Let’s admit it, looking at an expert tasting a wine in front of an audience is fascinating. The ease of observing, of sniffing, of tasting the wine and talking to the public about the characteristics, about the flavours and the tastes, make the audience hanging on his lips.
The tale of the flavors is, even just itself, a show. The ability and the ease for the expert to detect them is something out of reach, his confidence is that each one of us would be willing to achieve and, above all, his flavours database could make a maitre parfumeur jealous!
Nobody can be emotionless in front of the quantity of flavours that can be detected in a glass of wine and, first of all, in front of the quantity of flavours totally unknown by the majority of us. They might be already heard names, but our brain wouldn’t be able to recognize, nor to remember.
Attend a tasting by an expert could be a traumatic event for a wanna-be sommelier. After the moment “I wanna be like that”, “oh yes he knows that”, the next feeling will be “I’ll never be so good”… Inferiority complexes will start to come out and will be our best friends every time we’ll face someone more knowledgeable, could be another sommelier, a winemaker, an oenologist. Or it might be with someone we just think is more experienced that us… Every time we’ll be asked to make a comment on a wine in front of someone else, our nose will detect some flavours, our brain will perceive a fraction of these, our mouth will pronounce just a couple, just to avoid to say stupid stuff.
But how did these nose guru learnt all this flavours? And, first of all, are them really able to distinguish those endless shades between the indian jasmine, the spanish and the chinese one? Maybe yes. Maybe no. We’ll never know this because we won’t be able any way to distinguish them, not even mentioning to remember them.
So how did these nose guru learnt all those flavours? And first of all, are them really able to distinguish the endless shades between an indian jasmine, a spanish and a chinese one? Maybe yes. Maybe not. We might never know as we won’t never be able to do it neither, nor remember them.
They for sure studied for long time and made a lot, really a lot of practice, smelling everything it could come at a smelling distance, keeping their training, which is essential. But in real life, talking in front of an audience, we quite often have the feeling that there’s a tendency to look for an excessive research for innovative terms, not really motivated from a practical point of view, pretty useless, useful just for the research itself and for the speaker ego. If there would be a world championship for the extravagance of the flavours identified in a glass, the rank would change day by day. So? All falsehoods? All show, invention? Absolutely not! Every wine is an inventory filled with the most different flavours, but we’re not all able to identify in their totality, for study reasons, experience and physiological differences. There’s a part of show, yes, and sometimes the show hide the taster’s ability, it makes him closer to an anchor-man rather that to a wine expert, closer to a jester rather than someone who devote a lot of efforts to get prepared. When this happens, everything related to that specific wine, loose some respectability and professionalism by the majority of the audience. Sometimes, it’s really enough not to go too far, as in everyday life.