My father’s favorite foods were concentrated in the center and near right. “Your father had the perfect palate for wine,” Utermohlen said. “The way wine was then. Lower alcohol content, higher residual sugar. The classic Bordeaux. He wouldn’t have liked today’s big reds, over on the right—too much alcohol burn.”
Haven’t read the whole thing, but what great writing. I laughed at that this:
My father would have loved [the party] —first-rate minds, first-rate food, enough Wasps to make him feel he’d crossed the river from Brooklyn, enough Jews to make him feel he was not an outsider looking in. And, of course, excellent wine.
Nice article but nothing really revelatory - of course we taste things differently. See them differently too - how do you know your blue is exactly what someone else calls blue? Still, nicely written and for me it hit home because she was essentially describing my wife.
Although the physiology has long been known, it isn’t often recognized. Even your remark about seeing blue is just an old philosophic truism about subjectivity (or falsism, depending on your beliefs). The article is about an irreducible physiological difference, which is different. It should make us more hesitant about not understanding on this board why people don’t always taste the same wine the same way. I also think that its noticeable that wine enthusiasts and critics are likely to be medium tasters or even (if they lean toward high alcohol wines), relative non-tasters, while supertasters will tend not to like wine as being too intense. That should make us think our notions about the sensitivity of the palates of wine critics.