My friend Stefano argued he can’t find any difference among wines and feels perplexed when sommeliers use all sorts of spice and fruit adjectives to describe them.

You know, wine is just grapevine juice where fermentation transformed sugar into alcool. Water, alcool and tartaric acid. This is all you need to synthetize something that’s technically 99.99% wine. The problem is, if you try tasting this fake wine you quickly discover it’s ugly, has no aroma and feels completely uninteresting. This is because the last 0.01% is what makes a wine great: hundreds of aromatic chemicals. And this is the only part you should care for. When drinking wine you should mentally remove alcool and tartaric acid from your mouth and focus on the remainder. Well, if you drink very cheap wines it’s likely there’s nothing to focus on. But don’t worry, for just a few euros per bottle you can drink decent wines with a bouquet to care for. OK, let’s say you bought a decent bottle. How can you discover what’s great in that wine? There are 3 different aspects to consider: how it looks, how it smells, how it tastes.

Vision is the simplest aspect, cause we are used to watch at things and describe what we see. Of all our senses, vision is the one we use the most and, by the way, we developed a scientific and simple model to decompose colours into three basic components so that any colour is easily described by RGB coordinates.

Olfaction is the hardest part, cause there are thousands of basic odors out there. With our nose we have been provided with a wonderful probe, able to discover a lot of chemicals even in concentrations of few parts per million. The problem is that

1. we use it rarely
2. it’s hard to distinguish between them when they’re together, and
3. we don’t know the name of each chemical we recognized.

Nobody would ever say “hey, this thing smells like methyl cinnamate“, except maybe for people with a degree in organic chemistry. People are more likely to say “hey, this thing smells like strawberries”. It’s just a way to communicate our perception so that others we’ll be able to associate to their previous experience.

Most of the time we understand some odor and we immediatly know we already experienced it somewhere in the past, but we’re unable to tell what it was. This is because normally we don’t put conscious attention to our nose.  We feel odors at the subconscious level and quickly forget them.  While studying to become a sommelier, one of the most important things I’ve learnt is to smell everything and memorize scents, so to be able to recognize them later.

Taste is tricky, because we can smell from inside the mouth (the rear of the nose cavity) and most flavour perceptions are actually odors. Our tounge is able to detect just four basic tastes: sweetness, sourness, bitterness and saltiness but on top of this we can feel the touch of food, such as fatness, dryness or temperature.

I hope now you understand how many variables there are in a single glass of wine, why wines can be so different and how people can get so excited when tasting wine. Now go drink some!