknowingly consuming (see New York Times Archives on McDonald’s $10 million settlement of this issue with vegetarians and religious groups).

What is interesting about this is not so much that the actual percentage of beef extract in a super-sized package of fries reportedly amounted to just 0.000000000003%, but the fact that it was put into the fries precisely because the average person can perceive this flavor, even at infinitesimal levels. The Hindus were angry because McDonald’s was getting them to eat their fries by appealing to their raw, unconscious desire for beef—a thought planted in their heads, rather than an actual taste.

Human beings may not have nearly as sensitive a nose as say, dogs and cats, but our perception of flavor is still a fine tuned instrument. This makes us susceptible to manipulation by both the food and wine industries. In his landmark book Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser described "flavorists"—scientists who develop the microscopic chemical compounds used to flavor fast foods such as McDonald's fries, and virtually all the processed foods consumed today—as "discreet, charming, cosmopolitan, and ironic." According to Schlosser, these are the sort of people "who not only enjoy fine wine, but who can also tell you the chemicals that give each vintage its unique aroma."

Like Schlosser's flavorists, winemakers have long been aware of the fact that the aromas and flavors which distinguish, say, a Cabernet Sauvignon from a Merlot can be attributed to natural chemical compounds amounting to barely a few parts per trillion. The minty, often green or herbaceous character of Cabernet Sauvignon has been isolated to flavor components (grouped as methoxypyrazines) also found in bell peppers, which can easily be detected by an average person at approximately .02 parts per billion.

Ask an oenologist what gives certain varietal reds such as Syrah, Petite Sirah, Zinfandel and Grenache a characteristic peppery spice aroma, their answer would be rotundone, a sesquiterpene found in foods and wines clinically identified as (3S,5R,8S)-3,8-Dimethyl-5-(prop-1-en-2-yl)- 3,4,5,6,7,8-hexahydroazulen-1(2H)-one.

Chardonnay is often described by the wine production industry as a tabula rasa, or something of a "blank slate" that can be manipulated to attain specific tastes. A winemaker looking to maximize the appealing qualities that have made Chardonnay the best selling white wine in America since the start of the 1990s tends to approach the varietal as something of an old fashioned assembly line, or chemistry set: Beginning by looking upon Chardonnay's varietal fruit profile more in terms of its basic chemical compound, ethyl-2-methyl butyrate, which gives off aromas suggesting green apple, the peel of apple or pineapple skin.

To further embellish the perception of ethyl-2-methyl butyrate, the vintner might put a Chardonnay through a malolactic fermentation, and then barrel age it on its lees (i.e., spent yeast cells, which smell like the Saccaromyces cerevisiae used in bread baking). These practices also result in minuscule proportions of diacetyl or Butane-2,3-dione (which gives the taste of "butter") and 4-hydroxy-3-methoxybenzaldehyde (the taste of “vanilla”), sometimes combined with methyl-2-peridyl ketone (“popcorn” sensations). Hence, creamy, buttery, apple or tropical fruit-like sensations, plus a comforting smell akin to rising bread: Voilà, a perfect replica of "California Chardonnay," or at least what many consumers associate with Chardonnay. Back in the early '90s, the construction of a similar replica was considered so important that a California winery sued a former winemaker for giving away "trade secrets" pertaining to Chardonnay production methods considered proprietary by the winery. Ain't that "America."

These days, though, almost none of the commercial American Chardonnays selling for less than $18 see the insides of a barrel. Oak barrels are very expensive, costing a minimum of $400 apiece; the finest barrels from France, anywhere from $900 to over $3,000. To bypass the cost, time and labor demanded by barrels, value-priced Chardonnays are simply kept in stainless steel tanks, and oak chips bundled in food-grade mesh bags are dipped into the tanks for a few weeks (instead of months spent in barrels). Another "oak alternative" process is to utilize various sizes of oak staves, sticking them into tanks like bags of tea.

To further duplicate the taste of an actual barrel, which attains its rounded shape by being bent over open flames resulting in charred or "toasted" surfaces, both chips and staves can be toasted over fires at varying degrees. Oak staves and chips, of course, are organic materials. If anything, the increasing usage of them has become a booming revenue source for the cooperage industry, which still commands access to oak mills and forests. Coopers now sell as much oak amendments, or adjuncts, to wineries as they do barrels.

More and more winemakers, however, are going in different directions, looking for less “butter,” “vanilla,” "toast" or fruity “apple/pineapple" flavors in their Chardonnay. Instead, many are prioritizing more of a “lemon” or citrus-related flavor profile; or, if they can get it, an elusive tastes of minerals. Both lemony and minerally qualities can be pushed forward in the sensory perception when Chardonnays are made from earlier picked grapes which have less sugar and higher natural acidity (see Jordan Ross Minerality, which addresses the relationship beween acidity and mineral perceptions).

Why make an "opposite" style of Chardonnay? Because there is a growing segment of younger consumers (i.e., Millennials and Gen Zs born primarily after 1990) who are demonstrating a taste for wines that are lighter, leaner in fruitiness, and a little more tart rather than soft or buttery. A new generation of wine consumers looking for different Chardonnay profiles—which is demanding a different usage of a winemaker's "chemistry set," so to speak.

How the brain functions as an operating system

Much of what we perceive as taste comes through our nose—as smells, rather than what is perceived through the mouth. Because the brain is so much involved in how we distinguish both smells and palate sensations, it can be fooled by something as simple as visual impression.

For instance, there was a 2003 paper once published by Jeannine Frances Delwiche which demonstrated how the perception of a single, Chardonnay-based white wine was altered significantly simply by adding red or pink food coloring to the wines. When subjects saw a red colored wine, they described it as being fuller bodied than the white or pink wines, and more in terms of red and black fruits. When they saw a plain colored wine, they described it in terms of yellow fruit. When they saw a pink colored wine, they found it to be even fruitier. They were tasting the exact same wine, but the subjects' brains interpreted them as distinctly different wines.

Even our taste buds, however, can be thrown by mixed signals sent to the brain. Each of the taste buds found on our tongues is composed of taste-receptor cells, commonly referred to as TRCs by researchers (see Nature, November 2006). TRCs are able to detect the five basic taste sensations, which most people know about: The tastes of bitter, salty, sweet, sour and umami.

So when you taste something—be it a dish, or a beverage such as wine or coffee—each little sensation finds a dedicated TRC, which is label-lined along a neural path going directly to the brain for evaluation. Hence, when we eat ice cream, a glucose molecule comes into the mouth and fires up a TR2+TR1 receptor (which have cells wired primarily to detect sweetness); once that signal is sent and received by the brain, presto, your brain tells you “sweet,” while another part of the brain identifies it as "ice cream" and still another registers it as "pleasure."

The interesting thing is that scientists have been able to modify cells in TR2+TR1 receptors to fire up only when, say, a bitter compound interacts with them. Result: Bitter compounds can also be made to taste sweet. In other words, it’s the cells that drive perception of taste sensations, not the receptor itself.

The significance of that? Simply, that our sense of taste is a physical apparatus connected by nerves relayed between our brain, nose and tongue; and whenever those connections are hot-wired, we can be made to tastes things that are physically present in the most infinitesimal proportions, or tastes that are not there at all. This is why the brain can be so easily confused or manipulated, the way flavorists can have us thinking “beef” when we are eating fries, or Chardonnay specialists can get us to think "rich oak aging" when a wine never sees a second in a barrel.

It is the brain, in fact, that distinguishes culinary talent. How many times have you heard it said that someone is a really good chef because they have a strong sense of taste? Or a winemaker is really good because he or she is an exceptional wine taster? In reality, what they have are minds that are better organized than that of most people. They have a knack for remembering sensations derived from ingredients and making delineations. Because of that, they are able to deftly manipulate those sensations with whatever technical skills and experience they bring to a kitchen or winery. It's the chefs and winemakers with the most prodigious brains who prepare the best dishes, and make the best wines.

It is the same thing with accomplished wine tasters. Wine professionals, for instance, are not necessarily born with a sense of perception that is physically superior to that of the rest of the human race. It is purely because they make systematic use of their central nervous system. They study wine in order to fortify their memory bank, and thus are able to make more delineations when they taste them, and speak with more clarity when communicating them.

The same goes, I'm afraid, for sommeliers. Some are better than others. The best ones, I'd say, follow every step of the wine tasting process, they consistently take notes, they keep their minds open to new sensations, and they constantly polish their craft through communication—staff training, composing marketing material, even dabbling in a little bit of journalism themselves. The worse sommeliers skip most of those steps. They make less use of their brains, and it is reflected in wine programs that are average at best, negligent at worst.

This goes for everyone and anyone who appreciates wine, not just wine professionals. Whenever you make conscious use of your mind, your pleasure is bound to be increased simply on the basis of increased awareness. Wine appreciation is no different than any other aesthetic subject such as music or art, which become more comprehensible, more interesting, and more appealing whenever you understand the theory behind them, and study the lives and works of artists. You get what you put into wine, and virtually all of it is mental.

Grace Slick might have said it best: Feed your head. In other words, take notes, dammit!