[MUSIC] Welcome back. In the previous lesson, we considered the first sniff. In this lesson, We will discuss the first taste. When we're swirling and smelling a glass of wine that is still external to our head, so to speak, the smells that reach our brain are referred to as orthonasal smells. These smells pass through our nose. They are sniffed up to our olfactory region, and comprehended by our brain. Once the wine is on our palate, however, the smells that reach our brain go through the backdoor, so to speak, and up our sinuses to our olfactory region. And we call these smells retronasal smells. So, there are a couple of good terms that tasters use. Orthonasal and retronasal. So, the next thing we're going to do then, after we've given this quite a few swirls and quite a few sniffs, is to go ahead and take a sip. You may only have an ounce in your glass, but don't sip the whole ounce. Just sip a very small portion of it. And if you're comfortable with it, draw a little bit of air in, sort of slurp the wine. I see many tasters do that, and then chew the wine. I've never seen a serious taster gargle the wine. I'm not sure what that would accomplish, so don't do it. It might be embarrassing, but go ahead and swirl the wine around. And the first thing we want to do is to assess the wine flavor. That is due to basic taste elements in the wine that are perceived by our taste buds. In the world of human taste buds, traditionally, there were four basic tastes, sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. Over the last 50, or 60 years, or so, we have come to realize that, through research, that there is actually a fifth basic taste that's called umami. U-M-A-M-I, umami is a Japanese word that translates to our word in English, savory. There is no umami in wine, so we're going to skip that one for the present. However, there is a lot umami on the food side, and so, when we come to discuss wine and food interactions and wine and food pairing, we're going to pay specific attention to that landmine, or potential hazard that is umami. We're going to rule out saltiness too at this point, because there are almost no wines in the world that exhibit saltiness, I can think of a few exceptions. There are cherries made along the Southern coast of Spain that may have some saltiness. I've had a couple of wines from Greece made on rocky islands in the middle of the JNC that have a little salty tang to them. And I always felt that that was because of their proximity to crashing waves, or salty breezes, or whatnot. But for the most part, we can rule out salty. So, we're going to focus on sweet, sour, and bitter, and how we perceive those. Sourness is not a word that winemakers like to use, because the term sour has the connotation that, perhaps, our wine has gone sour. There is some reasons why that might be appropriate, but not in my wine, thank you very much. So, winemakers and wine tasters tend to talk about acidity or tartness. Interestingly enough, the work tart comes from the word Tartaric. Tartaric acid is the main acid in grapes and wine. There's another acid that we call Malic acid, and that contributes to the acidity of a wine. Malic acid is the one that we find in high amounts in apples, for example. So, that's acidity, and acidity is felt on the tongue by kind of a firmness or sharpness. And I'll tell you in a subsequent lesson how to make up standards that will enable you to recognize tartness or acidity. But for now, imagine biting into a lemon. That extreme, almost sharp pain that you feel from that very, very acidic lemon juice is a stronger version of what you would taste on your palate, as the acidity that most wines would have. So, acidity is one basic taste that is perceived by our taste buds. Sweetness is another. The sweetness in wine may come from the original glucose and fructose, sugars that are contained within the grape that still exist in the wine, if some still do. Or it can come from sugar that's added by the wine maker in various parts of the world. Wine makers may add sugar to their finished wine to sweeten it up a little bit, and sweetness is also a basic taste bud perception that we have when we, when we sip a wine that is a little bit sweet. Sweetness and acidity, or sourness, actually mask or counterbalance each other, as you can recall from the time that you made lemonade, which you made by squeezing lemon juice and adding a bunch of sugar, and maybe a little bit of water. As you recall from that experience, if you don't add enough sugar, it's too tart to drink. If you add too much sugar, it's not very interesting, because you buried all of that flavor of the acidity. Wines have that same kind of back and forth balance between their sugar and their acidity. Sugar tends to soften acidity. Acidity tends to cut the sweetness perception of sugar. Probably most wines made in the world, most table wines made in the world, except for certain categories, are what we call dry wines. A dry wine is a wine that has no sweet flavor, no sweetness to it. However, a wine can still have a little bit of sugar in it, that is what we call sub-threshold. It's beneath the level that our taste buds can taste sweetness. Even though we can't taste sweetness, the fact that there is sugar in that wine below our level of ability to taste it is still having a nice effect on softening some of the acidity, or the sourness in that wine. A third basic taste that we can taste is bitterness. Most white wine categories in the world don't have much noticeable bitterness. If any, the difference between bitterness in white and red is night and day. Very, very, very low levels, or even zero bitterness in a white wine. There are some categories, however, that do have a little bit of bitterness, or a grip, as we say in them. And we'll discuss some of those white wine types eventually. Red wines, on the other hand, usually have moderate to very noticeable amounts of bitterness. And bitterness, again, is that third basic taste that is perceived by our taste buds. You may have seen at one point in your studies a diagram of the human tongue. This human tongue was probably labeled by the regions where our tongue is optimized for tasting certain of these basic tastes. Sweet, sour, salty, bitter, but that's an old-fashioned notion that results from misrepresentation of a paper 100 years ago that was written in German. And it's actually false. Our tongue has no specific regions of sensitivity for each of these basic tastes. In fact, every taste bud on our tongue can taste all five of the basic tastes. Each one is equipped with taste bud sites that can taste each one of them. Each one of our taste buds is surrounded by nerve endings that can taste differences in thickness or thinness of a wine. Differences in temperature, differences in sharpness and so forth. But all of the basic tastes that are perceived by taste buds can be tasted everywhere on our palette. There's an interesting area of study, won't delve into this too extensively about how these tastes evolve during the moments when you're first tasting a wine. Sweetness, if any, tends to be noticed first, followed by sourness or acidity, followed by bitterness. Well, what about a dry wine? You might be wondering, how can I taste sweetness first if there is no apparent sugar or sweetness in the wine? Well, actually, what I noticed in my palate is that the acidity in the wine takes a few moments to develop. So, something in the wine is sort of, is sort of hitting my taste buds and my palate first. And then after a few moments of delay, the acidity gets stronger and stronger and stronger. And then after I have registered the amount of acidity in the wine, bitterness tends to bring up the rear. So, I could have at wine that's very bitter, but not sweet at all, dry and very low acidity, and not notice the bitterness until several seconds after I sip it. So, we call this the temporal dominance of sensation, or the, or the time evolution of tastes as they unravel on your tongue. This is all within a very short amount of time, however, especially since we're swirling and swishing the wine around, and we're allowing it to contact all of our taste buds. We will notice, right away, sweetness. We will notice immediately after acidity and then bitterness, if any, will sort of bring up the rear. Those few white wines in the world, which we'll mention in the next lesson that may have some little residual bitterness, always comes at the tail end of the seconds or so that we're tasting, sort of bringing up the rear as a kind of a pithiness or soapiness.
