Submodalities & Wine Tasting...I'm Baffled

The latest LocalFlavor issue came out ystrday focused on the upcoming SantaFe Wine&Chile Fiesta (sorry…not yet on-line: LocalFlavor …perhaps soon).
In it, writer (and Certified Sommelier) ErinBrooks has an article interviewing TimGaiser (sorry…almost forgot) MS. In the article, Tim goes on at length at how use of the concept of submodalities has dramatically changed his ability to taste wine. Say whot…submodalities?? What the heck’s that:

1. Submodalities in neuro-linguistic programming are distinctions of form or structure (rather than content) within a sensory representational system. For example, regardless of the content, both external and mental images of any kind will be either colored or monochrome, and stationary or moving. .
2. (Sub-Modalities) The special sensory qualities perceived by each of the five senses. For example, visual sub-modalities include color, shape, movement, brightness, depth, etc., auditory submodalities include volume, pitch, tempo, etc. …

These are some of the clearest definitions I could find w/ Google. If you Google “NLP submodalities belief changes”, the definitions get even more woo-woo and out there.

This stuff sorta left me scratching my head in puzzlement. I am the first to admit…I’m not exactly the sharpest pencil in the box. But this stuff seems waaaay over my head.

Ahhhh…but when you Google “submodalities wine”, up pops TimGaiser’s BreakThrough Discovery: TimGaiser

AhHa…enlightenment is now within my grasp. Tim studied w/ world-renowned behavorial scientist TimHallbom of the Everyday Genius Institute (yet another organization I can’t join) on deconstructing his tasting process. Alas…again…it sorta left me scratching my head in puzzlement. Some of it made a bit of sense. When I find barnyard in a wine, it certainly creates an image of my Grandpa’s barnyard in my mind. But exactly how to fit that image of “barnyard” into a inner map or grid of a wine in my mind is beyond my ken. But, I’m told, this is something of “enormous importance” to attribute a structure to these images in improvinging one’s ability to blind taste.
As for the “heirloom roses” image…I just don’t have one…never smelled an “heirloom rose” that I have recollect of. Likewise for “charcoal roasted bergamots” or other such attributes commonly found in wine.

So…since there are some sharp pencils here on WB and people whose tasting skills I have a very high respect for; I would like to pose this question to them:

Who has applied the concept of submodalities to improve their wine tasting abilities???

Surely, if this idea is of “enormous importance”, then someone here as already taken advantage of it to improve their tasting skills. Is Tim really onto something here?? He is, after all, a MS and an Adjunct Professor at the Rudd Center for Professional Wine Studies, which has gotta account for something.
Like I said, I’m not the sharpest pencil in the box and this stuff seems way over my head and ability to grasp. Alas, I can’t find a “Submodalities for Dummies” WebSite.
Tom

Well, Tom, I have. I am with you that this word “submodalities” was a new one to me. Frankly, I still don’t completely understand what it means, but I do understand what Tim is talking about. At this point, I’ve let the nomenclature go. I’ve been to two of Tim’s seminars on this subject, and I found them fascinating and very surprisingly enlightening. Without launching into a long explanation of my understanding of the concepts, I will say that Tim has had very significant success coaching MS candidates on this technique, and that I fully believe being aware of it (since I was doing it all along without being conscious of it) has made and continues to make me a better blind taster. Tim hasn’t been doing this work for very long, so I don’t expect many people to chime in with relevant opinions on it. Hopefully I’ll be surprised there too.

Oh, I almost forgot, I do think it’s a concept of enormous importance. Seriously.

It makes sense to me. Sometimes you don’t have the words to describe the note you’re looking for. Pull back, imagine what you’re trying to think of and detail that.

Submodalitites = Semiotics for wine.

Tom - My advice is to desist at once. If you scratch too much, your hair will fall out, and we don’t want you to become another victim of submodalities.

Fair enough, Doug. I have an open mind on the subject, despite my first reaction that it was a bunch of “baffle 'em w/ bull$hit” writing on wine, of which there’s am abundance.
I would like to attend his Seminar sometime if it were offerred down here in NM. He’s a frequent visitor here.

But if submodalities were of such “enormous importance”, why isn’t it being talked up all over the InterNet, on WineBlogs, on WineBoards, and such??
Why haven’t you shared your excitement over submodalities with us here on WB, Doug (not giving you a hard time…just sincerely curious)?? Why hasn’t Parker or Heimhoff or Olken brought it up (maybe they have)??

OTOH, another subject of “enormous importance”, the Parker 100-pt scoring system, was mostly greeted by a shrug of the shoulders and little reaction when it was introduced 30 yrs ago, and it
wasn’t until 25-30 yrs later that at became heatedly discussed in boringly tedious detail on all the wine blogs. So maybe 30 yrs from now, on all the wine blogs and wine boards, submodalities will be
being discussed heatedly as well??

OTOOH, another subject of “enormous importance”, “natural wines”, was heatedly debated and discussed from the very start of the introduction of that term.

I’ve suggested to the organizer of SFW&CF that he have Tim give a seminar on submodalities. Like most of my suggestions for “interesting” wine seminar topics,
it’ll probably be rejected out of hand because of its source.
Tom

Sorry, John…mostly already gone already.
Tom

Baffling is one way to put it.

I tried to read his description of how he teaches this and also follow along with some videos of him talking to other somms about how they use his technique. I was at times laughing to myself thinking is this guy serious! However, I think it really makes sense to some people and works for them. In the same way that working through the grid to identify wines works some people and other techniques and ways of tasting work for others.

I think it’s a new name for something a lot of us do naturally to some extent. We break down the various sensory perceptions into subcategories. You posted some examples for visual and auditory, arguably the least important for wine tasting. Touch can be broken down into hot/cool, soft/rough, location on the palate and in the mouth. Taste and smell are very intertwined but the sub-categories would be similar to those for visual and auditory. Intensity is similar to volume, acid vs bitter vs umami is similar to hue, as is floral vs fruit vs spice on the aroma wheel. By concentrating consciously on these subcategories you can improve your tasting acuity.

Using a fairly obscure cognitive science term like sub-modalities is probably correct (I’m no cog sci expert), but since it’s not a familiar word it tends to elicit more of a response. Whether that response is “ooh, that sounds scientific so it must be important” or “that sounds like BS” depends on the individual, I guess.

Tom - I think it’s a meme he’s trying to put into the zeitgeist to disrupt our emo-sensory paradigms. In other words, it’s a psy-op and you’d best be on your guard!

Think red for red wine … yes that helps.

Those are fair questions, Tom. I’ve talked about this in person with a few friends who are interested in such things. I haven’t posted about it for a couple of reasons. First, understanding it involves descriptions and interaction that I think work best in person. Also, as Tim is using these ideas, they relate directly to structured blind tasting, which doesn’t seem to be something many people here study too intensely.

The (very) basic premise is that most of us (not all) are forming visual images in our minds when we taste. That involves aromatic elements (black cherry, vanilla, etc) as well as structure (medium+ acidity, etc), assuming we are evaluating all of that. It’s easier to be aware of what we’re evaluating when we are aware of those images. At first, I thought there was probably something to this, but that I probably wasn’t one of these visual image people. It wasn’t until the second seminar that I really got it. We were doing the exercises, and suddenly I “saw” (became aware of) all of these images. I didn’t create them because Tim told me to; they were there all along and I didn’t know it. If we’ve been taught to formally evaluate wine and have practiced it extensively, we know how much acid, alcohol, residual sugar, etc is in a wine, and it’s a lot easier to access that awareness when we’re in touch with the part of the brain that is actually figuring it out.

I caught the tone of your first post, and I completely understand why you would think that. I am now sure that it isn’t a “baffle them with BS” type of thing.

I think there is [or at least could be] a pretty important point at work here - I have long felt that the English language is just about completely incapable of describing smells or tastes.

Almost all wine tasting notes use similies as descriptors [“cigar box” or “bellpepper” or “lead pencil” or “Asian spice”] without providing an intervening layer of abstraction for classifying “cigar-box-ness” or “bell-pepper-ness” or “lead-pencil-ness” or “Asian-Spicy-ness”.

It’s particularly curious when you consider that smell is [supposedly] our sense which is most strongly tied to our deepest and oldest and most personal memories.

Maybe smell evokes such a strong emotional response in us that we temporarily lose our ability to analyze it logically?

I don’t know whether there are other languages which do a better job of classifying tastes and smells [maybe French or Italian or whatever they speak in Thailand?], but the English language certainly falls flat on its face in this regard.

BTW, Maureen Nelson [who, given that she’s a female, is probably a better winetaster than all of the guys at this site put together] has argued that taste- and smell-driven descriptions [or similies] are essentially useless in describing wines, because taste and smell are such deeply personal experiences.

Instead, she has argued in favor of a texture-based description of wines, since mouthfeel seems to be a much a more universally consistent experience across broad populations of tasters.

And then there’s one other obvious mathematical possibility here - maybe our senses of taste and smell are so deeply personal [and so strongly tied to our emotions?] that in any sufficiently large group of people, the taste and smell experiences [from encountering a given wine] will vary so broadly and so uniformly [across whatever multidimensional space into which the observer would be trying to force a classification system] that there aren’t enough regions [or maybe aren’t any regions at all] with small tightly-knit gatherings of cluster points around which you could try to formalize a classification?

And on an individual basis, this same “lack of clustering” could pose a particularly cruel dilemma for women [like Maureen] if they really can detect impurities in a wine at an order of magnitude better granularity than can men [single parts per billion for women versus tens of parts per billion for men] - it could be that women experience such a “kaleidoscope” of tastes and smells that it might be very difficult for them to concentrate on any one taste or smell and single it out for emphasis.

Or maybe the opposite is true - maybe the impurity is so irritating that they can’t enjoy the rest of the wine for what it is? That certainly seems to be the case for “supertasters”, who are said to prefer the blandest of foods and drinks because the slightest impurities invoke in them an overwhelming sense of bitterness.

And speaking of kaleidoscopes - this doesn’t even touch on the question of synesthesia.

Personally, when it comes to a very high acid, very “minerally” wine [something like a Donnhoff Kabinett or a Dauvissat Les Preuses], I have a really bad tendency to “see” the wine, rather than to taste it.

I wonder if that’s Stephen Tanzer’s problem?

All of his highest-rated wines invariably taste like vodka or gin.

Josh Raynolds, too - always recommending the blandest wines you’ll ever taste.

Ann Noble, UC-Davis:

Thanks for your thoughtful response, Doug.

I did not pick up from Erin’s article, nor Tim’s page, that submodalities is only applicable to improving one’s blind tasting skills. I could give a rat’s a$$ about blind tasting skills as I
have no interest in becoming an MS or MW or any such thing. Certainly, I was aware Tim was using submodalities to coach students in passing the MS blind tasting test.
But, given the “enormous importance” of submodalities, I just sorta thought it might improve my own tasting skills. I gather that’s not the case.

So…I gather the only way I can fully understand submodalities is to sit down w/ Tim, or one of his accolytes, and be trained by him on its usage?? Presumably, that’ll cost me $$'s and since
I have no interest in blind tasting, I’d probably best just forget about understanding the “enormous importance” of submodalities and go on and try to understand minerality and phenolics and
other such stuff. I was able to learn quantuum electrodynamics and neutron spallation from reading books, but I gather submodalities requires a higher level of intelligence that you can’t
get from reading a book, which I can accept. I couldn’t understand contour integrals until DrSanger sat down w/ me and explained it in detail in terms I could understand. So maybe that’s
the case w/ submodalities as well.

I have a rather sensitive BS antenna and, when I first read Erin’s & Tim’s articles, it went into high alert, just like it does when I read a TN describing this wine as having scents
of “charcoal roasted Basque bergamots” or some such. But the earnestness of Tim’s endorsement of the “enormous importance” of submodalities led me to retract my BS antenna and delve
more deeply into submodalities and keep an open mind on the subject. I gather, though, I’m wasting my time.
Tom

I’ve tried a number of times using this “incredible tool” of Ann’s aroma wheel and found it didn’t much work for me. It seemed clumsy to
use and took all the enjoyment out of tasting wine. Besides…you have to go way out to the 7’th tier to find “charcoal roasted Basque bergamots”.
Tom

BINGO! SUB-MODALITIES!

If you look at the OP example, you start to run into some circular definitions - if the expert says, “auditory sub-modalities include volume, pitch, tempo, etc…” then it is fair to ask, what are the “modalities” of sound/perception from which you depart in order to achieve “sub-modality?”

Really, the “sub-modality” thing is simply further specification of a more general term.

Fruit…to…cassis is not so much some fancy sub-modality as it is a specification.

In the OP’s example of vision, what are the original visual “modalities” if color, shape, movement, brightness, depth, etc…are sub-modalities?

Nice sub-modality work there!

What color sub-modalities do you use for “white” wine?

Tom, I believe you might be able to use these ideas to hone your own tasting skills as well. Now that I think about it, I was wrong in saying that Tim is using it only specifically for formal blind tasting. He also mentioned teaching his “tricks” to relative amateurs with strong results. I do think most of his work is focused on blind identification, though. I have walked a few customers and friends through some of his methods, and some people have had what I think are amazing results very quickly. You’re a lot more experienced than the people I’m talking about, but my point is that it should be applicable to people of various levels of experience. When I have more time, maybe I’ll try to type out instructions for a couple of specific exercises. Better yet, I wonder if you could find someone local who has attended any of Tim’s seminars on the subject. As I mentioned, it’s a lot easier in person. There are elements that someone can help you through by actually watching you taste, and I find that looking for them yourself can lead to overthinking and missing it.