The Certified Sommelier Examination was introduced in December of 2005. Previously, students who passed the MS Introductory examination could apply directly to the Advanced Course after waiting the required years’ time.  More often than not, first time students did poorly on the Advanced Exam for any number of reasons. Each student is unique so the three parts of the examination will always pose different challenges to different individuals. Historically the major challenge was the service exam where the combination of lack of appropriate preparation for dealing with nerves—sometimes extreme—in an audition situation doomed most first timers. Exceptions to the rule usually came in the form of students who were working the floor of upscale restaurants where they performed service to MS standards night in and night out, and who were also used to the pressure of being “on stage” in a top level venue.

Several years prior to 2005, the CMSA Board had discussed the possibility of an intermediate level between the Introductory and Advanced Courses; a level that would accomplish several goals: first, to provide the hospitality industry with a much-needed basic sommelier certification; second, to introduce students to the three-part MS examination format; third, to give us a first look at their individual service skills.

Between 2004 and 2005 a team of Masters from the CMSA created the Certified Sommelier Examination with the help of UK and European Masters. After beta-testing, the exam went live at the end of 2005. While the content has changed from year to year, the format of the exam has remained basically the same:

• Theory: a 40-question written test combining multiple choice, short answer, and matching questions.
• Tasting: a blind tasting of two wines, one white and one red, with the student filling out a grid based on the MS Deductive Tasting Method.
• Service: sparkling wine service with students being asked questions about various beverages that might be served during the course of a meal as well as questions about food and wine pairing. 

Since that first exam in 2005, the Certified Sommelier Examination has, to a great extent, accomplished its goals. With that, I’d like to offer some advice to students who are preparing to take the Certified Exam, especially those taking it for the first time. 

Disclaimer! The following is my personal advice to students and in no way a reflection of the policies of the CMSA or its Board of Directors.

Theory Examination

The CMSA philosophy of theory curriculum has a lot to do with what a sommelier theoretically could be asked tableside by a guest about any beverage served in the restaurant. Emphasis is placed on wine, but beer, spirits, sake, and aperitifs are important as well. Therefore, it’s important to realize that geography is vital to a sommelier’s body of knowledge; knowing where a wine is produced down to a single vineyard (if necessary) is paramount to success in the MS program.

Example: if a guest is asking about a vintage of Savennières “Clos de la Coulée de Serrant” from the producer Nicholas Joly, the sommelier/student should know the following about the wine:

• It’s a dry white wine.
• It’s made from the Chenin Blanc grape.
• The Coulée de Serrant vineyard is located in the Anjou region of France’s Loire Valley, specifically in the AOP of Savennières.
• The Coulée de Serrant vineyard is actually an AOP itself.

Further, if the guest asks about the biodynamic symbol on the bottle, the sommelier/student should be able to explain what it means and also provide some information about the philosophy of biodynamics, how it can affect wine quality, and some growers/producers that farm biodynamically in other regions of the world—all without burying the guest in a mountain of useless and confusing verbiage.

Once again, it’s important to note that MS theory exams focus on geography and being able to connect grape varieties to styles of wines made in specific geographical locations. From there students also need to study country and regional laws, classifications, terms about grape growing and winemaking, and major producers for important wines such at prestige cuvée Champagne.

Tasting Examination

The Certified tasting examination consists of tasting a white and a red wine and filling out a written grid based on the Deductive Tasting Method, which is first taught in the Introductory Sommelier Class. The grid requires the student to input information concerning a wine’s aromas and flavors, the presence of minerality and/or earthiness, and the use of oak. Further, the grid asks that students assess the structural components of the wines; the levels of residual sugar, acidity, alcohol, the finish, and tannin in the red wine. Finally, the student is asked to deduce the best possible conclusion about the wine, which includes the climate in which the grapes were grown, Old World vs. New World style, the actual grape variety or blend of grapes, the country of origin, and the vintage of production. 

It goes without saying that a good deal of practice is needed to become proficient at using the grid, not to mention tasting in general. The good news is that the grid can be downloaded for practice from the CMSA website at any time (here). The grape varieties used in the exam for both white and red wines are listed on the grid so the student can focus his or her tasting practice. Otherwise, here is further advice in preparing for the Certified tasting exam:

A word about practicing tasting: make sure you are working in a tasting group as the dynamics of a good study group are essential to learning and improvement, not to mention the camaraderie and shared experience. 

Finally, I’ve written about tasting and preparing for the MS tasting exams extensively on my blog. I’ve found that smelling and tasting wine is completely based on one’s memory; not only the memory of the various aromatics and flavors in wine but the combination of these components that make up the complete profile of a grape or style of wine. If memory is the key, then students can—and absolutely should—work with their own personal memories of these components and varietal profiles apart from actually tasting wine. I strongly believe that practicing memory of the components and profiles of grapes and wines is just as important and beneficial as actually tasting them. 

Service Examination

The MS title is about being a world-class sommelier and thus service and working the floor are the essence of what we do. The service component is also important to an employer in terms of wanting to know if a potential hire knows the basics of correct service and can open a bottle of sparkling wine without inflicting bodily injury to themselves or those in the immediate vicinity. Safety is key in sparkling wine service. There are any number of ways to open a bottle of bubbly incorrectly—even dangerously—but only one way to do it right. Here are some vital pointers to do just that:

Mise-en-Place—Setting Up:

• Fold two—and ONLY two—serviettes for service. One will be used for opening the bottle and the other will be left on the bucket tableside if a bucket is used for service. In other words, don’t fold all the napkins on the service station.
• Make sure the glassware is clean and polished. 
• Always line the tray with an unfolded cloth napkin; no fancy origami folds as they result in an uneven surface almost guaranteeing you’ll lose glassware in a spectacular fashion.
• Place the glassware consistently at each cover; at the point of the knife is the most straight forward method.
• Place glassware starting with the host or the person to the host’s left. Placing glassware is NOT gender specific so one trip around the table will suffice.
• Place two under-liners or coasters to the right of the host, one for the cork and the other for the bottle, if the host decides to keep the bottle on the table.

Opening the Bottle:

• Never take the top of your hand off the bottle when opening. This is utterly crucial to opening the bottle safely and properly. BEFORE loosening the cage, place a folded serviette over the top of the bottle. Then with a firm grip over the serviette and top of the bottle, loosen the wire cage and slowly remove the cage and cork at the same time by twisting the bottom of the bottle back and forth. Remember: the cage is NEVER removed before the cork. 
• Watch where you’re pointing the bottle when opening. Don’t point the bottle at the table or anyone else in the vicinity. Doing so is dangerous and cause for major deductions on your score.
• Always place a serviette over the top of the bottle when opening. As mentioned above, use a serviette over the top of the bottle when opening to prevent spilling any wine if the cork exits the bottles suddenly and tragically.
• Open the bottle as quietly as possible. A no-brainer. This is proper wine service and not the end of a Formula One race. Opening bottles of sparkling wine quietly is a matter of practice and repetition.
• Wipe the bottle with your serviette after you’ve removed the cork before pouring a taste for the host.
• Present the cork to the host on an underliner which is placed to the host’s right.

Serving the Bottle:

• Hold the bottle with a still wine grip. Do NOT hold the bottle with your thumb in the punt of the bottle when pouring; this method does not provide enough control and stability and the odds of dropping or losing control of the bottle increase significantly.
• After presenting the cork pour a 1-to-1.5 ounce taste for the host. Wait for them to approve the wine and then serve the table in the following order: serve lady guests first and then men. If there is a guest of honor seated to the right of the host, serve them first before lady guests. Serve the host last regardless of gender.
• Fill the glasses at least ½ to ¾ glass full with a maximum pour of an inch below the top of the glass.
• Fill the glasses one at a time with a maximum of two pours for each glass; partial pouring and/or going around the table multiple times is not allowed.
• Make sure the pours are even!
• Gage the pour level/amount based on glass size and number of glasses to be poured so you don’t run out of wine.
• It’s not necessary to empty the entire bottle of wine; in fact, there should be a little wine left in the bottle.

General Service Points

• Remember to serve from the right and to move around the table clockwise—ALWAYS—even if just returning to the service station.
• Don’t reach across a guest’s space to place or clear glassware or serve wine--even if the chair is empty.
• PRACTICE CARRYING A TRAY. This is the one part of service that cannot be faked. If you don’t regularly work with a tray, lots of practice will be needed for an exam setting. Odds are you will be nervous. Practice!
• You should be able to carry a tray comfortably with either hand. However, proper service dictates that the tray should be carried in the left hand and glassware placed with the right hand.

Service Exam Theory:

• Work on major cocktails, aperitifs, and after dinner spirits. Study cocktails and aperitifs by category, i.e., vodka cocktails, gin cocktails etc.
• Food and wine pairing: Have specific wine recommendations with producer and vintage in mind.
• Be able to take a specific style—be it a high acid red wine or a white with residual sugar—to multiple places in the wine world.   
• Above all, know why the pairing works! Be able to explain why a wine works well with a specific dish in terms of the structural components of the wine (i.e., high acidity, lack or oak or smooth tannins). It’s the entire point of selling a specific wine with a certain dish. 

General Service Advice:

• Taking care of the table is paramount. Even though you’re in an exam setting, remember that you are a sommelier and your job is to take care of the table—NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS. In a real life service situation you do not have the luxury of freaking out or giving up on a table or “failing.” Your job again is to take care of the guest and give them great service. The exam should be no different. Take care of the examiner(s) as you would any guest in your restaurant. To do so will translate into success. 

Gilian Handelman is the current director of education and communications for Jackson Family Wines. She began her career as an assistant sommelier in 1987 at Pierce’s restaurant in the Finger Lakes region of New York. But quickly moved into the production side in 1988 in Washington State working six harvests for three different wineries. Gilian was hired in 1994 by Kendall-Jackson as Enologist, where she produced experimental wine, yeast, and barrel trials and tracked the 1,500-plus lots of wine made by the winery each year. In 2006 she was tapped to create a trade education program for the winery, where she developed training for KJ’s sales force as well as wine and food education and seminars for trade and consumers. 

In 2000 she was hired by Paige Poulos at Paige Poulos Communications to be the Director of Wine Communications. Here she developed PR and education plans for winery and industry clients; plans that combined sensory evaluation, winemaking, and culinary education with public relations and marketing strategy. In 2002 Gilian was hired by Wine & Spirits Magazine as their Director of Marketing and Education. Handelman created their Best New Sommelier program, coordinated and taught scores of classes at culinary and hospitality schools around the United States, and developed their lauded event program. Eventually Gilian was lured back to Jackson Family Wines in 2007, where she currently directs education for the family’s 34 wineries around the globe. Gilian lives in Berkeley, California with her husband and two children. 

I met with Gilian in May of last year. We used the 2009 RDV Rendezvous Merlot blend from Virginia and Riedel Vinum/Bordeaux glasses for the tasting. As for the session, it was clear from the outset that Gilian’s inner processing of wine is far different than most people’s strategies. She is a synesthete processing wine as a flow and shape of colors and movement. She’s created “maps” of many grape varieties and these can be found on the KJ website (http://www.kj.com/sensory-tour). Her strategy is unique--and remarkable as well.
 
Overall Goals

TG: What are your overall goals when tasting? 

GH: I’m trying to bridge the gap between language and the abstract. For me, it’s a different exercise because I’m trying to decipher what’s going on in the glass whether it’s for a blind tasting or for quality purposes. But when I’m speaking to an audience and trying to get them to come to a shared conclusion, what I’m trying to do is to get them to consider anything whether it’s shapes, sounds, frequencies, or hard word descriptors—literally anything that will create that “aha!” for the class. It’s a language aspect.

TG: What do you think the “aha!” moment is? What does that mean? 

GH: It really varies so much from person to person. What I’m looking for is the brow not to be knitted anymore. It’s like someone is thinking, “I don’t see it, I don’t see it, I don’t see it, I SEE IT!” Some people want the satisfaction that they’ve hit upon a descriptor that resonates for everybody. Other people want to understand a structural element. Some people just want answers to questions like, “what do you mean by framework?” or “What do you mean by high note?” Even if you have to resort to things like, “is it this?” (She sings high pitch) or “is it this?” (Sings low pitch); you do whatever it is to make all the brows to stop knitting. 

Sight

TG: When you look at wine in the glass what are you trying to figure out about it? 

GH: I’ve been spending a lot of time lately trying to unravel the 30-year mystery for me of how much bias goes into sight. This because I’ve had so many “kerthunk” moments in the last five years when I’ve been positing things to scientists and people who really taste analytically about how sight is such a huge predetermination of how people taste. What I’ve been trying to do is to open the space between my ears and think, “with this wine (glass in hand), it’s opaque so my sense is that it’s relatively low in acid and high in tannin and probably has wood on it, blah blah blah.” These are all things you get from visual cues. But now I’m trying really hard to think that maybe those things aren’t necessarily true.

TG: Why do you want to avoid doing that? I think to your point, sight, especially for red wines, builds instant expectations for fruit qualities and structural components. At least that’s a good framework to begin with. Are you trying to wipe the slate clean?

 
GH: A little bit. I think one of my pitfalls as a taster is that I have preconceived notions and they will drive me through things that I am missing. So something I’m really striving to do now is to stop my brain from saying, “I know what that is!” 

TG: Anything else about the sight, the appearance of a wine?  Anything to describe it? 

GH: The other thing about sight that I really like to pay attention to, and that I also encourage people to pay attention to, is the textural element; how the wine moves in the glass. That’s something I look at pretty carefully right away. That’s different from color.  It translates to sound for me.

TG: In other words when you swirl the glass and watch how the wine moves in the glass you hear sounds? 

GH: Yes.

TG: If a wine is really viscous and rich what sound is that? 

GH: Gloop, gloop, gloop. (Laughs)

TG: Is it just a sound? Is there anything that you see? Does the sound create any kind of pattern in your field of vision? I’m just curious.

GH: I don’t think so. I think it’s more like having observed Jell-O, jellies and candies hardening-- various things like that over the years. I just have a very firm sense of what texture means.

TG: What about something like Champagne or German Riesling that’s really light-bodied?

GH: Ffft! Ffft! Ffft! (Laughs again)

TG: What’s in between? 

GH: It’s more of a gentle swishing sound, like water lapping on the edge of a lake or the sides of a boat.

TG: Do you have a predisposition to any one of those? 

GH: Gloop, gloop, gloop is not attractive to me. 

TG: For all wines? What about something like a dessert wine? 

GH: For a Sauternes it’s OK. 

TG: What about a red wine?

GH: Much less so. Personally, I want more tension and more edges on my red. Also I’ve become more predisposed to not like so much glycerin-glycerol-texture in my wines. But that’s totally personal and not qualitative. 

TG: So one is about judging wine professionally and the other is personal. But it sounds like you like the higher acid, less alcohol red wines. 

GH: Yes, but there are definitely exceptions. I wouldn’t kick a Huet Vouvray out of bed and it’s a gloop gloop wine. 

TG: (Laughs) I agree. 

Nose 

TG: Go ahead and pick up your glass and smell the wine. When you really get into your zone, I’m interested in is where your eyes go; where you look. (She smells the wine) It seems your eyes go right out here (straight out and down about 15-20 degrees). 

GH: Yes.

TG: Does that feel really comfortable, like it’s the best place? Try it again.

GH: Yes, that’s it. Definitely. I don’t stare into the wine. 

TG: Most people do. Over 90% of the people I’ve worked with look down either center, slightly to the left, or slightly to the right. I think this is really important because it’s a starting point for your tasting sequence. It also helps to shut the world out so you can focus. Once you do that and smell this wine, what kind of fruits do you smell? 

GH: Mostly dark fruit; fruit that’s not stewed but more on the compote side or on the counter for a while side. 

TG: As you’re smelling the wine and telling me this, I see your eyes start here and then go out here (Straight out in front almost eye level). Question: how do you know it’s dark fruit and not something else? 

GH: Tenor.

TG: Tenor meaning …

GH: I also see and hear music a lot when I taste. For me, this wine is more of a basso sound (hums) vs. a higher sound. 

TG: When you say you see something, do you get images of something that’s dark fruit? I also have to note that you’re looking in exactly the same place as before. 

GH: Not sure. 

TG: Put your nose in the glass and hold the dark fruit and your eyes in the same place for a few seconds and see if anything pops up.

GH: No, I don’t see any dark fruit. I feel dark fruit whether it’s in the core of my body or in a smell memory.  

TG: But I’m curious because feelings tend to be evaluative—they happen as a result of an image or a sound. What I want to know is if there is an image that creates all this other stuff? Because again, how do you know it’s dark fruit and not red fruit or even a catcher’s mitt for that matter? How do you know?

GH: Right as in how am I pulling it from the wine. I guess it’s just an instantaneous reaction in my brain. There’s this thought that I’ve catalogued all these smells and there’s a synapse that’s telling me this is dark fruit.

TG: But what tells the synapse?

GH: I think, although I haven’t really articulated this before, that for me it’s sort of a family tree or a logarithm. Like you, I do the same kind of thing in terms of the fruit, the floral, mineral, veggie, and the rest. 

TG: As you’re saying those things, you’re going left to right just out in front of you. Is that how it works? 

GH: I always go left to right.

TG: Is that a grid? 

GH: It’s a like a family tree or a logarithm. If I’m starting with fruit (and I always start with fruit), then it would branch off here (points out front).  It happens really quickly and there’s only two worlds for fruit for me—white and red. In red fruit there’s also only two worlds, red and black. After that, the logarithm breaks off further.

TG: If I were you, what would all that look like? Is it like a picture of a tree with branches?

GH: It’s almost like electricity. Once I make those quick decisions, say that it’s in the black fruit world I’m asking if it’s fresh black fruit or prunes or whatever. 

TG: As you point to those places (out in front of her), are those images or what are they?

GH: I think they are lines of connect in my brain that are leading me to one framework or another. 

TG: I’m still trying to get to how you know it’s black fruit vs. something else. So if I had to be you, what would I do? So far I know that you put your nose in the glass and some kind of tree appears quickly; but you somehow take everything into consideration and then recognize something specifically. From there, it becomes a subset of different variations of whatever it is. But what does all this look like? 

GH: It’s like a family tree or an electron; almost like when you match up electrons and protons. There’s lines of yes-no, yes-no for me.  

TG: Are there any pictures that have to do with all this? I’m just curious if there are images somehow in the process.

GH: I don’t think there are pictures. I think there’s a memory but it doesn’t look like an image because I’ve been smelling things for so long. I remember walking around as a kid with my Mom smelling things in markets. It’s more of an association. It’s not emotional as it it’s recognition of some kind.  

TG: But how do you recognize something? That’s the question. If you recognize anything specifically, how do you do it? Say it’s something really strong in a wine such as a fruit or a rose; how do you represent that? 

GH: If we really do go there, I think it’s a shape. For me round, dark fruit is sort of amorphous and blobby. Red, vivid fruit is spiky. And it’s not necessarily something like, “there’s that shape of a tear drop.” It’s not that clear cut for me. It’s more like thought flowing into shape. So round, black fruit that’s kind of stewed is amorphous; back to the gloop gloop. In fact, all the fruits I smell will go into those kind of roles. Maybe that’s what it’s like for me, a channel of shape and sound. “So (speaking in a high voice) this is a tiny channel that is bristly, high-noted, and cleaver-shaped. Then (speaking in a much lower voice) this amorphous pool of a shape.” I don’t think I see actual pictures of things. 

TG: Interesting. Where does that come from? Where do these shapes come from? Inside your head? Out front? 

GH: It comes from my whole body (laughs).

TG: Not only that but it seems like there are sounds that accompany all this too.

GH: Yes, inside my brain. 

TG: So you project these amorphous shapes along with pitches and frequencies in terms of how rich or how acidic the fruit is.  

GH: I do this all the time especially with the structure of a wine—the liquid takes a shape.

TG: We’ll get to structure in a bit. In the meantime, you mentioned dark fruits. Are there any red fruits in the wine, anything sour?

GH: Near the end there’s some plum notes like plum skin.

TG: What about things like flowers, herbs, and even earth?

GH: There’s kind of a cured leather or cured fruit leather to which then to me goes flat. It’s not amorphous anymore and that I think is just associated with fruit leather. Whenever I think of fruit leather I always think of flat.

TG: As in a flat shape?

GH: Yes, there’s also some subtle perfume in this wine but it’s more of a bass-noted or woody perfume. That’s getting into the wood world but it’s still kind of in the fruit-natural things world.

TG: Finally, what about oak? How do you know there’s oak?

GH: There’s a cocoa note which to me is a dark almost round, puffy character. Oak characters to me are more bristly.

TG: When you say bristly, what do you mean? What does that look like?

GH:  It looks like a claw (laughs) because it’s “grippy.” Then there’s the spice-oak elements which I’m picking in the wine which are almost like roasted spice elements. They’re like little bits of roundness but it’s not a large puffy thing.

TG: Thinking about all those things together, what does that look like? Once you put your energy into a shape and/or color how does it appear? It seems to be almost like an arrangement. Do all the shapes happen at once and stay there or does it happen one thing at a time? 

GH: It eventually all comes together so that there’s the puffiness and the roundness. But that round jam note anchors it all and then there’s stuff laid on top it. 

TG: So the shape of the fruit anchors it all and everything else is around it like little satellites? 

GH: Yes.

TG: In other words, there are shapes instead of actual images? 

GH: Yes.

TG: A bunch of different shapes? Do the shapes have any color or any texture? 

GH: No.

TG: Are they just outlines?

GH: There’s definitely texture. Now I’m also picking up some resinous notes in the wine. It’s almost like blood orange notes and dried citrus and they’re kind of curly shaped.

TG: You’re pointing to them right out in front of your face. It’s interesting that your entire field is very close to you in proximity. It’s all within 12-14 inches in front of you at eye level. What happens when you taste the wine? Does all this change? If one flavor gets stronger than it was on the nose, does anything change? Or does it all stay the same? 

GH: Your right, it is all intimate for me; it’s right here in front. But what changes is that it takes off.

TG: Takes off? As in …

GH: Away from me.  

TG: Just curious, smell the wine again and take your arrangement of shapes and push away from you about 10 feet. What happens to the wine? Just push it all the way.

GHY: I kind of lose control of it.

TG: Can you make sense of the wine anymore? Or does the wine smell different if you push it away?

GH: Yes, it smells higher noted. It’s like I pushed the bass away.

TG: Reset it. It sounds like there’s dimensionality to this as well as depth. What happens if you smell it and make the shape flat? Like two dimensional and flat right out in front of you.

GH: I lose the whole screen.

TG: But is there any part of the wine that smells stronger? Different?  

GH: It’s kind of like all the left over notes like soy and fruit leather.  

TG: So the major things go away?

GH: Yes.

TG: Makes sense. So reset it and let’s taste the wine.

Palate 

TG: Now that you’re tasting the wine keeping all those shapes in mind, does anything change? Or do they stay in the same kind of arrangement?

GH: Now what happens is that I check the assumptions from the aromatic profile and things open up quite a bit.

TG: Meaning that the field gets larger? 

GH: Yes, it gets quite a bit larger this way (pointing up) and that way (side to side).  But it never, ever grows down. I don’t know why, but that’s the way it is. It grows in width, in height, and in depth.  

TG: So how much larger does it get? 

GH: At least a hundred percent bigger. I feel and see huge spikes.

TG: Huge spikes? What does that mean? 

GH: I’m very influenced by structure in terms of my visuals and my sense of things, which is why when I’m teaching a class in front of people I’m motioning like this all the time (waves her arms). 

TG: You’re literally showing them what you get out of the wine.

GH: Right! It’s really a three-dimensional model on my palate.

TG: Do the shapes stay the same? Do they get bigger? 

GH: No, the big amorphous thing is still there and that’s the center of the whole structure. What’s happening elsewhere is that tannin and acid are stretching either forward, or up and out. With a tannic wine like this I’m looking very carefully at how the tannin crescendos and where it pops out. This is a little bit like those fruits that have spikes on them. I think it’s like a passion fruit because it’s fairly round. They don’t take on square shapes for me so they’re fairly round. It’s almost like this is a vision of my palate right in front of me.

TG: It’s kind of an arch right in front of you.

GH: Right, front to back. So what’s happening is that the tannins take shape on the palate.

TG: When you say, “takes shape,” what does that mean?

GH: They get spikey. 

TG: Meaning that on the curve of the wine shape there are spikes that come up? 

GH: Yes, there are spikes that come up through the curve.

TG: Again I have to ask, is there any color to all this? Or is it just shapes and outlines?

GH: In reds no but some whites have a color.  

TG: But in red wines in terms of all these different fruits, spices, and other things, there’s only shapes with outlines? Are they filled? How does it work?

GH: They’re definitely filled. It’s like a big rubber casing that’s filled and things are shooting out the end of the casing making the rubber stretch which is what I meant by the passion fruit. Then in the back there’s this kind of roller coaster and other stuff stretching through the casing.

TG: Roller coaster meaning what?

GH: Cascade—like a cascade of what’s going on. There’s tannin and acid, and it (cascade shape) goes up (motions with hands) coming back down and then goes up again. 

TG: So it’s the shape of the palate of the wine. Does the structure define the movement of the shape? 

GH: Yes, the structure.  

TG: How is high acid different from low acid? 

GH: For me high acid definitely goes up (whistles). With acid there’s usually an up and sometimes an out.  

TG: How would that be different? 

GH: Because of the way I perceive acid on my palate. Whether I feel a burst at the end of the wine like fingers moving, or a turkey tail, or a slow build of acid that takes off like you’re going up a roller coaster.

TG: How about alcohol? How is that represented to you? 

GH: I don’t perceive alcohol that much. The only way I’m influenced by alcohol is by retro-nasal.  

TG: What about something that’s really high in alcohol like a port? 

GH: If it’s really high in alcohol it’s almost like a burning or a gaseous.

TG: You’re making a motion off to the side and up.

GH: Right, it’s off to the side and up but all also through the palate. It’s constantly kind of burning in there like roiling gas.

TG: How about residual sugar? What’s that like? 

GH: I don’t know because I don’t have anything like that in the glass. 

TG: True, but if you had a young vintage port, what would the sweetness be like?

GH: It’s that base “mattress” again (pointing right underneath her chin). So if this is all a reflection of my palate, and I think it is, then this base mattress is a kind of soft, couchy thing going on the bottom of my palate. 

TG: So you’re literally projecting all this right out in front of your palate? In front of your face? 

GH: Yes.

TG: Have you ever thought about taking different grape varieties and drawing maps of what all this looks like? 

GH: Yes, I did it and they’re on the Kendall Jackson website. 

TG: You did? Then I have to check it out to see what all of them look like.

GH: You’ll see them on the website and in some instances, I did several maps for a single grape like Cabernet. I did maps for three different Cabernets but you’ll see that they all have a similar shape. That’s because I feel that tannin and texture work together in such an unusual way. To me, the tannin dictates a huge amount of what that shape looks like. It’s not just the grape variety because you can taste Cabernet from the Oakville bench from a big time producer at 15% alcohol and to me the shape is a lot like a Central Coast Syrah. It’s got that zauftig kind of shape. But Cabernet from Howell Mountain or Pauilliac is much more spikey. So I can’t necessarily put a shape to a specific grape.

TG: So structure is really important. Does a shape with all these aspects just keep going and changing every time you taste the wine? Or does it stop changing at some point.

GH: It does change after three to five minutes. What’s left is this kind of end of the roller coaster or like foothills or steps left by the tannin on my palate. And often for me, and this is how I pick up minerality; there’s literally pebbles or gravel.

TG: Do you see pebbles or gravel? 

GH: I see different shapes of rocks on my palate at the end. 

TG: You mentioned no colors for red wine but some colors for white wines. 

GH: I should revise that because there’s no color for most reds. But if something is really different from what I’m tasting day to day (and that can change depending on where I am or what I’m working on), there might some color. That’s usually if something is really blue or really red in terms of the fruit. There’s also a spike or a frequency. Blue gives me a frequency that sounds like a high-pitched buzz. It’s almost musical.

TG: Do you have a music background? 

GH: No.  

TG: How does sound enter so much of what you perceive in wine? I have a formal musical background and it doesn’t really transfer over into wine. 

GH: Not sure why. I’ve always been very sensitive to music and it’s affected me emotionally quite a bit and that affects me physically.  

TG: What kind of music? 

GH: All kinds but I particularly love classical and even reggae. I love syncopation.

TG: When you say classical, what kinds of classical music?

GH: Primarily French horn and cello. I love piano too and those are certain frequencies (sings a pitch). Things that vibrate at a middle base line frequency as opposed to more of a base frequency are less interesting to me.  

TG: Just curious, are there other things in your life where these frequency and shape things come into play? I’m not sure what that would be but do different people have different frequencies for you? 

GH: Frequencies definitely enter the picture around certain situations. 

TG: Does it have to do with stress? 

GH: Probably, but it also has to do with real happiness. So for instance my favorite time of the day is right before sunset and that is a shape that is incredibly amorphous and really generous and flowing. 

TG: Is there a sound or pitch that goes with that? 

GH: It sounds almost like a harp. It’s extremely gentle and sounds of water too.

TG: Really interesting. You’re very much a synesthete when it comes to tasting in that you bring in other senses to the tasting experience that don’t usually come into play. I think that pitch really help you calibrate things. If something in a wine is off then the pitch of the wine is probably off for you too. So if it’s not quite right it probably bugs the hell out of you.

GH: True.

TG: But as for shapes and pitches in tasting, not many people do that. For most of us, especially those of us trained in the MS program, tasting is very visual and locational. A lot of it has to do with pictures. 

GH: It’s funny because I’m not very good at memorization of specific wines like “X” producer from 1982. But I can remember the shape of the wine. Like I can also pretty much remember any face or voice I hear but I may not be able to remember a name.

TG: What parts of you strategy do you try to teach people? Do you try to get them to hear different pitches with different kinds of wines? 

GH: I encourage them to consider that there are other modes of communicating about wine which is arguably the area that trips people up the most. They can feel they’re not establishing a connection around what they’re supposed to be tasting with people. Or they can feel inferior in some way because they don’t have the language expected of them. I’m really trying to encourage people to consider that there are other modes of communication than words to discuss wine. 

TG: That’s great. I want to try one more thing if only to be a pain. I want you to smell and taste the wine and as you’re smelling, what happens if you put a picture of whatever the dominant fruit up there? 

GH: That does happen to me a lot in the beginning of tasting a wine before I’ve had a chance to dissect it. And this was the exact same picture I had when I first tasted the wine—which is like moss and mud.

TG: I was asking about fruit. So how does that happen? 

GH: It smells like moss and mud to me. The natural world of it is a very huge aspect for me as well. It’s really important and I often see landscapes or waterways when I smell and taste.

TG: Just curious, are those landscapes or waterways life size? 

GH: No, they’re very intimate; whether it’s like a river bank or a dried up gravel bed or other things like that. It’s literally like a section of earth or an overturned log or a crushed flowers or what have you. Those are the only visuals I tend to pick up. 

TG: And those are like flashes? 

GH: Right. 

TG: So the overall impression of the wine gives you something like that? 

GH: Yes and sometimes it’s kind of fecund and gross like a tide pool with rotting critters.

TG: One last question: when you teach beginners, what’s the “aha!” moment you want them to have? 

GH: That their voice is relevant. I tell people that they don’t have to describe the wine. What I’m asking them to do and what other people in this community will ask to them to do is to share some sort of connection around what’s in the glass. So they can come up with any kind of entry point in terms of describing it. They can describe wine musically or as a person. They can describe it as an emotion or they can dissect it and totally take it apart. They can describe a wine as the color purple. At some point you have to have a connection to the understanding that language is bringing to two people. What you’re trying to do is to connect over something that isn’t saying anything at all. It’s like when you’re trying to connect over a piece of art. It’s just that with wine you have so many more cues than just visual. You can say a wine reminds you of a piece of velvet because that’s true for you. It’s all about finding a way to connect.

TG: I think a major disconnect for most people is that the wine is visual; that internally the experience and sequence of smelling and tasting have visual aspects to them. At the same time, someone who is a beginner and picks up a glass of wine is really intimidated because we’re using a vocabulary, a language, that’s really intended for another sense—not smelling or tasting. 

GH: I agree. You just can’t expect people to come into a first tasting and start getting a lot of things right away. But your smell memory is yours and if you smell Clorox in a wine or Barbie legs it’s fine. It’s more like you’ve got all these memories logged and you can use them with wine. 

Daniel Tammet is a remarkable man. The London born 34-year-old Tammet is both autistic and a savant. In his book, “Born on a Blue Day,” he describes his struggles with autism as a child and young adult; how through sheer force of will, the help of his family, and a multitude of others, he was able to acquire the skills to be able to function in the adult world--an extraordinary feat. But what is equally arresting about Daniel is his incredible memory for numbers; he can recite the number pi past 22,000 digits as well as multiply and divide enormous sums in his head with the accuracy and speed of a computer. There’s more. To Daniel, numbers such as arithmetic problems or days of the week are experienced as different shapes, colors, and movements—hence the title of his book. This phenomena is called “synesthesia,” a term often defined as a neurological condition where stimulating one of the senses results in an automatic, involuntary response/experience with a second sense. Tammet describes synesthesia as “cross-talk” between the senses. He and others like him are called “synesthetes.”  

Over 60 kinds of synesthesia have been documented. Some of the more common forms include grapheme, or color synesthesia, where letters or numbers are perceived as colors; ordinal linquistic personification, where numbers, days of the week, and months of the year are experienced as personalities; and spatial-sequence, or number form synesthesia, where numbers, months of the year, and/or days of the week are experienced as specific and very precise locations in space. 

In thinking about Tammet, it’s tempting to put forth the idea that everyone experiences synesthesia from time to time given that our inner senses are so interdependent. Any strong memory--be it pleasant or not—is a complex package of intensely interconnected images, sounds, and feelings. But true neurological synesthesia is always involuntary thus differentiating individuals who experience it from the rest of us.

In regards to tasting and synesthesia, I’ve learned that most of the colleagues I’ve worked with in my tasting project are like me. We’re visual-dominant in our thinking and represent our internal experience of wine primarily with images in any number of different ways. However, over the last year I noticed several outliers among colleagues I’ve interviewed; professionals who taste at a world-class level but whose inner processing of the wine experience is so far outside the norm that their tasting strategies are challenging to deconstruct and code. To these few, the wine experience is not so much about using images associated with memories of aromatics and flavors, but instead experiencing wine as a flow, shape, colors, texture, and sounds often projected outward from their body. These tasters are synesthetes, the true instinctual tasters. Here are three of them.

Sur Lucero, MS

Sur Lucero, MS, describes himself as an instinctual taster who learned how to work with the MS tasting grid only after many long months of hard work in order to pass the Master’s tasting exam in the summer of 2012. Sur is also one of 16 individuals to ever receive the Remi Krug Cup for passing all three parts of the exam on his first attempt. Lucero told me that he’s never relied on the aromatic and taste profiles that most students use, but more from the “picture” of a wine in terms of how it interact texturally on his palate. 

“I visualize how the wine feels on my palate,” he says; “whether it feels flat, lifted, vibrant, tense, or youthful.” When asked for an example he mentioned New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc describing it as an “intense wine with lots of energy and crisp angularity to it with shades of green, yellow, and platinum.”  I asked if he saw shapes; he replied that he doesn’t necessarily see shapes, but does see colors and movement in what he described as a linear fashion out in front of him. “They move and they’re not just in one dimension. They expand on an X and a Y axis.” Further, he went on to say that the shape of a wine is largely determined by the structure. To Sur, the “intensity, the sharpness, and austerity” of a wine will create more lift on the Y axis as opposed to a wine that’s richer, fuller, and fatter which be more expansive and broader on the X axis.  

I wanted to know how he was able to assess the quality of the fruit or age of a wine. He answered by saying, “The colors are generally based on the ripeness of the fruit. Leaner, tauter wines are going to have lighter shades of color. A New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc is a pretty intense, almost electric green. For Chablis, it’s a very pale cream straw; almost transparent.” Further, “I get the aromatic properties in terms of the fruit composition generally from the shades of colors that I see moving within the X and Y axes. Again, I don’t necessarily see cherries or blueberries or other specific fruits, I see shades of colors on the X and Y axes. But I don’t really think of the X and y axes as being present in this picture, I just see the shapes of the colors and how they move; the richer wines have more volume and the leaner wines have more height.” I asked him where a shape comes from and he replied with the following: “It comes from my chest and my head. Whenever I smell something I can feel it coming from here (motioning from his chest up to his face), definitely the upper part of my body.” 

Gilian Handelman

Gilian Handelman is director of education for Kendall-Jackson. She’s long known that she doesn’t process wine the same way that most people do. During our session, I asked her how she was able to recognize a specific fruit vs. another. She replied by saying, “I guess it’s just an instantaneous reaction in my brain. There’s this thought that I’ve catalogued all these smells, and there’s a synapse that’s telling me this is dark fruit. It’s almost like electricity. Once I make those quick decisions, say that it’s in the black fruit world, I’m asking if it’s fresh black fruit or prunes or whatever.” 

While saying the previous, she was motioning with her hands out in front of her face. I asked her if her hand movements corresponded to images of the aromatics she was smelling in the wine. She replied saying, “No, I think they are lines or shapes that connect in my brain leading me to one framework or another. I haven’t really articulated this before, but for me it’s sort of a family tree or a logarithm, almost like electricity.” As for the shapes, she said that the quality of the fruit and structure of a wine had a lot to do with determining the kind of shape.  She described her experience of the RDV Cabernet from Virginia we were tasting as: 

“It’s like a big rubber casing that’s filled and things are shooting out the end of the casing making the rubber stretch … then in the back there’s this kind of roller coaster and other stuff stretching through the casing. But there’s also like a cascade of what’s going on.  There’s tannin and acid, and it (cascade shape) goes up (she motioned with her hands) coming back down and then goes up again.”

When I asked her if the shapes were consistent within a single grape variety she responded by saying, “It’s not that clear cut for me. It’s more like thought flowing into shape. So round, black fruit that’s kind of stewed like in this wine is amorphous. In fact, all the fruits I smell will go into those kind of roles. Maybe that’s what it’s like for me, a channel of shape and sound. So (speaking in a high voice) this is a tiny channel that is bristly, high-noted and cleaver-shaped. Then (speaking in a much lower voice) this amorphous pool of a shape.” 

Gilian also experiences different sounds with different styles of wines. For her, a rich, round wine like the Cabernet we were tasting sounded like “gloop, gloop, gloop” vs. a lighter-bodied, high-acid wine like German Riesling, which would sound more like water lapping on the edge of a lake or pond. She describes it with the sound, “fffft, ffft, ffft.” She further said, “I see and hear music a lot when I taste. For me, wine we’re tasting is more like a basso sound (hums) vs. a higher sound.”

I asked her where a shape would come from and she replied, “It comes from my whole body. It’s really a three-dimensional model of my palate.” She went on to say that the shapes are outlines and some, but not all, have color to them.  

Gilian has illustrated many of the shapes for different grapes and they can be found at the KJ website: http://www.kj.com/sensory-tour

Here are some examples: 

Roland Micu, MS

Like Gilian Handelman, Roland Micu, MS, has always known that the way he tastes wine is different from everyone else. As soon as we started his interview Roland said, “I smell the wine and then there’s this so-called shape or texture. Maybe it’s a type of synesthesia because if you hear a note on a keyboard, it’s going to have a kind of impact. All the notes are going to have different impacts. So the shapes or textures remind me of that.” 

I asked him if the different components in a wine like a specific fruit had different shapes. He responded yes and then described the dark plum note in the Merlot blend we were tasting as having a round shape that was black in color. But his experience of the shape was more complex in that it had texture as if he were biting into the actual fruit. He went on to say that “different fruits have different textures. Raspberry is going have more angularity and be mushier. A dark cherry will be more focused and a dark plum more broad.”

I asked if images were involved in his perception of the different aromatics. He said yes but that the shapes were the initial sensation before an image of something would appear. Further, he said that the two were almost simultaneous as the process unfolds rapidly when he smells a glass of wine. He went on to describe the Merlot blend we were tasting with the following: “To me this wine is like a level. There are no sharp angles and texturally nothing shoots out. It’s not like a contact lens but more like squished elliptical shape and the edges are round.” 

I asked him where the shapes come from and he said, “It’s a feeling and it comes out of me (pointing to his chest) then moves up through my chest and out through my eyes so I can see it and translate it.” In terms of assessing the kind and quality of the fruit, he said that “the shape is being formed and all these fruits are being assessed at the same time.” 

Roland described any changes in the wine from the nose to the palate with the following: “I think with the nose its two dimensional, but when it gets to the palate it becomes three dimensional. It also might be more blocky or pixilated. But it’s three dimensional as opposed to the nose where it’s an image of a cherry or whatever.” As for assessing the structure in the wine we were tasting during the session, Roland used the shape to calibrate the amount of alcohol, acid, and tannin. “I don’t base structure on texture, but I’ve done some research and found that the elliptical shape in this wine typically is related to higher alcohol, riper fruit, new oak (usually barrique), and minimal minerality.”

Take Aways

Ultimately, the purpose of my tasting project is to model best practices by deconstructing the internal strategies used by top tasters. The end goal is to take the best strategies and be able to teach them to anyone interested in learning about wine. With that, the question of what can be taken from the strategies of Gilian, Roland, and Sur arises. At this point I’m not convinced their strategies can be easily taught. Perhaps what we can gain from them is the idea of using colors, sounds, and shapes to more intimately and personally calibrate the different aromatic and structural properties in wine. More than that, working with tasters like Sur, Gilian, and Roland makes me think about how complex and miraculous the human mind is. And though we share common “hardware” in the form of our brain and nervous system, how different we all are and how important it is that we celebrate these differences and learn from each other—on a blue day or any other.

It’s holiday time again and that means we’re about to careen smack into the new year with little, if any, semblance of control. But before then, we’ll have to navigate the perilous tinsel-filled waters of office parties, dysfunctional family gatherings, crowds, traffic, and general holiday mayhem. Fear not! What follows is sage gift giving advice that will hopefully allay the madness and make your holiday shopping easier. But first, some sage advice for overall gift giving:

Rule # 1: if all else fails, give a bottle of bubbly. Champagne, sparkling wine, Prosecco, and Cava are like a quartet of sparkling seasonal elves whose only purpose is to make your gift list shorter. Prosecco, the DOCG variety and not the mass-produced dreck, is a personal favorite because of the deliciousness-to-value ratio. Beyond that, for the boss or the target of your future affection, a bottle of grower-producer Champagne fits the bill perfectly. Pierre Peters and Egly-Ouriet are personal favorites.   

Rule #2: Give yourself a gift. Before everyone and everything gets completely out of control, remember to get yourself something. A great bottle of restorative spirits is just the prescription needed, whether it be a top shelf Cognac, Malt Whisky, or Rum. Italian Amaros are my personal favorite and aside from the ever-restorative bottle of Fernet Branca always on my shelf, I heartily recommend Braulio. It originates from the Valtelinna region in Northern Italy and is both overtly herbal and bittersweet. An ounce or two (or three …) is guaranteed to help guide your nimble fingers over the keyboard as your order away online. Remember: avoid brick and mortar if at all possible.

Rule #3: Get a book! A good book is one of the best gifts to give and receive. Here’s a dozen I’ve read over the last year. All are entertaining, informative, and highly recommended. 

 Wine Grapes, by Jancis Robinson, Julia Harding, Jose Vouillamoz

The one and only time I met Jancis Robinson was several years ago at a memorial dinner held for the late Robert Mondavi at the artist formerly known as COPIA. I was a member of the sommelier team and met Jancis just as she was leaving at the end of the evening. I only had time to say hello and ask when she would release an update of her book, “Vines, Grapes & Wines,” published in the early ‘90s. She looked at me as if she suddenly had a strong urge to tase me. In fact, if there would have been a taser app for the iPhone at the time, I’m sure she would have made quick use of it. Instead, she smiled tightly and said that something would be coming out “in a couple of years.” Fast forward to last year and her new amazing tome, Wine Grapes. Weighing in at a hefty six-plus pounds and over 1,400 pages, it could be the most profound book on wine ever written—and sure to satisfy any and all wine geeks on your gift list. Suggestion: given the heft and lack of portability of the book, you might consider a gift download for your lucky recipient.  

One Summer: America, 1927, by Bill Bryson

I’m a huge Bill Bryson fan and his new effort doesn’t disappoint. In One Summer, Bryson spins his narrative magic describing in detail the months that made up the summer of 1927, a short period time crammed with remarkable characters and events including the likes of Lindberg crossing the Atlantic, the Sacco-Vinzetti trial, the secret origins of the Great Depression, Al Capone, Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, Charles Ponzi, Herbert Hoover, and much, much more. After reading it, I’m once again struck at how much there is to learn about American history. 

Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard P. Feynman

Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman was one of the most brilliant scientists of the 20th century. For better or worse, Feynman was an instrumental part of the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb ending World War II and ushering in both the Cold War and the atomic age. Aside from his work in physics, Feynman was also an outstanding teacher/lecturer at Cal Tech and he penned multiple books comprised of his thoughts on everything from explaining the basics of science to gambling in Las Vegas to working on physics problems while sitting in strip clubs. Surely You’re Joking, is one of Feynman’s best and most entertaining volumes.  

Everything’s Coming Up Profits: The Golden Age of Musicals, by Steve Young & Sport Murphy

This book is to be filed under the category of strange, wacky, and delightful--as in an entire musical genre you’ve probably never heard of.  While great musicals such as “My Fair Lady,” “Oklahoma,” and “Carousel” are widely known (even if not nearly as popular as they once were), for several decades running the same talents—literally from writers to performers—crafted hundreds of stage musicals for the big corporations of their day; from John Deer Tractors to the Ford Motor Company to the Maiden Form Bra.  That’s right, full-blown staged musicals with casts, plots (sort of), bands, and full scores, where stars of the stage (and sometimes screen) belted out tunes about the beauties of selling the newest, shiniest tractor, pickup, or bra.  Steve Young, long-time writer for the David Letterman show, and industrial musical vet Sport Murphy, chronicle the history of the industrial musical through the decades. Everything’s Coming Up Profits is a perfect coffee table book filled with delightful period illustrations and photos.  

​Is there a connection between music and wine? I’m often asked that question and probably more than qualified to answer it, as I have two degrees in music; a BA in music history and an MM in classical trumpet. The easy answer is yes, there is a connection between music and wine due to the multitude of parallels between the two fields. Both have remarkable depth in terms of history, culture, sociology, philosophy, and more. But for me, the most important connection between music and wine for me is how they make us think; how intensive training in either or both can create complex and refined patterns of thought not necessarily acquired in other fields.

I started playing the trumpet in 4th grade. A few years later, my first job in the restaurant business, bussing tables and washing dishes in a pancake house from 6:00 PM to 4:00 AM on weekends, helped pay for my first professional trumpet. I played in concert bands, jazz bands, marching bands, (true!), and orchestras throughout high school into my undergraduate days at the University of New Mexico to graduate school at the University of Michigan. After grad school, Carla and I moved to San Francisco where I played with various Bay Area orchestras and chamber groups as well as with the San Francisco Opera Orchestra as an extra for the better part of four years. However, eventually the restaurant business and impending parenthood took over. But music has remained a vital part of my career and life and thus I can easily draw on my experience to answer the music-wine question. Further, there are more than a few things from my musical training that have mapped over to my wine career. In fact, I wouldn't hesitate to say that I would never have passed the Master Sommelier examination without my musical training.  Here’s why. 

I. Shutting the World Out

Playing a musical instrument (or singing) professionally requires immense focus. One’s success ultimately depends on being able to shut the world out and concentrate singularly on practicing and/or performing along with the playing of other musicians if an ensemble is involved. Tasting at a high level of proficiency also requires great focus and the ability to shut the world out in order to decipher what’s the in glass. I would argue that both are refined trance states in a manner of speaking. 
 
II. Game Day Skills

Game day skills means the ability to bring one’s best game exactly when needed. I’ve written about it several times previously in this blog. The Master's Exam is a series of three very specialized auditions. I’m convinced that I would never have passed if it wasn’t for the trumpet auditions I took from junior high all the way to my years as a professional. As tough as the MS exam was, it wasn’t nearly as intimidating as some of the auditions I took as a professional. In one of those auditions, it was me alone on the stage of a huge empty concert hall in front of an audition jury I couldn’t see with a music stand filled with a long list of the of most difficult excerpts in the repertoire. Audition protocol requires that you start playing at the beginning of the list and when you make a mistake a voice from someone unseen in the jury calls out, “again!” Then you resume playing until you make three or four mistakes at which point the unseen voice says, “Thank you!”  With those two dreaded words you're done and months and countless hours of practice are gone with no reward other than the fact you took the audition and have the experience. Want pressure? That’s pressure.

III. Unconscious Competence and Mastery

Competence as in unconscious competence of a given skill with the ultimate goal of mastery. This is the scale of competence that begins with unconscious incompetence (I’m completely oblivious to the fact that I’m a really horrible dancer), conscious incompetence (Wow! I really suck at dancing), conscious competence (I can dance OK but I really have to work at it), and finally, unconscious competence (Wow, he/she’s an amazing dancer and they make it look so easy). Music and wine are both fields where this scale definitely applies. With the trumpet, it’s all about breathing; specifically the cycle of inhalation, exhalation, and the release of a note—a cycle that has to practiced literally thousands of times to become consistent under the duress of an audition or performance. With wine, one smells and tastes in order to translate a myriad of aromas and flavors in the glass in order to connect sensory impressions to a specific grape, style, place, and even a single harvest. This too requires repetition in the form of thousands of times to gain unconscious competence and with the ultimate goal of mastery.

IV. Heightened Sensory Acuity and an Expanded Field of Awareness

This is perhaps the most important connection of all; how music and wine affect the way we think. A musician in a professional orchestra is required to have remarkable sensory acuity. I remember performing the Verdi Requiem in an orchestra of over a hundred musicians with several vocal soloists out in front of the orchestra, a chorus of over 200 singers directly behind me, and a dozen off-stage brass players positioned hundreds of feet from the orchestra up in the balcony of the hall. From moment to moment, I had to be aware of everything going on around me including my own part, watching the conductor, and listening to the other people in my section, as well as all the various instruments and singers around me. Every instant I had to adjust the volume, intonation, and timbre of my sound while playing my part in tune and in time with the rest of the trumpet section, much less the rest of the orchestra. I really can’t tell you how I did this--or how any musician does it for that matter. But I can tell you that performing at a high level requires one to keep an enormous number of things in their field of awareness either simultaneously or in rapid sequence.

Tasting is much the same. In the work I’ve done over the last several years modeling the tasting strategies of MS and MW colleagues, I’ve noticed one major pattern: tasting is a visual experience internally for most people and top tasters have unique and intricate ways of visually organizing all the information in a glass of wine. Like the musician, a professional taster can keep a great number of aromas and flavors as well as structural components from a given wine in their field of awareness either simultaneously or in rapid sequence.

V. Heightened Sensory Calibration 

I’ve written many times previously of how sight is our dominant internal sense; how most of the human race thinks in pictures and movies. The accomplished musician goes one more by elevating their internal auditory sense to the level of internal sight. A trained, experienced musician calibrates pitch, volume, and timbre with as much precision as a visual artist does color, contrast, shade, and more. Likewise, a professional taster elevates the olfactory and gustatory senses by calibrating the qualities of aromatics (fresh vs. dried vs. cooked vs. stewed fruit) as well the structural components in wine including acidity, alcohol, and tannin. I’ve heard many musicians describe their experience of music and/or playing as three dimensional; I’ve heard many tasters describe their internal experience of wine as three dimensional as well--no great surprise.

VI. Importance of Theory and Accumulated Experience 

It may sound lofty, but as a trumpet player sitting in the back of an orchestra I had to know the difference between playing fortissimo (loud) in a Mozart symphony vs. playing fortissimo in a Mahler symphony. Both are completely different even though they are marked identically on the page. In Mozart, the trumpet never plays above mezzo forte (medium-loud) even when the part is marked fortissimo because of the acoustical properties of the instruments that Mozart wrote for in his time. The trumpet Mahler wrote for at the end of the 19th century is almost identical to the instrument of today; it can easily bury an entire orchestra all by itself as far as volume. No surprise that he (Mahler) took full advantage of what the trumpet could do and wrote some of the greatest literature for the instrument in his nine symphonies. And when Mahler wrote fortissimo for the trumpet, he intended for the performer to play LOUD--but always maintaining a good sound.

In wine theory is also always key. In blind tasting it’s almost impossible for one to get to a conclusion such as “Spain, Tempranillo, Rioja Gran Reserva” without knowing that a classic style of Tempranillo from Spain comes from Rioja region and that the Rioja appellation has a quality hierarchy in which Gran Reserva is the highest designation (Not to mention that one can’t even get to Rioja without knowing all the markers for the Tempranillo grape).  
 
Final Thoughts

There are other many other parallels between music and wine but I will leave you with these last few: music and wine can both create great passion and drive on the part of the student for the very subject being studied. In fact, they should do just that. Both also require a willingness on the part of the student to spend a great deal of time practicing alone to improve personal skills which include the repetition of tedious and often boring things. Finally, music and wine are two fields involving a high degree of aesthetics and beauty; in many ways they are two of the greatest things Western civilization has ever produced. Music, wine and life—it’s not a bad combination.

​Last year as a part of my tasting project, I did a session with dear friend and fellow Master Emily Wines. Emily is the current Senior Director of Beverage for Kimpton Hotels and Restaurants in the U.S. She’s had an outstanding career in the wine industry having worked at top level restaurants in San Francisco such as Jardinierre, Elka, and Foreign Cinema. In 2000 she joined the Fifth Floor restaurant as assistant sommelier under Raj Parr. In 2005 she took over the Wine Director position for the restaurant and during her tenure the Fifth Floor list won a Grand Award from Wine Spectator as well as being nominated for the Outstanding Wine Service award by the James Beard Foundation.  

In 2008, Emily became one of only 149 people in the U.S. to ever pass the Master Sommelier diploma examination—and one of only 24 women. She was also awarded the prestigious Remi Krug Cup for passing all three sections of the exam on her first attempt, one of two women to ever achieve this remarkable distinction.  

We did the tasting session at her office in San Francisco. The wine used for the tasting was the 2009 Double Bond Pinot Noir from the Wolf Vineyard in Edna Valley. Riedel Wine Series Chianti Classico/Sangiovese glasses were used for the tasting. During the session, I spent the better part of two hours standing next to Emily observing her tasting. In particular, I paid close attention to her eye movements and language patterns, looking for clues as to how she processed all the information in the glass. My intent was to deconstruct her strategies, literally how she thinks about tasting, in the form of processing and organizing aromatics, flavors and structural components. In the end, we managed to map out the exact sequence of what she does internally when she tastes. The results, to say the least, are remarkable in that they provide a glimpse into the thinking and strategies of a top taster. Read on and enjoy!

Overall Goals and Beliefs about Wine 

TG: What are your overall goals when you taste? What are you trying to accomplish?

EW: I’m trying to find out if the wine is, what it should be, and if it’s OK and not flawed. If it’s too wacked I don’t even bother to go further and taste it. I’m also checking for flaws to make sure it’s not too over the top. I’m also looking for varietal correctness and the “deliciousness factor,” or something that makes me want to taste more. Even if it’s an over the top Cabernet, is there something about the wine that would make me want to taste more.

TG: What does “deliciousness” mean? 

EW: Does the wine have good balance and good structure? Does the wine have something intriguing about it that makes me want to taste more? The intriguing part could be, if it’s an over the top Chardonnay that’s all about oak and butter, does it taste like delicious caramel popcorn, tropical fruit, and butterscotch? Or is it just so heavy in the mouth and there’s really nothing else there. The opposite would be something really understated which also can be a problem if there’s not much there to begin with. A lot of people are now making an un-oaked or restrained style of Chardonnay and there’s really not much there.

TG: Do you have other goals for tasting if it’s a wine you’re considering for a restaurant list?

EW: I’m checking for varietal or regional correctness. I’m also asking if it’s appropriately priced. Does the wine taste like it should for the money or does it over-deliver? Ideally it should over-deliver.

TG: What are your goals as a taster? 

EW: To narrow down and get an impression from the wine. At the very least, I want to come away with an impression from a wine. I’d like to have more stamina as a taster, to be able to get through more wines. Once I get beyond 50 wines my palate isn’t as fresh. But there’s not something specific that I try to do every time I sit down and taste. I’m trying to find something new that sticks or that makes an impression; I think blind tasting is like a language, so I’m looking for something that I can add to my language of senses.  
 
TG: What is your evidence for a good tasting?  What do you need? (Glassware, context, lighting, etc.)

EW: I need good light, bright enough light that I can really see the wine; it needs to be quiet. With a professional tasting, it’s really easy to blow through a ton of wines and not pay attention. I taste wine in batches so I can go back and compare if I need to. I think comparing is important because a wine can sometimes be affected by what comes before it. I also almost always taste wines at room temperature because any flaws in the wine will really show. It’s the most honest way to look at wine.

TG: What are your beliefs about tasting; about your own tasting?

EW: I think that I have a pretty unbiased palate; some people’s palates are more skewed to luxury wines vs. other people’s palates which can be more naïve. I’ve tasted so long as a buyer that I do tend to have that perspective. One of the things I have to do is find wines under $5 and that’s hard. But I don’t really think I’m a great blind taster; it’s something that I worked really hard at and focus on. It’s not something that’s inherently easy for me. Some people have really great palate memory and the ability to taste things and textures that I don’t get. But I can taste at a really high level. In the scheme of blind tasters out there, it’s not a talent that came easy to me but it’s something that I’m good at doing. I think I’m good at processing information quickly and categorizing it in my mind; visualizing through things. I learned pretty early on that I’m a visual learner with my tasting. 

TG: What about the other parts of the exam?

EW: Service was easy for me because it’s what I did all the time. Theory was manageable because it was about taking all the information and making a system for memorizing the information. To memorize theory I made up a lot of acronyms. But then I also did what I’ve come learn as making memory palaces; taking names or places that didn’t really have any connection for me and then create a word association picture with it. 

TG: What are your overall beliefs about wine? 

EW: Wine is pleasurable, it’s enjoyable and it’s often social. It’s an artisanal thing but it’s also an industrial product; there’s a balance there and it doesn’t mean that one is necessarily better than the other.

TG: How is wine valuable to you, both personally and professionally? 
 
EW: It’s a living, creative thing. Fine wine is like artwork that’s in a bottle and you don’t get to appreciate that artwork until you consume it. If you go to a big trade event like the Aspen Food and Wine Festival, watch the people with wine vs. spirits. There’s something about the way that people think about wine—they savor it.  Most people take their time and get drawn into it. You don’t see that often with beer and spirits.  

Sight

TG: What are you trying to learn/accomplish when looking at a glass of wine?  

EW: I’m looking for quality. There are times when I’m looking at a Pinot Noir, for instance, and it’s purple. Then something’s wacky or not varietally correct because there could be something blended in like Syrah. So it’s not honest wine and they’re (winemaker) changing the wine from something that it should be.

TG: As you look at the color, how do you know if it’s varietally correct? How do you know that it’s the right color vs. other similar wines you’ve had in the past? 

EW: I can compare it to similar wines I’ve had before; I have experience with what those wines should look like. I’m picturing the range of colors for red wine starting on the left with pale colors for a delicate young red moving across and to the right as they get more intense in color (Emily motions 12-15” in front of her, starting to her left at eye level, then going left to right ending just to the right of her face. The more intense the color, the farther right and closer to her face the color is. If it’s too intense for her it’s literally right in her face).

TG: What about wines that have age? 

EW: If the wines are more orange in color with age, then it moves off to the right and farther away.  
 
TG: So there are two color spectrums? One for age and one for intensity of color? Do they start together and then branch out separately? 
 
EW: Yes and yes. 

TG: Do you do this with all wines? What about a white wine like Chardonnay? 

EW: Yes, if it’s really yellow, it’s right here close to me. If it’s a younger wine with more green, it’s over here (to her left). If it’s golden and oxidized, then it’s over here off to the right and further back. 

TG: Do you literally take a look at the color of a wine and then compare it to the scales? 

EW: Yes.

TG: What shape are these color scales?

EW: It’s like a strip.                                              
 
TG: Do the colors change in a continuum or are they separate?

EW: It’s like a continuum or series of pantone paint swatches lined up.

TG: Are the different colors segmented? 

EW: They are segmented but it’s very subtle. Like tick marks, like paint strips with very thin lines. 

TG: How does it work? Do you look at the color of the wine and then match it? Does the scale move? Something else move? 

EW: The scale is fixed. I look at the wine and then compare it to the scale.  
 
TG: How do you know you have it or have accomplished it? 
 
EW: It happens pretty quickly for me. After I match the wine to the color on the scale I’m pretty much done. 

TG: How do you actually observe wine? 

EW: When I look at a glass of wine, I almost always tip it away from me and roll the glass in my fingers. At the same time I’m looking at the color, I’m also watching the viscosity and the staining because the wine is moving and reflecting light. I’m also looking down at the core and then at the rim for sediment for brightness and for clarity. All that’s happening pretty much at once.  

Tasting: Nose

TG: What are you trying to learn and/or accomplish when smelling a wine? 
 
EW: The grid is a pretty important framework to hang things on. My primary goal is to get a first impression. I believe that whatever that first impression is, is really important. If I’m starting to veer off, I go back to that first impression because it’s something that can’t be ignored. The first impression can be a flaw or cherries or violets or smoke like a campfire. I ask, what can that be? Sometimes it can be really obvious like Shiraz. Sometimes not.

TG: When you say it’s obvious like the Shiraz, it’s because ...

EW: It’s because all those clues are lined up.

TG: What are the clues? 

EW: I’ve already looked at it so the color’s there. Then there’s an almost painful intensity with blue-black fruit, tar, mint, and eucalyptus, herby, and exotic--all those things. 

TG: Are there any other goals in smelling the wine? 
 
EW: Once I get that primary or first impression, I usually don’t say it out loud; but if I’m blind tasting but hold it and then I try to go through the wine and find the fruit, earth, and wood.

TG: Do you use the MS tasting grid? 

EW: Yes, it’s huge and in black and white right in front of me (about 5 feet away, 2D, rectangular about chest height). It looks like an Excel document and has the all information from the grid on it. The first thing I do when approaching a wine is to get a first impression, to let the wine come to me. I stop and smell the wine. It’s more of a visceral experience and I try to get an idea of what’s the very first impression. But I’m not trying to make any decisions. I just want to be with the wine because sometimes I think we do so much work with the grid that we miss out on things. You can miss the soul of the wine.  
 
TG: What does soul of the wine mean to you? 

EW: It’s the part of the wine that speaks to me. 
 
TG: So soul and first impression are the same thing? 
 
EW: Yes. 

TG: Let’s find out how you smell wine. 

EW: I smell wine twice. I first pick up the glass not disturbing it too much and take the most delicate gentle sniff and let the wine come in. To me, it’s a whole different range of smells. Then I give it a swirl and smell again.  

TG: What are you looking for in that first go round? 
 
EW: The very delicate, sort of volatile aromas that disappear when you swirl the glass. Things like floral, volatile acidity, and perfume. Sometimes it’s hard to pull things out of a wine; but when you pick up the glass like that you can get some delicate subtle aromas. 
 
TG: Show me how you smell the wine. (Emily rests the glass under her nose on her upper lip.  She holds the glass at about a 35 degree angle, head slightly down, torso very slightly down as well). When you first pick up a glass to smell the wine where do your eyes go? 

EW: Straight out ahead and very slightly down. 
 
TG: What’s happening then? Do you think about the grid? 
 
EW: No. 

TG: What’s going on?  
 
EW: I smell roses and cherries. It’s almost like Tarot cards on a table.  

TG: Cards? How do the cards appear? Where do they come from? So you smell something, ID it as “cherry,” and then what happens? 

EW: It’s almost like there’s a table in front of me and there are cards on the table that have things in the wine on them. 
 
TG: Where do the cards from?  
 
EW: I take them out of my back pocket.  

TG: When you take the card out of your pocket do you look at it and ID it as “cherries?”

EW: Yes.

TG: So when you smell something you and ID it, how do you know it’s a “cherry” and not something else? This is even before it becomes a card. 

EW: I’m picturing big, luscious, almost stewed cherries right here (points chin level to the right about six inches away). There’s a cluster of cherries, they’re really ripe and almost soppy.  

TG: What does the image look like? 

EW: It’s a cluster of cherries in 3D with realistic bright colors and texture. 

TG: What happens to the cherries once you see them and ID them? 
 
EW: I set them aside and they become an image on a card that goes on the table. With the first impression whatever it is, the card is larger and I keep it on the table right in front of me.

TG: So you smell and then confirm with an image of the fruit or whatever; then the image becomes a 2D Tarot like card on the table in front of you.  
 
EW: Yes.  
 
TG: What’s the table like? 

EW: It’s a dark wood conference-like table. When I taste, the table is my whole world. I can’t see the other side. I’m in my own little bubble just putting these cards out in front of me. It’s funny because I’ve never even done Tarot cards before. But that’s exactly how I picture it.

TG: What else did you smell besides the cherries?  

EW: Roses (she points to almost the same place where the image of cherries was) and they’re almost to the point of almost being tossed out.  

TG: Just curious, where are the cherries now?  
 
EW: They’re both together but the roses are closer to me. They’re the same color as the cherries (deep but almost faded Burgundy).  
 
TG: What happens to the roses then? 

EW: They become a card and go on the table.

TG: How big are the cards on the table? 

EW: About the same size as playing cards, although the primary, first impression card is larger and it’s right in front of me. The others not so close, so I’m always having to refer back to them. If there’s an important clue about a wine, the card could become bigger and closer to me. If I’m looking at a white wine that’s copper colored, then it’s an important clue and it would be a bigger card. It’s almost as if the sight’s here, the nose is here, and palate’s here (she motions in front of her left to right, table level, sight to the left, nose directly in front and palate to the right).  

TG: With all these cards, are there different places for fruit vs. earth vs. wood?  
 
EW: Not at all. It’s more about what are the most important clues. The more important they, are the closer they are to me.  
 
TG: This is a pretty cool system. How do you use the grid with it?  The grid that you showed me a few minutes ago was right out in front of you about chest-high and was like an Excel grid with all the information on it. 

EW: Yes, it’s right here (motions out in front of her about two feet), and I’m going through it checking off things that might be in the wine.  
 
TG: What happens there? You’re seeing something that might be on the grid and then what? 
 
EW: Rather than checking something off, it becomes a visual clue.

TG: So you’re going down the grid checking things off and then an image is generated? 
 
EW: I’m looking at the section of the grid on wood and now images of oak aromas are coming up; then they become cards and go down here (points to the “table”).

TG: It also seems like the images of wood are slightly to the right of center.

EW: Yes. 

TG: For this wine, what representation of wood do you see? 
 
EW: I’m looking for sweet things like in ice cream or baking spices like clove. Or maybe there’s a subtle textural thing.  
 
TG: Are you pulling something out of the glass and then comparing to something you’ve smell before, or do you see all of those things first and then choose? 
 
EW: It’s a scale just like the colors; from gently oxidative all the way to screaming oak.

TG: What does that scale look like? Is it colors? Images? 
 
EW: I guess it’s kind of images. For gently oxidative I think of dried apples.  
 
TG: Where is that? (Points over to the left about 2-3 feet from center) What’s over on this end? 

EW: On this end, it’s my primary impression and I almost can’t shake it. The scale starts here (motions in front about two feet left of center) and goes over here (scale ends really close to the right side of her face).  
 
TG: What’s over here next to your face? 

EW: It’s something very sweet like vanilla and sweet spices. It’s not necessarily images, but something really sweet like you’re walking through the cologne department of a store and people are spraying things on you. While over here I really have to reach for it. 
 
TG: That’s great, but again I’m trying to get the recipe or sequence for what you do. You put your nose in the glass and smell the wine. Then you have the Excel grid in front of you and have these continuums. Do you use them for everything? Do you use the same thing for earth and mineral? 
 
EW: No, it’s different. With fruit, I have buckets of different kinds of fruit I’m reaching into. Is it red fruit or black fruit, or blue fruit or dried fruit? (Points to different locations out in front of her, eye level, left to right starting with red fruit). 

TG: When you say buckets of fruit, are there literally buckets? 

EW: No, they’re almost like giant fruit bowls with real fruits in them (both 3D). I identify the kind of fruit in the bucket and then ask what quality is the fruit. Is it fresh? Is it dry? Is it sweet? Is it sour? 
 
TG: So you pull the fruit out of the bucket and then look at it to see if it’s dry, fresh, sour etc.? Once you’re done with it, does it becomes a card that goes on the table? If it’s really important, is the card is larger and closer to you? If it’s anything else, is there an arrangement to it?  

EW: Not really, it’s more like the important things are closer to me; the things that are screaming are very close, and that first impression is always the biggest card.

TG: Do the other cards vary in size?
 
EW: No, it’s just in terms of how close or how far they are from me. 

TG: What about earth? What do you do with earth?

EW: With earth, I smell the wine and ask if it’s there and then if it’s organic or not (Eye position is in front and down table top level).  
 
TG: You looked here and here for organic and inorganic. What are you looking at?

EW: It’s almost like there are two buckets; a bucket full of rocks and a bucket full of soil and mushrooms.  
 
TG: What do these buckets look like?

EW: These are more like a bucket with a handle on it.

TG: And the fruit is in a bowl?

EW: Yes, the fruits are in a bowl up here (points to just below eye level out in front), while the buckets for earth and mineral are down here (table or waist level).

TG: So you ID something, define its quality, and then as soon as you’re done with it, it becomes a card on goes on the table.  
 
EW: Especially if it’s important. It might not be that important.

TG: How do you know if it’s important? Better question, how do you know if it’s not important? 
 
EW: Sometimes if it’s a neutral white wine and has citrus, the citrus doesn’t tell me anything. 

TG: Got it. Behind your system there’s a lot of theory and experience to back it up.  

EW: Right. 

TG: I have to ask if you had any idea that you did all this? 
 
EW: I knew I did the Tarot card thing but not the rest of it.  

TG: To summarize: you start by putting your nose in the glass and then you look out in front. It seems like most of your eye positions are right out here in front. Right here (out in front, straight ahead and slightly down), seems like your comfortable starting point. Does that seem right? 

EW: Yes.

TG: From there, you’re looking for the first impression, whatever the strongest aroma is.  If it’s fruit, it’s in the bowls out in front here; if it’s earth, it’s in the buckets here or here. What about herbs and other non-fruit things? Where are they? 

EW: They fall in that same kind of middle tier out here (points directly out front, chest level and left to right).  It’s almost like reaching out to find what else is there.  
 
TG: Where are the herbs? 

EW: The herbs are in bunches. I’m also asking what kind of herbs, as in fresh herbs vs. dried herbs, etc.

TG: So literally right out in front of you, chest level, with herbs left of center in bunches and then going toward center.  
 
EW: Yes. 

TG: To finish your sequence; you put your nose in the glass and then your eyes go out in front and slightly down. If fruit is the first impression, you go with the system of bowls, choose what it is, and then grab it. From there you hold it, look at it, and then assign a quality to it. Finally, that becomes a card that goes on the table. 
 
EW: That’s right.

TG: How do you know when you’re done? 

EW: Because I’ve gone through the entire grid. I’ve got my first impression and then I check off all the boxes on my Excel sheet.  
 
TG: It also seems like that once you ID something, you pull it out and compare it against the grid as well.

EW: Right, I check it against all the boxes.  
 
TG: When you say you check all the boxes, do you actually put marks on the sheet?
 
EW: Yes.

TG: To finish up, let’s talk about submodalities and the image of cherries. What happens if you make the image larger as in really large? Does the intensity of the aromas of the fruit get stronger? Less strong?  
 
EW: If I make it larger it becomes singular, blocking out all other smells.

TG: What happens if you make the image smaller? Stronger intensity or less strong?  

EW: By making the image smaller it’s less intense, almost like it's set aside.

TG: What happens if you push the image far away? Stronger intensity or less strong?  

EW: Much less strong or intense; it’s what has to happen to move on to the next aroma. 

TG: What happens if you make the image of the fruit black and white? Stronger intensity or less strong?  

EW: It becomes much less intense. The color is very much a part of the aroma.

TG: What happens if you make the image 2 D instead of 3 D?  Stronger intensity or less strong?  

EW: Much less strong. This is what I describe when I say the 3D image becomes like a playing card. It is cataloged but set aside.

TG: What happens if you change the location of the image? Say put it way up or way down? Stronger intensity or less strong?

EW: It becomes less strong. It's strongest when it is right in front of my eyes.

TG: In summary, your driver submodalities are size, proximity, color vs. black and white and location. Changing any of those in an image changes the experience and sometimes dramatically.  

Palate

TG: Now you have a really good idea of what the wine is about. What are your goals when actually tasting the wine? What are you trying to
learn/accomplish?

EW: To confirm the checked off things on my Excel sheet next to me, but I’m also going through this physical visceral kind of experience with the wine. 

TG: What does that mean? 
 
EW: Is it mouthwatering? Is it appealing? Is it bitter? Is it even the right temperature?  

TG: We’ll get to the structure in a bit, but in the meantime, what are your goals as a taster in terms of what you’ve tasted vs. the cards on the table? 
 
EW: I’m referring back to the cards on the table, reviewing and asking, does this taste like cherry? Like roses? Now I’m noticing that the fruit is more macerated.

TG: What it seems like you’re doing, is pointing to all the cards on the table from smelling the wine. If there’s something extra, what happens? Is it the same process where you reach for something and then it becomes another card? 
 
EW: No, when I taste I’m looking at the cards and reviewing them. If there’s something new, then it’s almost like it’s right in front of my face.  
 
TG: You mean an image right in front of you? 

EW: Yes, but it’s like a card because I’m not reaching for it. I’ve already done that but I’ve missed whatever the new thing is.  
 
TG: After it pops up where does it go? Is there a specific position for it? 
 
EW: It goes on the table in the palate position to the right. If it’s something subtle, then it will go further away from me. But if it’s something screaming, then it will be closer and I’ll say, "Wow, how did I miss that much tar in the wine?" Or something like noticing that the quality of the fruit is different from what I was smelling.  
 
TG: Do the images on the cards change, or do you get different cards?

EW: If I’m tasting a wine and the fruit is much richer or brighter than it was on the nose, then the image on the card actually gets brighter too. If it’s a wine where I’m reaching for it and can’t I really get anything out of the nose, sometimes I’ll taste something new and it can solidify the wine.

TG: Go ahead and taste the wine. I’m interested in the sequence of where your eyes go. I notice that when you taste your eyes go down here (down and straight ahead). Are you looking at cards?   
 
EW: I’m looking at the other edge of the table. When I taste, my whole world is right out here (motions to the “table”).  
 
TG: Are you looking at anything in particular? 
 
EW: No, just trying to let an impression come to me. 
 
TG: So you look out to the other edge of the table and let the whole process start? 
 
EW: Yes.

TG: Now for structure. How do you know how much acid, alcohol, or tannin is in the wine? How do you quantify those things? Let’s talk about acidity, for instance. 
 
EW: I’m paying attention to how tart the wine is on my tongue, how much I’m salivating—a combination of the two.  
 
TG: Got that. But how do you calibrate just how much acidity is in the wine, as in the difference between medium-plus and high acid? How do you know? 

EW: There’s a scale I see; it’s really small. 
 
TG: So there’s some kind of visual confirmation? You put both hands out in front of you about a foot apart. What does the scale look like? 

EW: It’s a ruler.  

TG: A ruler with gradations? Over here to the left for low and over to the right for high?

EW: Yes.

TG: What color is it? 

EW: It’s yellow and the color for medium to low is almost faded out; the color from medium to high is much deeper and brighter.  

TG: Is there any marker on it that moves so you can calibrate? Or do you just point to a mark on it? 

EW: There’s a motion; I point to it.

TG: What about alcohol? How do you calibrate it? 

EW: Alcohol is more visceral in some way; there’s an intensity to the wine overall. 

TG: How do you measure it? 

EW: There’s the same kind of ruler, only it’s broader because it goes from low to high. It also doesn’t have tick marks on it. There’s almost like a bubble on it like a construction level that shifts. I have to watch it a lot closer because alcohol can be kind of nebulous for me sometimes. 

TG: Is it the same color as the acid ruler? 

EW: No, it’s kind of an aquamarine blue like a swimming pool.

TG: What about tannin? 

EW: Tannin is kind of a wooly thing; it’s a textural thing. It’s almost like a piece of wool that’s stretched out and thin at one end and much thicker and larger at the other. 
 
TG: I also notice that you’re going through the scale with your hand. Is that something you have to feel? 
 
EW: It’s a textural thing: how much it is and the texture.  Is it gritty? Is it silky? Where is it on the scale and how much?

TG: So it’s a combination of the amount and the texture.

EW: Right, as I’m tasting, it’s almost like I’m taking a piece of Brillo pad and rubbing it against my fingers. 

TG: So if it’s a Brillo pad, it’s probably a wine that’s pretty tannic and astringent. What about a wine that’s smooth? 

EW: It’s like wet velvet.

TG: It seems like you have your right arm out in front of you and you’ve moving it from left to right and feeling the texture of the wool.

EW: Right.  
 
TG: What about the finish? How do you calibrate that? 

EW: I like the finish because I get a lot of subtle clues out of it (Her eyes move slightly up and look out over the table).

TG: I noticed that your eyes moved here (points to the location). What’s there? 

EW: I guess it’s almost like I’m trying to taste the wine through my sinuses or something. I’m exhaling the finish.  
 
TG: Like retro-nasal breathing? 

EW: Yes, I’m doing that and asking, “What’s there?”

TG: OK, but twice you’ve literally looked right up here, slightly above eye level, out and straight ahead. What’s up there? 

EW: I’m looking for anything that I haven’t seen in the wine.  
 
TG: The components of the wine? 

EW: Yes, sometimes I find something on the finish like, “that’s American oak.”

TG: Would that then become a card? 

EW: Absolutely.

TG: Getting back to the finish. How do you know how long the finish is? How do you calibrate it? Is it another scale? 
 
EW: Yes, it’s a kind of a scale that goes out in front of me. It’s almost like a road that goes out to the horizon. I’m looking to see how far down the road I can see.  

TG: When you taste and look down the road at the finish, does anything move? 
 
EW: No, it’s almost like how far away is the horizon.  

TG: How do you know when you’re finished tasting the wine? 
 
EW: I’ve gone through the process with all my cards. Then I sit and do a quick see, smell, and taste through of the wine to see if I’ve missed anything. From there, I ask what makes sense about the wine. I obviously already have a general idea about the wine sitting in my head.  

TG: Do you use the cards on the table to match to a specific wine? How would you match the cards to this Pinot Noir we’re tasting? 
 
EW: No, it’s like I have a Pinot Noir card in my hand (holds her left hand out in front of her) and ask if the cards on the table match the list of things on the Pinot card.

TG: So you look at the list of things on your Pinot Noir card and compare it to the cards on the table? If enough of them match, then you internally say yes, this is Pinot Noir?  
 
EW: Yes. 

TG: What happens if the Pinot card doesn’t match? 
 
EW: Then I might set the Pinot card aside and consider other cards. But I always have my first impression card and that’s really important for the
conclusion.

TG: What does the Pinot Noir card look like? Is it just a list of the markers for the grape? 
 
EW: It’s a card with a Burgundy-colored border and the center is white with the list of Pinot things typed out in terms of sight, smell, and palate. It’s literally a check list for Pinot Noir.

TG: Is it playing card size? 

EW: Yes. 

TG: If it’s not Pinot Noir, you pull out another card that the wine could be? 
 
EW: Yes, at that point I have a really good idea of the cards I want to bring out to look at to consider for the wine.

TG: Where do the cards come from? 

EW: (Pauses and smiles) From my back pocket! At that point, I think that I have Pinot or Gamay or something like that and ask, “Which of these match?” I’m thinking varietal as well as wine.  Is it Burgundy? Is it new world? 

TG: In terms of Pinot Noir, are there different cards for Central Otago and Carneros? 
 
EW: They all have their own cards. It’s almost like Pinot Noir has a card but Pinot Noir from Beaune has its own card too.   
 
TG: How do all these Pinot cards show up? 

EW: It’s almost like a family of cards, the Pinot cards, and that set has a Burgundy border. If it’s the Malbec/Syrah cards, they have a dark purple border. It’s a family of cards.  
 
TG: So it has to do with color.  
 
EW: Yes.  
 
TG: If it’s white wine, does it have to do with the color as well? 
 
EW: Not necessarily but wines that are grassy and herbal have a green color. Aromatic wines might have a pink border since they are so distinctive and floral.  
 
TG: How do you know you’re finished tasting the wine? 
 
EW: I say this is the card that matches, that feels right. Then I put the card right in front of the wine and move on to the next glass. When I’m done with all the wines I’ll go back and look at all the cards to make sure.  
 
TG: What about age and being able to assign a vintage to a wine? 
 
EW: To me, that’s like theory. It’s about knowing what happened in a particular place, how youthful the wine is, and then matching the two together and asking if it makes sense. It’s combining the sensory thing of feeling the age of the wine with knowing about the year.  

TG: Thanks, Emily, it's been amazing to taste with you and deconstruct your system for tasting. 

“Music has Charms to Soothe a Savage Breast”

                                                                           William Congreve

Music has been called the universal language. It’s the aspect of our culture that arguably moves us more than anything else--other than sex. Mankind cherishes and values music so much that snippets of several of western civilization’s musical highlights, including the song “Johnny B. Goode” and the first movement of Beethoven’s 5th symphony, were sent into space along with the two Voyager probes in 1977 in the hopes of ultimately reaching extraterrestrial life and demonstrating that we as a race are intelligent. Ahem.   

What happens when music goes wrong? Sure there’s plenty of what can generally be considered bad music and much of it from the 1970’s, which by the way was my formative decade. Catch a mere smidge of any of these truly bad songs and you may be stuck with it for the rest of your day and auditorily maimed, so to speak. Yes, even a mere five second exposure to the likes of “MacArthur Park,” “Take a Letter Maria,” “Honey,” or “Muskrat Love” is enough to stun the naked mind. I apologize for even bringing up these cursed tunes and hope you will read on.  

Beyond simply bad music like the songs listed above, there are other times when musical mismatching of monumental proportions takes place; where the performers, the performance, the music, and/or the context is so epically wrong as to defy all logic, much less lofty imagination. These are special musical moments indeed and here are three of my favorites. Read on, listen, and prepare to be sore amazed.

Exhibit A: The Leningrad Cowboys Play, “Sweet Home Alabama,” with the Russian Army Chorus

It’s doubtful that you’ve heard of the subject of our first sonic implosion. If by some chance you have, then you know that the Leningrad Cowboys were and still are a Finnish band known for their exaggerated hairstyles and costumes. The Cowboys are further known for performing a wide range of popular '70's and '80’s covers, not to mention some very slick polka tunes. Beyond that, the band also has a cult following for their filmed concerts, in particular the “Total Balalaika Show” first released in 1994. The film is of a 1993 performance of the group in Helsinki accompanied by the 160 member Russian Alexandrov ensemble and chorus. The highlight of said concert, even above an inspiring rendition of “Stairway to Heaven,” has to be Lynyrd Skynyrd’s 1974 ode to southern rock, “Sweet Home Alabama.” Know that the Cowboys are a pretty decent cover band that manage to do justice to anything they play. But the combination of their remarkably outlandish hair and outfits with the minions of straight-laced Russian lads in staid brown uniforms belting out “Sweet Home Alabama” is impossible to describe. It must be experienced:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKD7g56DNN0

Exhibit B: Lawrence Welk and “One Toke over the Line”

Even in my naïve youth I could sense an incredible rift in TV reality played out weekly on early Saturday evenings on our local Albuquerque ABC affiliate. Precisely at the 7:00 hour, just before the listening audience was about to go face down in their TV dinners due to a combination of starch, fat, and various medications, conductor and accordion player extraordinaire Lawrence Welk and his band of renown offered up 60 minutes of what can only be called well-scrubbed sonic dry wall. Each week Larry and the band would play perky tunes so removed from musical reality that their source had to be a portal into some bizarre alien universe or the result of a cruel government anti-youth plot.  

Likewise, I’m sure that Welk struggled with all the music/noise born in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, when musicians began to plug their instruments into wall sockets and play louder than proverbial hell. And let’s not even mention the long hair, the outlandish clothes, and the steaming morass that defined the morality of the times. Every now and again Welk and his band would bravely foray into the murky waters of rock and roll and always with mixed results at best. The finest example surely must be their 1971 rendition of Brewer and Shipley's ode to marijuana and excess entitled, “One Toke over the Line.” It’s a song I remember from high school, a song that’s definitely forgettable--unless you tried to embody the spirit of its lyrics, in which case remembering anything other than your name became a major sport not to mention the power-eating of junk food. 

Did Lawrence and company realize what the song was about, especially with Welk himself calling it a “modern spiritual”? And did bashful Dick Dale and perky Gail Farrell really get what being, “one toke over the line sweet Jesus,” meant? Probably not, but then we are the benefactors, yea the grateful recipients, of this momentous occasion in the history of musical short circuitry. Watch, listen and enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8tdmaEhMHE

Exhibit C: the Portsmouth Sinfonia Performs “Also Sprach Zarathustra”

By now the initial bars of Richard Strauss’ tone poem, “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” aka the opening theme to Stanley Kubrick’s, 2001: a Space Odyssey, is one of the most ubiquitous pieces of classical music known to mankind. It’s right up there with the Blue Danube waltz and the Taco Bell Canon. You might assume that a piece such as Also Sprach, which is scored in C Major with a lot of open chords, a simple melody, and tympani (kettle drums) going boom, boom, boom, might be a piece of cake to play. After all, how hard could it be?  You would be wrong. The very fact that so many different instruments in the orchestra are all playing the same pitches and the same chords at the same time, lives and breathes disaster for ensembles at practically any and every level of expertise. Just ask the principal trumpet player who has to end the opening segment by blowing his or her brains out on a high “C.” Lovely.

Enter the Portsmouth Sinfonia, an orchestra founded in 1970 by a group of students at the Portsmouth School of Art in the U.K. The only requirement to be in the orchestra was that players either had to be non-musicians; or if they were musicians, they had to play an instrument that was completely new to them. The ensemble started off as a lark but soon gained notoriety with concert appearances and a film. They eventually attracted the attention of musician Brian Eno, who produced two albums with the group. Even though the orchestra disbanded in 1979, their recording of Also Sprach is legendary. Without further ado, I give you a performance for the ages.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpFQLw5_N2o

“The future seems bright.” 

“I just can’t get any distance from it.”

“He’s blowing it all out of proportion.”

“My mind went blank.”

Sound familiar? Odds are you’ve probably heard all of them at some point as they’re commonly used expressions. But they may be a lot more than just catch phrases casually tossed into conversation. In the 1970’s, a group headed by Richard Bandler at U.C. Santa Cruz were working with students trying to find patterns that would connect eye movements to various memory functions; patterns that would later come to be called eye accessing cues, or vertical and lateral eye movements in psychology speak. What Bandler and his colleagues also realized during their study, was that some of the answers given by students like the ones above were more than mere figures of speech, they were in fact literal descriptions of what the individual was experiencing inside their head at the time. So the person who couldn’t get any distance from their problem actually had a large image in their mind’s eye that was too close for comfort. Likewise, someone whose mind “went blank” literally saw a blank white screen instead of being able to bring up with the image of the desired memory.

Consider for a moment that our connection to the physical universe is our five senses: seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting. These are called modalities after “moda,” the Greek term for senses. Internally we also use our five senses, our inner modalities, to organize our experiences. But those inner modalities also have structural qualities, or “submodalities,” as noted by Bandler and colleagues. Sight alone has dozens of submodalities including size, proximity, location, brightness, depth, and more. Here’s a partial list of some of the most common submodalities:

Visual 

Black & white or color*
Proximity: near or far*
Location*
Brightness*
Location*
Size of the image*
Three dimensional or flat image*
Focused or defocused
Framed or unframed
Movie or still image

Auditory
 
Volume: loud or soft
Distance: near or far
Internal or external
Location
Stereo or mono
Fast or slow
Pitch: high or low
Verbal or tonal
Rhythm
Clarity
Pauses

Kinesthetic

Intensity: strong or weak
Area: large or small
Weight: heavy or light
Location
Texture: smooth, rough or other
Constant or intermittent
Temperature: hot or cold
Pressure
Vibration

Driver Submodalities

Another discovery for Bandler and company was that changing any one of a handful of visual submodalities completely altered the experience and any feelings connected to the experience for the subject in question. These became known as “driver” submodalities and they include size, proximity, brightness, and dimensionality, to name a few (I’ve noted the driver submodalities for visual listed above with an asterisk). I have to note that all the tasters I’ve worked with in my project have driver submodalities. For Emily Wines MS, increasing the size and proximity of the images she perceived of the aromas in a given wine increased the intensity of her experience. Decreasing the size of her images or pushing them away did the opposite—it decreased her experience of the specific aroma and also increased the intensity of the other aromas in the wine. For Doug Frost, MS, MW, changing any of the major submodalities made the entire experience unreal and he couldn’t focus on the wine. For me, changing the size, proximity, color vs. black and white, or making the image two dimensional instead of three dimensional, all change my experience of the wine, sometimes completely.

Your First Submodality Exercise

Here’s an exercise in finding out how your brain works; literally discovering how your brain codes external experience. For this first exercise, we’ll limit it to just visual submodalities. The only thing you’ll need is a pleasant memory like the beautiful sunset pictured above. So go back to a time when you experienced a gorgeous sunset. Once you’ve got the memory so that you feel like you’re really there, make the suggested changes below. Important rule: only change ONE thing at a time. If you change more than one, you’ll likely to completely muddle the experience. After you make each single change, remember to RESET your memory to the original before going to the next. As you make each change, pay close attention to how the change affects the intensity and quality of your feelings toward the memory. Remember: only change ONE thing at a time and then reset it before going to the next. Have fun! Go!

1. Color vs black and white: change your image from colors to black and white. How does that affect your memory?

2. Depth: change your memory from a three dimensional image with lots of depth to a flat picture. Does that change your memory?

3. Distance: move the image really close—right in front of your face. Changes? Now move it at least 20 feet away. Changes?

4. Size: make the image BIG—at least 20’ by 20’. Change in intensity of the memory? Now make the image really small – the size of a postage stamp. Changes?

5. Clarity: change the image from crystal clear to blurred. Changes?

Which of the preceding changes altered your experience the most?  For some, changing the distance, proximity, brightness, size, or dimensionality (2D vs. 3D) completely changes the intensity of the feelings connected to the memory. Did you find your driver submodalities? Chances are it was pretty easy to do. Now for more fun.

Your Second Submodality Exercise

In the first exercise we took one memory/image and played with changing major visual submodalities one by one to get an idea of how profound the changes can be. In this second exercise, we’ll take two memories and map the differences between them. We’ll use food as the topic. The first thing you’ll need to do is pick your favorite food, something that makes you swoon at the very thought of it. Easy for me: it’s good bittersweet chocolate or chocolate truffles. Bring up a great memory of your favorite food, be it chocolate or whatever. Now choose your least favorite food, something you will absolutely NOT eat under any circumstances. If for any reason you don’t have one, just choose something that you really would rather not eat. For me this is easy once again; my least favorite food is calves liver. Can’t stand it and absolutely won’t eat it (Long story here having to do with a tragic childhood experience). 

Now that you have your two foods in mind focus on your favorite. Where is the image of your favorite food located? Is it a life size memory? Is it in color? Is there movement? Sound? How bright are the colors? Is it 2D or 3D? Really be thorough in investigating the structure of your memory. Note all the different elements and write them down.  Next think about your least favorite food and do the same; note the location of the image, if it’s a movie, the size, distance, color, brightness, and other things. Also write them down.  
 
Now compare the two different foods in terms of how you represent them internally. Are the images in different locations? Different sizes? Is one image closer than the other? Is one brighter than the other? Is one a still image still while the other is a movie? For the record, I did quick inventory of both my choices. Chocolate was a large image front and center, 3D, about 4-5 feet away, life size, with bright colors, and lots of detail. In comparison, the calves liver image was down on the floor to my left just out of eye sight; it was a dark image, very dull in terms of brightness, and the colors were all faded greys and browns. It almost looked like a daguerreotype from the 19th century.

You get the picture--literally. Contrasting memories like this  in terms of structure is called "contrastive analysis" and it has any number of different applications.

The only other part of this exercise I'd like you to do is this: for a moment try moving the un-liked food over to the favorite food location and make all the structural components the same. Notice if you feel any different about the un-liked food after doing so. Then put it back where it was. As the saying goes, let sleeping dogs lie and leave undesirable foods alone.  

Submodalities and Language

One final--and not so trivial--thing about Bandler and company’s initial work with submodalities: during their work, their group recognized that subjects often favored one particular sensory representational system (internal sense) over others in conversation. Some would use “sight” language while others regularly chose auditory language while a small percentage used kinesthetic language. Thus one person might say “I see what you mean,” while another would say “that sounds good,” while a third might say, “that feels right.” While it may seem insignificant, Bandler's group went on to learn that matching language predicates generally led to good communication while mismatching predicates usually led to the opposite. Suffice to say that if you mismatch someone’s language predicates you will drive them absolutely crazy in a short period time. Further, it could be challenging to establish any kind of rapport or connection with them because you’re not in the same mental universe. However, match their conversational predicates and you’ll find yourself singing harmony with them in short order. Or something like that.

Tasting and Submodalities

How can we use submodalities in tasting wine? I thought you’d never ask. The answer is in a multitude of different ways, but in this post we’ll focus on improving olfactory memory. In the last post I wrote about working on one’s memory of the most common aromas in wine using what I called the “Basic Set.” If you did any work with the images, you probably improved your memory, maybe even considerably. Kudos to you! Now we’ll combine the submodalities with image work. Here are some exercises to try:   

a. Images, aromas, and submodalities: bring up an image of lemons internally like the one above. Start to use the submodality changes listed above as far as changing the size of the image, its location, the brightness, 2D vs. 3D, etc. Note how you can quickly and easily increase or decrease the intensity of your memory of what a lemon smells and tastes like.

b. Expand your repertoire: now isolate what different parts of the lemon smell like—the peel, pith, rind and the oil. Once again, use images to increase or decrease the intensity of your memory of lemon and all its components.

c. Refine and calibrate: now that you’ve discovered your major driver submodality (Be it size, proximity, brightness or whatever—and there could be more than one), use it or them to decrease the intensity of your memory of lemon until you can barely detect it. Work on pushing your memory and perception until you can detect minute amounts of the lemon and any part of the lemon.

d. Quality of fruit: take your image/memory of lemon and change it from freshly sliced lemon to dried lemon to preserved lemon. Morph your images and adjust your memory of the lemon accordingly.  

By now you should have a good first impression of how you can change your experience by altering submodalities. The possibilities, as it’s easy to see, are endless. While doing the exercises you probably realized—and very quickly—how important knowledge of submodalities is; how knowing about them and being able to change them consciously is like being given a keyboard to your brain along with a lot more control and choice about your experience and memories. I think submodalities could be the most profound thing I’ve ever learned. Nothing else comes close. Cheers!

“But it just smells like wine.”
 
The Beginner’s Dilemma

​​Sound familiar? I think this is a common experience for most people just getting into wine. It was for me. I clearly remember going to my first professional tasting while in grad school studying music. As I stood next to a vendor’s table, with a taste of what I seem to recall was a Châteauneuf du Pape in my glass, I listened to the two guys who were next to me. They were waxing poetic about the wine saying things like baked earth, dried spice, and leather. I immediately put my nose back into the glass and it smelled like … red wine. Period. I thought the two guys were completely full of it or hallucinating—or both.  

It wasn’t until several months later during the holidays that I had my first wine epiphany. A good friend had given me a bottle of 1976 Silver Oak Alexander Valley Cabernet for Christmas. It became my contribution to the holiday dinner we were sharing with a professor and his wife. The ‘76 vintage was one of several consecutive drought years in California, and the wine was rich, powerful, and quickly filled the room with aromas of blackberry jam and exotic spices once poured. It was the very first time that wine smell like things instead of just wine. I remember thinking, “this is what they’re talking about!” From then on, wine would never be the same.
 
What changed between experiences “A” and “B”?  What was the key that made the difference between wine smelling like wine and wine smelling like other things? At the time it seemed completely mysterious and it wasn’t until decades later that I finally pieced together what had happened. 

My experience points to one of the major wine disconnects--that wine as a fermented beverage can smell like a great deal of things which can confuse and/or intimidate the beginning taster. The answer to this conundrum may be as simple as perception and recognition, and developing and improving one’s olfactory and taste memory.  

The good news is that practically everyone has all the hardware and software required to smell, taste, and remember. We’ve been doing it since we were infants. In fact, we are more than capable of storing a complex taste memory fairly easily. Not convinced? Take a moment to consider exhibit “A,” the humble cheeseburger. If we take the seven commonly referred to taste sensations as in sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami (savory), kokumi, and fat into consideration, the garden variety cheeseburger can check off on all the categories except for bitter--unless of course you’ve burned the burger or are being très chic by adding radicchio to the fixings. Combine these with other variables such as temperature, texture, and context (where, when, how and with whom you enjoyed said cheeseburger) and you have the makings (sorry for the pun) for a very complex smell and taste memory indeed.

​The good news is that practically everyone has all the hardware and software required to smell, taste, and remember. We’ve been doing it since we were infants. In fact, we are more than capable of storing a complex taste memory fairly easily. Not convinced? Take a moment to consider exhibit “A,” the humble cheeseburger. If we take the seven commonly referred to taste sensations as in sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami (savory), kokumi, and fat into consideration, the garden variety cheeseburger can check off on all the categories except for bitter--unless of course you’ve burned the burger or are being très chic by adding radicchio to the fixings. Combine these with other variables such as temperature, texture, and context (where, when, how and with whom you enjoyed said cheeseburger) and you have the makings (sorry for the pun) for a very complex smell and taste memory indeed.
​
There is still another major challenge for beginners. Most enter the wine portal with the expectation that learning to taste is somehow different than everything else they’ve ever studied and learned—which is visually based. What’s missing is the awareness that there is a key visual component to smell and taste memory. Specifically, that there’s an internal image connected to practically all smell and taste memories. 

I’ve written about the image-olfactory connection several times previously, but suffice to say that practically all the professional tasters—and students--I’ve worked with over the years use images in some form or another to identify aromas and flavors when they smell and taste wine. These range from two-dimensional internal still images all the way to multi-sensory panoramic life-size movies. At this point, I’ll go as far to say that if you can’t create an image for something you are smelling or tasting in a glass of wine, you probably won’t be able to recognize it.  ​

Front Loading and the Basic Set

The challenge for the beginning taster (and teaching them) becomes clear: how to bring awareness to the connection between internal images and olfactory/taste memories. What’s important to note here is that we’re not talking about actual physical smell and taste, we’re talking about memory function. And if that’s the case, it’s possible to improve one’s memory—and recognition--without an actually having wine in hand.

In the past few years I’ve worked with a technique I call “Front Loading,” combined with a subset of the most common wine aromas I’ve dubbed the “Basic Set.” Front Loading in effect is working backwards to improve one’s memory of the most common elements found in wine—without using wine. Further, the Basic Set is comprised of the most common aromas and flavors found in a majority of all wines. I’ve found that using both in conjunction can bring awareness to the image-olfactory connection and ultimately improve tasting ability—in some cases considerably. 

​Here are the components of the Basic Set, the most common aromas and flavors found in a majority of all wines. Keep in mind that the intent of this list is not to set anything in stone, but to merely serve as a vehicle for learning. So, the list and its components can always be altered as needed. 

The Basic Set: Common Wine Aromas and Flavors

• Green apple
• Yellow/Golden Delicious Apple
• Pear
• Lemon
• Lime
• Orange
• Banana
• Peach
• Apricot
• Black Cherry
• Blackberry
• Red Cherry
• Cranberry
• Raisin/prune
• Roses
• Violet
• Mint/Eucalyptus
• Green bell pepper
• Rosemary
• Black/white pepper
• Vanilla
• Cinnamon
• Close
• Toast
• Coffee
• Chocolate
• Mushroom – forest floor
• Chalk

Using the Basic Set

There are four steps that can be used with the Basic Set. This sequence is designed to use a combination of visual and auditory in several ways to improve olfactory and taste recognition and memory. Here are the four steps:

I. Using external images and words

II. Using personal memories/internal images

III. Using submodalities to intensify memories

IV. Using internal images and contrastive analysis 

Step I: Using External Images and Words

I've listed six images below:

• Lemon
• Lime
• Green apple
• Roses
• Vanilla
• Mushroom/earth

Using the images, do the following:

1. Look at the image and say the name of the fruit, etc. internally, or out loud.
2. Recall a time when you smelled and/or tasted the given fruit, spice, etc.
3. In your mind’s “eye,” reach out or pick up a slice of the fruit (etc.), and take a bite of it.
4. Make your experience of the fruit, spice, or other component as complete and intense as possible down to the aromas, flavors, texture, and mouthfeel.
5. Go through the list several times. It won’t take long. With each repetition, try to get to your memory of the fruit, etc., as quickly as you can and make your memory as complete and as intense as possible. 

Step II: Using Personal Memories/Internal Images

Now use your own memories to bring up the same aromas/flavors. As you bring up each memory, say the name of the fruit/spice, etc. either internally or out loud once again. Adding sound/auditory to your memory work not only reinforces each memory, but it provides other avenues—auditory and the physicality of speaking—to stimulate the memory. As before, make your experience of the fruit, spice, or other component as complete and intense as possible down to the aromas, flavors, texture, and mouthfeel. Practice the list several times. Once again, with each repetition see if you can get to the memory faster and more with more intensity.

• Lemon
• Lime
• Green apple
• Roses
• Vanilla
• Mushroom/earth

Step III: Using Submodalities to Intensify Memory

Submodalities are the structural qualities to our internal images, sounds, and feelings. It may sound complicated—but it’s not. Think about any of your memories which are visually-based. In your internal field, so to speak, the images all have a location, size, proximity, brightness, dimension, and more. Further, changing any one of the most important submodalities for visual such as size or distance, can dramatically change the intensity of the memory. With that, you can intensify the experience of your memories of lemon, lime, green apple, roses, vanilla and mushroom/earth by doing the following:

a. Make your images (or movie) larger
b. Bring your images closer
c. Make the colors brighter

Once again, as you play with the images, say the word for each internally or out loud. This step may take a bit of practice. Play with one submodality at a time. See which one intensifies the memory the most. For me, size and distance both change any visual memory dramatically.

Step IV: Using Images and Contrastive Analysis 

Contrastive analysis is another way of saying “trying to put two things in the same place.” In this case, we’ll take your images of the aromas and or flavors from the list and play with them. The results at the very least will be curious. Here are the instructions. Use your images/memories for the pairs of elements listed below.

1. First, be aware of the location where each image/memory lives in your internal “theater.”
2. Next, try to put one of the images exactly where the other is located.
3. Be aware of what happens to the images when you try them both in the same location.  

I: Lemon and mushroom

II: Lime and vanilla

III: Orange and rose

What happens when you try to move one image on to another? Practically everyone I’ve done this exercise with (self-included), experienced something akin to placing polarized magnets near each other. The images usually fly apart and become separated by a noticeable distance--and the two images land in very specific locations where they naturally live in your “mind’s eye.”  

While this exercise may seem initially odd, the same phenomenon will really come into play when one builds more complex “progressive” memories of specific grapes and wines. Then an Alsace Riesling will occupy a specific location and proximity in one’s internal field making it more difficult to confuse for another grape or wine—even another Riesling. But I’m getting ahead of myself …

Parting Thoughts on Using the Basic Set

• Repetition is key: work with the images/words dozens of times until your memories become automatic. It won’t take long to go through several repetitions.

• Remember the goal is to be able to bring up a memory of one of any of the elements completely and intensely--on command!

• Don’t limit your work to the Basic Set. Expand your repertoire to include as many other aromatics/flavors as you can.

• In time, start to put the components together in groups or sequences to form markers for classic grape and wines.