Thanks again, Doug. Erin, the lady who wrote the LocalFlavor article, is a big believer in submodalities as applied to wine tasting.
She recommended that I purchase Tim’s video on wine tasting to understand it. He will be here in a few weeks, but wouldn’t have
time to spare somebody like me. I may get Erin to sit down w/ me & talk about the subject, though.
Tom
So I went browsing CT to find a tasting note which I believe makes great use of sub-modality (not mine):
The nose of this wine smells exactly like a pack of doublemint spearmint gum that has been sitting in the sewage drain of a public pool for a week, only to be chewed by someone with such desperately bad breath that they’d take that aroma over their mouth. The palate is thin and exhibits more of that cesspool water with some pointed fruit that seems to fade into an abyss known as a finish. One of the worst wines I’ve had this year, on the border between drinkable and undrinkable.
I finished working on a show recently which did a bit about tasting food. Submodalities to me means that he is ‘anchoring’ flavors/ aromas with images, something that many Professional Food Lab tasters do.
When you think about a great wine you had in the past, how does it appear in your mind? For me it would be an image or memory of where I was and who I had it with. Now think if you actively trained to taste by sitting in a room with foods that correlate to the flavor wheel? Taste each item and anchor it to a specific memory or image in your mind. Next time you smell or taste something similar it’s a good bet that image will pop into your mind.
People can train to be a better taster, but are still limited by how many taste buds they have. I’d imagine this greatly impacts professional reviews.
Find out what type of taster you are here: How to Tell if You're a Supertaster (test) | Wine Folly
I’d be really curious to find out the difference in taste buds between professionals like Parker/ Gilman, etc.
This from Anders pretty much nails it:
It’s amazing how some methods of teaching and learning work for some and not for others.
Dan,
I’m still a bit confused. Let’s take a specific example: brett.
If if have this (typically) CdP or Coturri sitting in my glass, reeking of brett, and I take a smell. Barnyard out the wazoo. It immediately conjures up this image in my mind
of the barnyard of my GrandPa’s farm, horse & cow $hit all over the place. This is a very good memory because my GrandPa was a special person in my life. If I think a bit more
about it, the image of the feedlots outside of Amarillo also comes to mind. A bad image because Amarillo sucks. If I think more about it, the image of tasting a TonyCoturri
Zin pops into my mind. Not a good image…makes me wretch.
What does submodalaties tell me to do?? Focus on one image or the other?? Are all of them?? Or the image that makes me feel best??
Help me out here.
Tom
Tom I think that there’s a lot of value in anchoring aromas/ flavors but am not familiar with NLP submodalities and how they would benefit tasting. IMO after identifying aroma/ flavors with the help of anchors, I don’t see how going deeper into it would change what is already ID’d. I’d be curious to read his article/ book though.
Gotta wonder about a guy that still considers this borderline drinkable.
I’m trying to work out what the sub-modalities for tasting wine would be. Presumably not acidity, sweetness, fruit, oak, as these are all flavours, just as red/blue/green are specific elements of the colour sub-modality of vision.
Would it be structural elements like texture, grip, viscosity and length? If so, seeing a wine described in these terms is more valuable and relevant to me than a list of subjective flavours.
Heh I thought the same - how many wines this year alone I DNPIM, that weren’t nearly as fetid as this description!
This is not true. People with greater sensitivity (more taste buds) are not necessarily “better” wine tasters, nor is the converse true. There’s a lot more to it than that, and sensitivity to taste sensation is not necessarily the same as sensitivity to aromas. This whole idea was a misinterpretation of the term “supertaster”.
Tom, I think the idea is not to decide to focus on one or another, but to be aware of the images that are immediately and automatically generated in your “mind’s eye”. Tim’s approach has to do with constantly asking yourself internal questions such as (especially this one) “what is here?” and “how much acid is in this wine?”, then paying attention to the images that your brain generates as you evaluate. The idea is not to get so caught up in one element that you’re just paying attention to all the iterations of that. In fact, when one thing overpowers others, he suggests pushing your mental image(s) of that thing out of the picture to “see” what else is there. I have seen that work remarkably well for people.
Do you think the amount of taste buds a person has makes a difference in what they taste? Perhaps my wording was wrong… I don’t assume that one with 3x the taste buds of another is “better” but I would imagine they definitely have far different sensitivities to the same taste (not taking aroma into account).
I think tasting by structure is a great idea precisely for this reason. Cherry-berry flavors are too vague, in most cases. Or at least I believe it’s good to use both.
Those would appear to be touch sub-modalities, not taste.
Unless “tasting” is meant to comprise the entire organoleptic experience.
But I would imagine from a cognitive science perspective things like intensity, timing (attack and decay), flavor (not individual favors but the entire flavor concept) and smell would qualify. Once you start converting the science into palatable, visualizable lay language, something always gets lost in the translation.
This is creating a problem for me, because I didn’t come her to think.
I wonder if olfactory impressions can possibly be classified and analysed the way that music, and to a less precise degree, visual arts can be.
Music has the mathematical precision of waves. Visual arts have color, shapes, and geometric properties (in the most general sense).
Olfactory sense has no continuum, only an agglomeration of molecules that register for some, but not all.
P Hickner
That would be Thai
People can train to be a better taster, but are still limited by how many taste buds they have. I’d imagine this greatly impacts professional reviews.
Find out what type of taster you are here: > How to Tell if You're a Supertaster (test) | Wine Folly
I’d be really curious to find out the difference in taste buds between professionals like Parker/ Gilman, etc.
I don’t think that’s true at all. And “professionals” are only that because they get paid for their notes. They’re not “better” tasters than many other people. I’ve tasted with a few of them over the years and they’re not from any higher order of being.
But the main reason it’s not true is that taste buds are necessarily correlated with one’s ability to discern, discriminate, or make sense out of what one is tasting. Physical taste buds are only partly correlated with the way humans taste. Most of it is done at higher processing levels in the brain.
Yes, different sensitivities to sweet, sour, bitter, salty, umami, but not necessarily better or worse at evalutating wine, at least there’s no current evidence to support that the latter might be the case.
Also, Dan, I just looked at your blog post, and there’s some serious oversimplification and even misinformation on there. I would suggest reading up more on that topic and revising it.
Oh, and what Greg said.
I think that any ‘tool’ that assists folks in breaking down complex things into simpler ones can certainly be helpful, and it appears on the surface that this is what Tim is attempting to achieve - and per Doug’s comments, it appears to have helped him and others,
That said, the concept does appear to be somewhat ‘problematic’ in that subjectivity STILL comes into play when describing even an image of an aroma of flavor. AND for those who discuss texture, subjectivity comes into play here. One person’s ‘coarse’ tannins will be another ‘smooth finish’ because we all have different affinities for bitterness, astringency, sourness, etc. This is quite apparent when I work my tasting room or am at a tasting - one person’s ‘smooth’ may be anothers’ ‘bitter’ - happens all of the time . . .
Cheers