Anyone reading Jamie Goode's new book, "I Taste Red"?

I just spotted “I Taste Red: The Science of Tasting Wine” at Barnes & Noble yesterday and grabbed it. I’ve only briefly skimmed it but it looks fascinating – topical questions for wine geeks and lucid prose coupled with deep coverage of current research. In other words, Jamie at his best. It starts with neurological pathologies and what they can reveal about our sensory experience and goes on to talk about the chemistry of different smells, cognition and the language we use to discuss wine.

It looks like it should be required reading for Berserkers.

Saw a review and I’m tempted to read it.

Cool, looks interesting for the wine geek, indeed! Will try to grab it…

Sounds great. I just ordered a copy. Thanks for mentioning it.

I’ve finally found a little time to read more of Jamie’s book. I’ve only scratched the surface, and my (distant) high school chemistry isn’t much help with the more technical parts. But the chapter on wine flavor chemistry is fascinating. Here are some highlights, some of which are counter-intuitive.

• Some grapes have “impact compounds” – volatile chemicals that correspond to specific aromas and give that grape their character. These include compounds that yield green/grassy/green pepper; linalool, which gives the floral/citrus scent to muscat; one that yields the flowery, rosy smell of gewurtz; and one that produces the pepper in syrah; and tropical fruits/passion fruit/grapefruit (e.g., sauvignon blanc). I think we all know how easy it is to recognize a grassy sauvignon blanc or the orange peel of a muscat.

• Not all grapes have impact compounds. This may explain the lack of a distinct fruit profile for grapes like chardonnay.

• Both (a) low-level volatile compounds (at too low a level to be perceived) and (b) non-volatile compounds (things we can’t smell or taste) can markedly affect the perception of volatile compounds, including impact compounds. Add or eliminate these in the lab and it can alter the smells and tastes of the wine.

• Alcohol increases the solubility of volatile compounds and aromas therefore decrease as alcohol increases. Past 14.5%, there is a sharp fall-off in aromas.
This is quite counter-intuitive to me. I had assumed that alcohol might accentuate aromas. But, on reflection, it squares with the fact that some of the most aromatic wines, such as red Burgundy and nebbiolo, are very high in acid.

• (In a magazine article a year or so ago, Jamie explained that sweet wines are more intense aromatically for the opposite reason: The wine is relatively (or completely) saturated with dissolved sugar. That causes the volatile aroma compounds to evaporate quickly with the wine is opened. This explains the night-and-day difference in aromas between sweet and dry rieslings, even when picked at similar sugar levels.)

• Acid levels affect color: High pH/low acid wines are darker (e.g., big cabs, syrahs, zins), while the pigments in high acid wines tend to be lighter (think nebbiolo, pinot, tempranillo). Of course, the chemistry of the individual grape types is important, too.

• Someplace in the book that I can’t now find he says that acid/pH also affects the fruit profile. Higher acid/lower pH wines are perceived as red-fruited, while lower acid/higher pH wines are more dark-fruited. I’m not clear on whether this is simply a reflection of riper red grapes tending to be darker in flavors. But I think he was sayting that the red/dark scale is partly a reflection simply of acid levels.

Anyway, lots of interesting, explanatory stuff there that should be of interest to Berserkers.

I still haven’t found a section explaining the pros and cons of decanting.

Been carrying that book around in my car for 4 weeks now & haven’t yet got started on it, John. Thanks for the briefing…sounds like a book I’m
going to really like.
Tom

I have to get a copy of this.

It’s denser and more technical than his Science of Wine but, as a writer and editor, my hat’s off to him for his lucid, lucid writing about technical topics. All from a wine lover’s perspective.

So… has anyone else actually turned a page of Jamie’s new book? It’s dense enough that I’d love to hear what nuggets other people have found in it.

I enjoyed Science of Wine, but just like wine, I’ve promised myself I need to cut through the Tsundoku before buying more.

Just got my copy. Will start reading tonight and report back later.

I’ve had it checked out from my library for a couple of weeks but haven’t cracked it yet. Will do so soon as it’s got to go back!

Enough of the good intentions! Someone else needs to start reading!

I’ve stopped chasing after every wine book that comes out, but looks like I need to get copy of this one. What I can’t tell from your brief snippets is if these points are based on in-depth research that Jamie is quoting or referencing, or if they are somewhat his theories of wine. Some are pretty obviously true (like the points about impact compounds, and how other compounds in small quantities can make big differences in how we perceive a wine - but good to be reminded).

The point about alcohol and aromas is an interesting one, but also one where I think there may be competing factors at work (and easy to over-simplify): I suspect most people know that different solvents have the ability to dissolve different kinds of compounds, depending largely on how “polar” or “non-polar” the solvent is. Water, for example, is quite a polar compound, and is thus very good at dissolving ionic compounds (salts), and other polar compounds (like acids, and compounds that have asymmetry in how positive/negative charge is distributed). Oils are very non-polar, and good at dissolving other non-polar compounds (that’s why a lot of flavor can be found in the oil layer during cooking, where lots of flavor compounds are more soluble than they are in water). Ethanol is a bit of a chameleon, having properties that allow it do do a bit of both (and it’s why alcohol dissolves so easily in water, while it can also can be used to dissolve things like oily paints). But I wonder if this is a chicken/egg argument, where wines with higher alcohol have different composition to begin with, because of the ripeness level of the fruit (same for the acidity point about red vs. black fruits).

Acidity and color: another chicken/egg dilemma. Do higher acid wines have different pigments to begin with, or does the acidity itself affect the state of the pigments in a wine? I don’t know the answer, but this is one where I have a feeling he is claiming a causation link where there may be none. Same with the red/black fruit profile. I’ve always just ascribed the darker fruit profile to higher ripeness, which tends to go hand in hand with lower acidity. But it’s not acidity that causes a difference in profile, it’s ripeness level that causes both (if what I’m saying is correct).

Anyway, I need to read it, because I’m sure there is a lot of interesting stuff in there.

BTW, in doing a little googling for this reply, I found this very cool site that has lots of interesting tidbits on all kinds of chemistry, suitable and hopefully interesting to anyone: http://www.compoundchem.com/

He’s summarizing research, which he cites.

That’s useful explanation, Alan.

Here’s what he says:
“An analytical chemistry experiment by R.S. Whiton and Bruce Zoecklin in 2000 showed that as alcohol rose from 11 to 14 percent, there was a reduced recovery of typical wine volatile compounds.”
He also cites two other experiments. In one, researchers added esters but found that aromas did not intensify with the increase because alcohol and other elements suppressed their scents. In another experiment by the same group, he says, “they added increasing levels of ethanol to a solution of nine esters at the same concentration that they found in wine; they discovered the fruity scent quickly fell as the alcohol rose, to the point that, when alcohol reached 14.5%, the fruity aroma was totally masked by the alcohol.”

I’d always assumed as you do. Here’s what he says: “The color of pigments depends on the acid of the grape must and the concentration of sulfur dioxide: they tend to be redder at lower pH (higher acid) and more purple at higher pH.”

The italicized phrase suggests he’s implying causation. But there may be an implicit “other things being equal” here.

Cool, the fact that he’s including a lot of published research is pretty exciting. Looking forward to getting this and reading it.

Yeah, I’ve read it. Didn’t like it, but I have never been a fan of Jamie’s writing.

There is a bibliography for each chapter, but I would have appreciated more direct references. I understand Jamie’s point about not making the book look too scary, but there are an awful lot of statements in the book that IMO are questionable, and I would love to know how Jamie arrived at his conclusions.

There is a lot of reporting of experiments and what other people say, but his understanding of perception is poor. He seems to take the view that the eye acts like a camera, and all the processing is done in the brain. Likewise for smell. This not the case, not for vision, and not for smell. This has been know for vision for decades. Only more recently for smell. But Jamie references a book where this is discussed, so he should be aware of it. Not sure how important it is for wine tasting, but if it isn’t important why do we need to be told anything about it at all?

I was also annoyed by his uncritical apparent acceptance of Barry Smith’s idea of an objective flavour property - as distinct from the objective aromatic chemicals, and subjective perception. The idea for me is a total non-starter, so I would at least have liked a better attempt to justify that position.

Perhaps the most interesting stuff I picked up from the book were the sections about multi-modal perception, which I kind-of knew about before, but Jamie has convinced me that it is more important than I thought.

I suppose it is also good in that it brings a lot of information together in one place. A lot of it is not specifically about wine, which you may or may not see as a good thing. I would just caution about the quality of some of the information provided, not just what I mentioned above. Use it as a starting point for exploration rather than the ultimate reference on the subject.

Edit: I was shooting from the hip, with those comment typed hastily and soon after I had read the book. I was not quite right in saying some smell processing is not done in the brain. However, a lot of visual processing is done in the retina - it is not merely an array of pixels. The smell equivalent of that visual processing is done in the olfactory bulb, which is a strange protuberance from the brain, but still part of it.

Steve – Thanks for the insights. Plainly, you’re very knowledgeable.

On the eye-versus-brain issue, I think he is trying to counter the commonly held notion that sensation takes place in the sensory organs. Even I know from (distant) college psychology classes that that’s not the case, but it’s still a view that many people hold unconsciously and I think it’s an implicit assumption behind a lot of discussions of wine.

I can see how for someone like you, a lot of the book may be ho-hum and old hat. But I don’t think he was writing for specialists. The book doesn’t profess to offer new research. I think he’s attempting to sum up scientific research on perception for an audience of wine lovers who are curious about the science. The research he describes is certainly not old news to someone like me.

as per Steve’s comment; multi modal perception is probably a major issue. A lot of this is based on the work of an Oxford psychologist named E T Rolls, and you can reference his work for more information.

A certain person in Burgundy who created a very elite wine club in an 800-year-old monastery in Beaune told me that major Burgundy winemakers have remarked that wines taste better in this monastery than elsewhere. I’m currently writing an article to explain this from the multimodal perception standpoint, has probably been empirically/intuitively optimized by the monks over hundreds of years.

Not familiar w/ this term, Steve. Has this anything to do with Tim Gaisers revolutionary/breakthrough discovery of use of sub-modalities, developed w/ TimHalbom
of the EveryDay Genuius Institute; a tasting system that is taking the wine-world by storm (according to Tim’s WebSite)??
Tom