Dear GuildSomm readers,
It’s good to be back. I have many fond memories of writing for this site and am thrilled to return here to promote my newest creation, Wine Confident. I wrote this book not so much for the budding professional but for the burgeoning consumer—whom, I hope we can all agree, we need more than ever.
In writing this book, I mined the depths of my over 20 years in the wine industry to answer some of our beloved field’s most vexing questions. But I didn’t just seek to inform. I also wanted to acknowledge that the journey to learn about wine can be a vulnerable one, and so I sprinkled in a slew of personal stories, dumb jokes, and motivational asides. My hope was to humanize the pursuit and inject a playful energy into what can often seem like an incredibly self-serious industry. Of course, in the spirit of GuildSomm, I backed up my wine hacks and hot takes with all sorts of facts and figures.
I’m proud of the simultaneous depth and friendliness of this book and hope you will enjoy it, too. Cheers to the journey. It brought us all here.
—Kelli White
“What do you taste in this wine?”
I recently had a client, a new but curious wine drinker, come to me in a panic. A tasting room attendant had posed to her that exact query and she froze. Unable to pick out specific aromas, such as blackberry or clove, she descended into insecurity. She became convinced that something was wrong with her palate, or that she couldn’t appreciate wine at the same level as other people. Needless to say, the winery also lost a potential sale.
To the uninitiated, “What do you taste?” is a dreaded question. And yet, we ask it all the time.
Picking specific aromas or flavors out of a glass of wine is an extremely difficult act. And in my opinion, the more wine writers and sommeliers pretend that this is not only intuitive but the best way to communicate about wine, the more people we will alienate. So why is it so hard, and how can we make it easy?
Why is it so hard to articulate a wine’s flavor? According to author, neuroscientist, and Yale professor Gordon M. Shepherd, it has to do with the way our brains are wired.
In his book, Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters (2013), Shepherd investigates the relationship between language and smell—the foundation of flavor—and makes several suggestions as to why their union might be fraught. The classic trope among scientists is that the speech centers of the brain are physically quite far from our smell-processing area, resulting in a weakened connection. But Shepherd contends that the issue is more that our brain processes smells as patterns, similar to the way in which we process faces.
To illustrate his point, he calls upon Grandma. “Humans are in fact very good at recognizing faces,” he explains. “The classical illustration of this is that in a room full of grandmothers, you can readily identify your own grandmother. Yet if you are asked to describe your grandmother’s face to someone else, it is very difficult; we lack the vocabulary . . . to specify how this pattern recognition is carried out. But we do it unerringly.” He goes on to say that we encounter the same linguistic block when attempting to articulate other abstract inputs, such as music, nongeometric art, and wine.
Wine is especially challenging because a single glass can contain several hundred aromatic compounds. And, according to Shepherd, smell is synthetic, not analytic, which means that “a mixture of several smells makes a new unified smell.” A good example of this is the way that chicken soup smells like chicken soup, rather than chicken + carrot + onion + parsley + broth + bay leaf. That’s not to say it isn’t possible to smell a bowl of chicken soup and pick out the carrot notes, but it is significantly harder to tease out the ingredients than it is to recognize the whole.
Breaking a wine down into its component aromas is even more challenging, in part because they are invisible but also, Shepherd alludes, because smell is processed almost exclusively on the right side of the brain. This is known to be the less logical and more creative half of our heads, which might explain the long-standing link between wine and poetry.
But Shepherd’s final and perhaps most important point is that our sense of smell is intricately bound with the memory and emotion centers of our brains. Memory (I remember this) and emotion (it was good) were critical to early man’s sense of smell, which was used to help differentiate food from poison and enemy from friend. Even today, it is almost impossible to separate flavor from emotion, especially when you consider that preference is an emotion. And whether it’s a wisp of perfume, an old shirt, or a tea-soaked madeleine, scents are notorious for conjuring memories in profoundly visceral ways.
I’m not saying it’s pointless to try and describe wine. On the contrary, articulating what a wine tastes like and how much you enjoy it are essential parts of connoisseurship. What I’m trying to communicate is that if it seems hard at first, that’s because it is. I also hope to encourage wine lovers to not simply focus on the information coming out of the glass. Relaxing into the total experience of a wine will enhance your appreciation.
Wine’s ability to smell like anything other than its base material is one of its most compelling aspects. Fermented wine grapes can evoke anything from roses to roasted coffee to rain falling on rocks. This extraordinary feature leads to considerable misunderstanding. My husband makes a small amount of wine each year, and bottling is always the most stressful part. One year, I happened to catch up on the phone with a friend just beforehand and was complaining about the day ahead. “What’s so stressful?” she inquired. “Haven’t you already added all the stuff?” “What stuff, sulfur?” I asked. “No,” she replied, “you know, the lemon, the leather . . .”
I was floored. At this point, I had been in the wine industry for over 15 years, and my close friend thought that winemakers literally add cassis to their Cabernet. In addition to underscoring my complete failure as a wine educator, this exchange revealed for me how confused many people are about wine’s fundamentals. It was also a good reminder not to assume a certain level of understanding in the people around me, and to be clearer in my communications.
So let me be clear. While wine might share the same compounds as familiar foodstuffs, it is produced exclusively of grapes, with minor aromatic contributions from yeast and barrel.
Wine conjures many things it does not contain. Or as my colleague Sarah Bray once brilliantly put it, what you are tasting is metaphors.
Before you can effectively describe wine outward, you must be able to explain it to yourself. You need to calibrate your palate so that you have an internal reference bank against which to measure any new wines that come your way.
Wine is a vague, complex beverage that is neurologically challenging to describe. Reaching for a metaphor can sometimes be the best way to articulate it to yourself. Forget for a minute the way other people talk about wine. Find your own language and frames of reference.
My colleague Sarah once hosted a couple for a blind tasting class. It began by tasting through a range of wines—their labels covered so the contents had to be guessed at. They discussed the dominant aromas and textures and what they might signify. The wife was not amused. She didn’t see how Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay were different—they both tasted like white wine to her. She found the concept of “palate weight” ridiculous and certainly didn’t want to talk about gooseberries!
Later in the conversation it came out that she was a skier, and Sarah made one last attempt to engage her in the tasting. The Sauvignon Blanc with its vibrant acidity and high-toned aromatics, she explained, was like skiing moguls—it was energetic, it had movement. Whereas the broad, creamy Chardonnay was like cruising in deep powder. The woman begrudgingly revisited the wines, and her eyes lit up. Suddenly, she got it. She had found a way in.
Finding your own way of describing wine, one that makes consistent sense to you, is the best first step.
Okay. You’ve done the work, sampled a bunch of different bottles, and you feel that you have at least a decent grasp of the range of wines available. It’s time to start talking about what you are tasting. Where to begin?
There are hundreds of different aromatic compounds in wine but only five tastes: sweet, sour, bitter, salt, and umami. Because of this, it is considerably easier to focus on taste. Texture—how dry, fleshy, lean, or even alcoholic—is also a good place from which to commence.
This strategy works because taste and texture seem to drive preference; therefore, people are more in tune with them (or vice versa). I have had countless guests tell me that they don’t want anything too tannic, too acidic, too alcoholic, or too sweet. But I’ve rarely had a guest express an aromatic aversion.
Some people, especially winemakers, can get quite granular with their comments—chalky versus dusty tannins, for example—but I recommend keeping things simple. Describe a wine’s textural elements and main tastes (sour, sweet) in terms of low, medium, and high. If that feels woefully unromantic, sub in as straightforward an adjective as possible, i.e., “bright acidity” instead of “high acidity,” or “powerful” for “rich mouthfeel and highly tannic.”
Picking individual scents out of a glass of wine can be exciting, especially if the person with whom you are enjoying the bottle has similar levels of skill and enthusiasm. But should you need to describe a wine to someone you don’t know, being less specific can often bring better results.
Say you go into a restaurant and try to order a wine that smells like apple blossom. The sommelier’s success in making a good recommendation hinges not only upon having smelled apple blossom before, but on being able to discern it from other similar-smelling flowers. Maybe you grew up in New England and know this scent by heart. They might be from Chicago and have only ever seen a picture of an apple tree. This is where being uber-specific in your descriptions can actually lead to miscommunications. If you simply express your love of floral wines, the sommelier could likely present you with several suitable selections.
Let’s change players and assume you are speaking not to a wine professional but to a new friend. If you start talking about apple blossom and your companion is either unable to pick it out or, due to cultural differences, doesn’t know what apple blossom smells like, they are going to disengage. If, however, you describe the wine more generally, as “floral,” you are inviting them to draw upon their own smell experience and connect with the wine.
Because I spent most of my career on the consumer-facing side of the industry, I am very focused on making wine-speak as easy to understand as possible, especially in the context of a transaction. This is why I almost always prefer to use the aromatic category over the specific aroma. In my experience, it is a far more effective and less alienating way to discuss wine.
The following are some common categories of wine aromas along with brief descriptions.
Unless a wine is old, fruit smells are present if not dominant, which makes this an essential category. But the term “fruity” might be insufficient on its own. However unfairly, describing a wine as “fruity” connotes that it is young and unsophisticated. Further clarification is recommended.
There are several ways to categorize fruit, but I find the most helpful to be:
These are broad, imperfect categories, but they can be helpful when describing wine. For example, if someone were to ask me for a citrusy white, I wouldn’t necessarily need to know if they meant lime or grapefruit to put together a great list of suggestions.
Wines can evoke a whole range of flowers, and while greater specificity can be useful (“dried flowers” or “white flowers”), I believe that, in most cases, “floral” alone will suffice.
I’ll start by saying that, for wine purposes, the word “spicy” never refers to heat.
Spice is a monumental category of foodstuffs that includes such disparate members as peppercorn, vanilla, clove, anise, cumin, cardamom, bay leaf, and ginger. Because of the vastness of the genre, further specificity is recommended.
Despite my position that the word “spicy” is too general to be meaningful, it is found in a substantial number of tasting notes. In my experience, “spicy” written on its own tends to refer to either peppercorns or the group of spices commonly used in Western baking traditions: cinnamon, clove, and nutmeg.
I do not recommend using “spicy” as a generic term.
Earthy aromas are often, but not always, found in older wines. Scents include potting soil, forest floor, adobe, and mushroom. “Earthy” on its own is sufficient shorthand in most cases.
Oak imparts a very specific range of aromas, including vanilla, coconut, hay, smoke, and fresh-sawn timber.
There are a considerable number of herbs that can be found in wine, ranging from rosemary to mint to oregano to lavender.
“Herbal” is considered either a neutral or a positive attribute, but “vegetal” tends to carry a negative connotation. “Vegetal” typically registers as “green,” and consumers rarely want green aromas in their wines, especially red wines.
“Mineral” is a contentious term in wine, with naysayers arguing that you cannot smell minerals. Nonetheless, it has become a relatively accepted descriptor for aromas including chalk, oyster shell, and wet stone.
Other commonly accepted mini categories of wine aromas include smoky (campfire, incense, charcoal), animal (leather, sweat, blood), and nutty.
I already said that wine loves its contradictions. Well, apparently so do I. Because though I just spent the last several paragraphs decrying overly specific wine descriptors, I am now going to advocate on their behalf.
I can still remember the first time I found chamomile in a glass of Sauternes. I was groping for the word and when I finally seized it, an electric shock ran through me. Now chamomile is the first thing I notice whenever I’m lucky enough to sip this particular dessert wine.
My ability to isolate and describe distinct aromas increased my excitement about, engagement with, and connection to that wine. And though I try to taste as objectively as possible, I confess that it is difficult to fully subtract emotions from the equation. Feeling like I understood the wine a bit better increased my fondness for it, which became bound up in my sensory assessment of it.
It’s worth stating that, just because I identified chamomile doesn’t mean that something is wrong with you if you don’t. The point isn’t to find the “right” aroma, just to train yourself to isolate specific aromas. I smelled chamomile because I grew up drinking it; someone from a different culture, with a different culinary tradition, might detect something else. Something to which I might be oblivious. Something equally legitimate. Wine does not belong to just one people.
Is a wine simply the sum of its flavors and structural elements? Or is it something more? And if so, how best to convey that? This is where poetry comes into play.
Jorge Luis Borges once said of wine: “Within your living crystal these eyes of ours have seen / a crimson metaphor.” Michael Broadbent described the massive and unconventional 1945 Château Mouton Rothschild as “a Churchill of a wine.” A particularly lovely Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon inspired Regine Rousseau to pen, “the wine’s center is a deep dusty red like the streaks of lights needling through the Pétion-Ville clouds at sundown . . . the wine slips over the tongue like a well-enjoyed mango seed, smooth with some grit.” And Miguel de León once longed for a wine to make him feel like the little spoon.
Poetic wine descriptions don’t have to be so overt. Consider the tasting notes in your local wine store. Ever read about a brooding wine? An introspective wine? What about a transcendent wine? An electric wine. An immortal wine. A wine that whispers, a wine that shouts. Architectural, harmonious, symphonic, discordant. . . . Poetry sneaks in while we’re counting the blueberries.
The descriptions above may not make literal sense upon examination. But I would argue that they convey more about the total experience of a wine than your average aromatic survey.
As Dr. Shepherd himself admits, “Connecting smells and flavor with language may be difficult, but it is a uniquely human endeavor. That we require effort to do it, using all the linguistic tricks at our disposal . . . qualified by the entire vocabulary of emotion . . . should not come, therefore, as a surprise.”
This excerpt first appeared in Wine Confident: There’s No Wrong Way to Enjoy Wine, written by Kelli White and published by Académie du Vin Library. It has been minimally edited for style, length, and audience. Used with permission.
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Honestly there are times tableside in front of guests, where I just dont have the words. Its easy to get lost in sommspeak if you will. I appreciate the reminder to just get out of the way and let the wine speak for itself.
Kelli... very good article. Thank you...