18 December 2006
Educate your palate
Many times I find myself tasting a wine and lacking the ability to accurately depict or even vaguely describe the various flavors within the tinto. Even worse, I will read the professional blurb about a wine I am drinking only to fail to spot any of the flavors when the wine reaches my nose and palate. This usually results either from my personal shortage of relevant descriptive vocabulary or from my simple relative “rookiness” to the wine world. The latter problem has a simple solution: drink more wine; but, for the former issue, my friend Gary Vaynerchuk at Wine Library TV demonstrated within an amazing episode an excellent solution for educating your palate.
You can’t describe all the complex flavors in a wine if you can’t even name the items that produce such hints! We must name them and taste them so that we can recognize these flavors in future wine adventures and really vividly describe the vinos.
This is something that I’ve actually wanted to do for a while now, and our friend Gary did this for us on his December 15, 2006 WLTV episode (thanks Gary). Watching him made it easy for us to go through this fun exercise. So, what did he taste, you ask? After watching a couple times, I compiled the complete grocery list to reproduce the task.
The list:
- cranberry
- blackberry
- red currant
- chocolate
- blueberry
- pineapple
- black cherry
- strawberry
- raspberry
- black currant
- cassis
- black raspberry
- royal fig
- mango
- papaya
- kiwi
- apricot
- piñata apple
- red delicious apple
- Granny Smith apple
- pears (fragrant)
- black licorice
- red licorice
- figs
- walnuts
- popcorn w/ butter
- almonds
- chocolate-covered cherries
- Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal
- Chocolate Puffs cereal
- Skittles
- goji berries
- bacon (bits)
- sweaty sock
- mix of mushrooms
- olives (black and green)
- asparagus
- sage
- orange peel
- broccoli
- green bell pepper
- soy sauce
- cinnamon sticks
- black pepper
- white pepper (watch you eyes!)
- white clove
- “arrow root” ??? (I couldn’t catch exactly what was said)
- thyme
- paprika
- rosemary
- lemon peel
- paper and cork
- rock
- jalapeño pepper
- soil
Gary tasted everything listed above, included those interesting items that are actually on the list (and you probably shouldn’t buy at the market for tasting). All of the items in the list above are terms that I’ve repeatedly seen used to describe a wine’s flavor profile, so I sincerely think it is worth investigating.
Let me know if I missed anything, if you have any recommendations, or pretty much comment about anything at all! Otherwise print, shop, check-off, learn, enjoy!
Share the fun that is wine!
-Nico
Great list! When are we going to go through it ourselves?!
— Amit Dec 18 #
I never knew the many tastes that wine can undertake. What I really need to do is find a wine alternative. Hmmm…
— Asad Dec 18 #
yummy…sweaty sock!
— Steph Dec 18 #