Virtual Sweetness? Tricks your brain plays on you unveiled..

WINE TALK
1

Overheard regularly in our store when we suggest the perfect wine for a customer’s (highly ethnic) menu:

“But that wine is made from Riesling (or Moscato or Traminer or many other related varietals), isn’t it sweet?”

“No, actually it’s drier than that Chardonnay you have in your hand.”

Since we sell a LOT of aromatic whites that SMELL like honey, candied fruit, tropical flowers and even fancy bath soap but are BONE DRY (and amazing with Thai, Sicilian, Indian, Persian and other highly spiced cuisines), we spend a lot of time thinking and talking about this.

One thing we have to point out is that your entire sensory system is built on pattern recognition: you can read text even if half the letters are smudged or truncated, you can recognize a solarized or profile portrait of a celebrity with no problem and you can figure out a song from a mere tease of the melody. This is a truly wonderful expression of the heights of cognitive evolution to which we (and maybe dolphins and even cuttlefish) have reached, BUT it can also be a two edged sword. Back to wine: we sell an insanely concentrated bone dry Malvasia (our beloved Martilde Piume) that smells like candied lime rinds, wild honey, honeysuckle blossoms and maybe Sophia Loren after a brisk jog and, since your feeble little cerebellum is CONDITIONED to associate these aromas with jam, candy, perfume and maybe even soap, it INTERPOLATES non-existent sweetness into its sensory report to your consciousness in the same way it tells you that you are seeing actual movement at the cinema instead of 24 still pictures per second.

Our friend Terry Theise (an amazing curator of German and Austrian wines plus Grower Champagnes) often pours the SAME Kabinett style Riesling from both its own bottle (tall, slender and green = sweet in many peoples minds) and a Burgundy bottle like your average Chardonnay comes in and asks tasters “Which one do you like better and why” and over half of them prefer the ersatz Chard and pronounce it “so much drier”!!! He then goes on to tell them that the best Chardonnays all come from Riesling (as if it is a place) and to always look for that name on the bottle but that’s another rant entirely.

So, in short, just because something TASTES like super ripe tropical fruits (because it contains the same chemical compounds that tickle the same receptors in your tongue) that doesn’t mean it is also sweet (full of actual residual sugar) any more than Kenny G playing a soprano saxophone makes his music Jazz and, remember, you can’t SMELL sugar anyway.

So, try something different with your Mee Krob, Pollo con Mole or Tandoori and join the Church of Transcendental Aromaticism…tonight!

2

I’m with ya, Roberto! I LOVE a white wine that is sweet and floral on the aromatics, but dry on the palate. This is one of the reasons I flocked to Soave Classico - beautiful floral aromatics, almost as rich as Viognier, but dry, crisp, and acidic on the palate. Nice combo.

3

Experience Traminette. A truly bonked hybrid (Sevyal and Gewurz, iirc) which has these incredible floral aromatics and whose palate rarely follows suit having a not-unpleasant bitters note, but also a hostilely abrupt finish. If someone can ever get it under control, it will be the bomb with those cuisines, being not unlike a rosewater lassi.

That said, some of these wines do compounds (aside from the alcohol) which give a perception of sweetnesss even in amounts, not unlike artificial sweeteners. And others like Muscat are painfully piercing and angular when totally dry - not always bad, but a little rs provides a body.

What I really can’t figure (and don’t think about a lot) is how tannic tea can work so well with Asian cuisine and I can’t find a correct red wine. We won’t even talk about yak butter tea! And pu-erh / certain aged Burgundy have incredible similarities.

A.

4

I usually make a distinction between sweet fruit flavors and sweetness from residual sugar. I think a lot of California wines get taken to task for being too sweet when it’s really the sweetness of the fruit speaking. One may not prefer that but it doesn’t mean they are necessarily sugaring up their wines.

5

Treana is a good example of sweet smelling winee that is bone dry.

6

And you KNOW the Treana credit goes to yours truly, amiright?

7

Ok you get the credit, but only because I’m trying to build up some good will with an Admin!!! Maybe I should’ve done some a$$ kising with Mark…noooo just ban be now. [suicide.gif]
Otto

8

No, because I have some history on that ‘other forum’ where I laid stake to that wine, brah.

9

I’ll be a contrarian, I had a few wines where you get this “impression of sweetness” when the wine is actually quite dry (or even totally dry) but I view it as an artifice more than anything (even if there was no artifice used in producing the wine itself). I actually like my dry wines to have “dry flavors” and my sweet wines to have “sweet flavors” (and the reverse). In my experience it works better this way.

This is why e.g. botrytis notes in Chablis disturbs me, or sweet flavors in my dry riesling. I seem to have more tolerance for dry flavors in off-dry wines, e.g. petrol in off-dry riesling - but that wouldn’t usually do it for me in really sweet riesling.