[MUSIC] Welcome back. In the previous lesson, We considered the second taste. In this lesson, We will turn our attention to wine texture. While the wine is on our palate and we're swishing it around, a third consideration, other than basic tastes and retronasal aromatics, really is the consistency of the wine or the heft or the body of the wine. Wine, even though it's a liquid, has a particular weight, it has a texture to it. And this is a finer point of wine tasting, but one that I think you're probably more familiar with than you realize. What if I were to get some black glasses, glasses you couldn't see through, and present you with a set of milks? And this set of milks included skim milk, 1%, 2%, 4%, half and half, cream. And I mixed the glasses up and asked you to organize these glasses, put these glasses in order of increasing weight, or increasing thickness. And you started tasting them and you would, say this is easy, I can do this, I do this all the time. And I know which weight I like as a matter of fact. So the same thing is true of wine to a finer degree. The body of the wine, or the thickness or thinness of the wine, if you will, is due to the amount of alcohol that the wine contains. And also, is influenced by the amount of sugar if any that the wine may contain. So, lower alcohol wines tend to be lighter body, sometimes even if they're very, very low alcohol, even watery. Higher alcohol wines tend to be medium body or medium+ body, or fuller in body. And that body or that thickness that we feel by flipping our tongue around while the wine is on our palate, is due to the amount of alcohol that's in the wine. It's difficult to compare the body of one wine versus another when they're very close in alcohol. If one wine is 12.5% and another wine is 13.5%, we probably can't tell any difference in body. But if, for example, we have 12.5% wine versus a 15% wine, a wine that is more than one and a half or 2% difference in alcohol from the other wine, it's possible that we can tell a difference. Certainly if one of those wines has some residual sugar in it, has some sweetness to it, that will also add to the perceived body of that wine. Alcohol in wine, in addition to conferring body or consistency or viscosity on the wine can add some other aspects to wine's flavor. Alcohol, if it's too high, can be hot or irritating, alcohol can present itself as being slightly sweet. We also know that alcohol can enhance the sweetness of any sugar that might already be there. For example, if I showed you two glasses of the same wine with the same amount of sugar, but I add one and a half percent alcohol to one of those glasses, that glass of wine will appear sweeter even though you know that both glasses have the same amount of residual sugar. So just to reiterate that, the presence of alcohol enhances your perception of any sweetness that's in the wine. In other words, it makes that sweetness greater. Other things in wine can cause a touch response or a kinesthetic response on your part. For example, tannins in the wine can absorb your saliva, which can temporarily make your mouth not adequately lubricated. I'm sure you've all sipped a red wine and then a moment later your lips feel scratchy and dry. Your lips aren't scratchy, they simply don't have adequate amount of saliva to lubricate them because the tannins have bound them up. If you wait a few moments, if you rinse with water, once you regenerate more saliva, this effect will gradually go away. So, that's not a taste bud perception, that's actually a mouth-feel, or a nerve, perception based on the nerve endings that are on your palate. Sometimes really high acid in addition to registering as a sour basic taste, can be painful [LAUGH] so that's a nerve response. Sometimes tannins can actually be so bitter as to be a little aggressive on your pallet and that's a pain response as well. So don't want to imply that tasting wine is going to give you pain, but just to imply that there's a difference between tasting basic tastes with your taste buds versus your mouth perceiving textural or mouth-feel or kinesthetic sensations based on things that are perceived by your nerves. So I think we've actually gone through all the basic steps of tasting, so we'll have to practice this again and again. So, seeing, smelling, tasting, which, as you know, involves tasting and smelling, aftertaste, thinking, pulling all of our impressions together to see how they integrate. Are all the elements that are in that wine balanced with one another? Is something sticking out and making the wine awkward? Is the wine overly tannic? Is the wine unbalanced with respect to acidity? Is it very sharp? Is the wine overpowered by one particular aroma, that makes it not complex but simple, and sometimes even boring? So how are all of these elements working with or against each other. Are they playing well together, do they make sense, and are there a lot of them? Is the wine complex or are there just a few of them is the wine of a simpler type? These are the kinds of questions you should be entertaining as you take your second taste. Thus concludes the last session for module 1. Your formal wine evaluation will be next.
