Vanilla Bean on Mushroom Dreams
I have a test on Monday. A wine test.
I've been taking a wine course at George Brown this summer. It's fairly basic, a foundation for the other wine courses at the college, and a prerequisite for the couple of programs that they offer there. Each lecture, myself and a dozen or so other students, ranging in age from about 24 to 64, sit and listen to the instructor talk about the regions of the week, the various laws and traditions of the areas, the grapes that grow there, and the wines that are produced. That's the first half. After a quick break we get to the fun part. "Tasting".
I put that in quotation marks because, depending on how you're feeling, you're free to actually drink all the wine that's poured for you. While it's not a huge amount (small pours of about six different wines), we're not doing any of that swish and spit stuff. And you can end up with what amounts to at least two glasses, more than you'd consume in just about any other classroom setting. More than you'd consume in any other wine class, even, given that the idea is to get a clear sense of every wine. You can't do that if you're buzzed by the sixth sample.
But hey, it's Wines I. It's meant to be fun. The tastings were (unsurprisingly) more enjoyable than the lectures, but not only because we were drinking. When assessing a wine, you can break it down into three parts: Visual, Smell, and Taste. Using these, your general knowledge about various regions, grapes, and your sense memory, you draw a conclusion about the quality of the wine, and if tasting blind, you can take a stab at trying to guess what it is. If you're really good, you can name the wine right down the the producer and the vintage, but at my level I'd be happy to get the grape(s) and the region right.
So that's all good and fun, more so if you draw a correct conclusion during a blind tasting. But having participated in a decent number of tastings in this class and in restaurants in the past, it's really coming up with descriptors for the wine that is the most weird and entertaining. Although you get hints about the wine from what it looks and tastes like, the bulk of the information comes through its smell. That's where all the magic happens.
Now, granted, if you're a casual drinker that hasn't really spent much time nosing your wine in the past, you're likely to just say "Eh, it all just smells like wine." That's understandable. But if you sip glass after glass, with the explicit intention of drawing out the similarities and differences between them, then eventually you'll pick up on those variances. And when you do, the results can be pretty unexpected.
The most well known of these obscure smelling notes is maybe cat piss. Is cat "pee" more polite? Either way, It's urine, and it's used to describe many cold climate Sauvignon blancs. Personally, I've never picked up on that particular note, but I had cats growing up, so maybe I'm numb to the scent.
Another one that comes up a lot for many white wines is "petrol", or some variation on that. Gasoline, kerosene, whatever. Then there's "tar" (Barolo), and "barnyard" (red Burgundy). That last one I believe is meant as a euphemism for animal shit. I can kind of see the resemblance, but that being said, I don't really find the smell offensive. Then again, horse manure doesn't even really smell that bad, does it? On the opposite end of the spectrum, sometimes wines smell like things you would actually want to put in your mouth! Bubble gum Beaujolais, the sweet lychee of Gerwurztraminer, the chocolate that can come through on a Bordeaux.
While there are common characteristics to be found in many wines, those that allow for meaningful discussion and comparison amongst wine people, at the end of the day, one's sense of smell is a deeply personal thing. You're limited or enabled by your own sense history. If you haven't experience an aroma before, you have nothing to compare it to. On the other hand, sometimes your memory serves up some weird associations. I was tasting a red from South America—I can't remember what it was—but it had a note exactly like the cappuccino flavoured ice cream I had had a few nights earlier. I didn't hesitate to write it down on the tasting sheet.
This idiosyncratic way of assessing wines has been noted for quite some time. In the documentary Somm, prospective Master Sommelier Ian Cauble described a wine as smelling like a fresh can of tennis balls. Another time, he names an aroma as "fresh cut garden hose", the inspiration for the Instagram account of the same name and source for the images in this post. Maryse Chevriere, somm at Petit Crenn and artist behind the account, curates odd-ball descriptions from somm's around the web and transforms them into humorous and whimsical cartoons.
(The above doodle—it's awesome, right?— is for one man's description of Old Fitzgerald's 1849 Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey. Not wine, sure, but sommeliers need to be knowledgeable of spirits, too.)
Are these kinds of descriptions unhelpful? Probably, to some degree. But they're also part of the fun. People tend to get bogged down by wine. Too often it's perceived as a stuffy sort of enterprise, and sure, it still is in some areas. But there's a whole other side to it, one where you can write things like:
"Berries. Berries. Berries. Like a wild bear who just stumbled upon a field of wild berries, just *barely* ripe and he ate a few... and then a few more and by the time he was at the end of it he was rolling around making jam in his field of wild berries, smashing them as he holds his tummy, screaming of a bellyache and glee simultaneously."
That's the side I want to be on.
