Citrus is ephemeral. Sometimes lemon and lime morph together into one and the same, and don’t forget that grapefruit is part orange (when it was created), so these categories are malleable.
Although there are similarities among citrus aromas, and it is relatively easy to create new hybrids, I think it goes too far to call them malleable. Different citrus species and hybrids do have distinct organoleptic character that I find transcend the similarities, and because citrus aromas are so common in wine, I find it useful to try to distinguish them.
Off-topic: check out Robert Lambert’s site to see someone geek out on citrus hybrids and blending them to create different marmalades. These are incredible marmalades IMO.
Exactly. I just thought I don’t need to dress up in my linguist superhero costume again, so I thought “partially discredited” would suffice here. However, it is quite easy to see why the hypothesis is discredited: I could describe all kinds of snow in Finnish with one or two simple words, whereas you would quite probably need to resort to words like “wet snow”, “heavy snow” or “packed snow”, for the lack of better words in English. Despite the breadth of snow-related vocabulary in the Finnish language, I doubt we would perceive the different kinds of snow quite differently.
Ah, the good old qualia. We discussed these things a lot when I studied philosophy.
If you read that Wikipedia entry, it says (1) Eskimos don’t have any more snow words than we do in English, they can just form more variants because their languages’ grammars and (2) it’s not the snow words notion that was discredited by the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, the theory that language shapes our thoughts.
Think of all the English words for different forms of precipitation: rain, drizzle, downpour, monsoon, sprinkle, spitting (“it’s spitting”), hail, sleet, snow, blizzard.
That human variation is important, particularly with smell. Color blindness is a quite specific inability to differential certain colors. Other than color-blind people, as the studies in The Economist showed, people generally agree when naming colors.
The sense of smell is much more complex. First, we’re not dealing with just 13 potential words (the number of basic English color terms). There are scores or hundreds. In addition, there seems to be wide variation of sensitivities to things such as pyrazines (green bell pepper) and TCA and, I suspect, brett, to name just three. In most cases, there are scales of sensitivity to smells, unlike color-blindness, where you either can differentiate red and green or you can’t. (Qualification: Sometimes you either can or can’t smell something. Some people cannot smell the compound that asparagus generates in urine, though it’s quite pungent for most people.)
I was thinking about the bolded remark last night, and that’s plainly wrong. If that were true, English-speakers would be handicapped in describing anything. Having lots of words to choose from is not a limitation.
The issue vis-a-vis wine is how we can describe things more carefully so our descriptions match those of other people who try the same wine (allowing for variations in individual sensitivities).
Memory is, from what I have seen, an important factor in all of this that has not so far come up.
My step-father, Joe Collins won the CA wine tasting championship in Boonville in 90 and 91. Learning the sensory part of winemaking from him was a great.
His memory for smells and wines is unusually good. I’ve seen him taste a cluster of grapes at a new site and say,”This fruit is just like the stuff we got from elk prairie in 2007.” Then, several years later, I go back and taste a 2007 EP from the library and damit if it does not share several traits with the wine made from the fruit he recognized.
Another guy locally who is an ace taster will say things like, “This Pinot has the same profile as the one Briceland sold us 15 year ago.” He remembered the vintage, vineyard, details about that growing season and even the day that he tasted it.
I think of improving at tasting like wearing a track to a smell memory file. I need to improve on this myself. I need a clear memory track into various fruit smells etc. so that when I smell them I can recall them clearly.
John, I think the study is plʔeŋ.
You only truly learn something in minute detail if it really matters intensely to you in some way. if your life depended upon your sense of smell, or if you would starve to death, or freeze to death, or poison yourself without a reliable sense of smell, you bet you’d learn to differentiate key things in a reliable and reproducible way.
This.
And what Andrew said above.
Humans are actually pretty good at smelling and tasting, but we don’t really pay all that much attention. I have tasted wine with a lot of people and the fact that they like it doesn’t mean they’re very good tasters. That includes many people who collect the stuff and write long and florid tasting notes.
To learn it you have to pay attention. And that requires building a memory bank. We can definitely do it - it’s what helped us survive when we were hunter gatherers. Sight obviously matters a lot more to us today, but we are actually pretty good at smell/taste memory too, as long as we pay attention in the same way we do to sight. And the mental patterns are pretty similar too - it’s pattern recognition in each case, at least according to brain studies.
I think that whether we have the words to describe the sensation with precision matters somewhat less. I don’t know what gives that specific green aroma to a tomato leaf, even though I’ve read the chemical name before, but having grown tomatoes I can recognize it. And there is a slightly different aroma associated with each of the four or five kinds of basil I used to grow. Once it sticks in your head, you can remember the distinction between Thai basil and that purple one with the thick leaves that dies fast, whatever the name is. But if you haven’t paid any attention, or haven’t had all of them side by side, you just describe the whole thing as “basil”.
It’s why we call things “red” fruit or "black"fruit or “rose”, none of which really mean much since there are a hundred of roses that all smell different, and there are dark fruits that can be very bitter, sour, or sweet or all of those at once. But if you had boysenberries, blueberries, and black currants side by side, they’re all dark and all different. And then there are the specific cultivars on top of that.
You need exposure + close attention + memory and you’ll do fine. Lots of wine tasters just galp down food and drink all day and then when they open a bottle of wine they obsess over a glass shape and suddenly try to pay all kinds of attention but they really don’t make paying attention part of their lives. It’s more or less like spending all week playing video games and eating granola bars and then deciding to get up and run a 5K race. Good luck with that.
Having to use the EMR and checking boxes, cutting and pasting while trying my best to not making my work day even 5 minutes longer has totally destroyed my writing ability. ![[snort.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/b/bdc3944606213c4dca6c1169cf0a166c8bc4f8c9.gif "snort.gif"){kind=small}
If I remember any details about any patient at dinner time, they have something to be concerned about. 
If there was an app that I could click on descriptors as I am drinking the wine, I could get back in the game of posting instead of lurking. 
Would be interesting to see if an app like this could result in less variability. To really make it accurate, a box of scents could go with it. 
Some folks just have the natural ability to be specific with tasting descriptors, others need to develop it: the more you do it the better you get. I experienced two first time wine tasters, nail their sensory input with no hesitations, both were my wife’s clients who wanted to learn more about wine while visiting CA.
Jim nailed mango in front of Robert Talbott on first whiff of the Chard. Robert knew it was his first time tasting and commented that it was the more specific tropical fruit identifier they used verbally the winery and not in print, nor anywhere else.
At Jacuzzi Winery, Rhayne said the wine reminded her of raking leaves as a child.
Off and running…
I suggest double blind tasting to accelerate your verbalizing skills:it eliminates any preconceived varietal expectations.
Can you point me to some more information on this? I heard an episode of Radiolab that very convincingly made the argument that it does exactly that. There were several examples that my most critical analysis couldn’t come up with any other explanation for. I’m pretty thoroughly convinced. One example involved the ability to think about other people’s perception of things. I would have thought that all adult humans without any mental impairment could do this, but they showed very clearly in a population of people who could not hear that such ability only came with the introduction of language (sign language, in this case) to talk about it.
Well here are some basics on the topic if you are interested in some in-depth reading:
Linguistic determinism
The strongest form of the theory is linguistic determinism, which holds that language entirely determines the range of cognitive processes. The hypothesis of linguistic determinism is now generally agreed to be false.
Linguistic influence
This is the weaker form, proposing that language provides constraints in some areas of cognition, but that it is by no means determinative. Research on weaker forms has produced positive empirical evidence for a relationship.
It has been interesting to read on colors and how different languages somewhat affect the perception. I remember reading that for example in Japan, where they have the same word for green and blue, people don’t differentiate much between the two colors, whereas they are two very different colors to most of the westerners.
I bolded a couple of parts of Greg’s post that I think summarize things to a degree.
It was earlier mentioned that too many or too few words was an issue. I don’t think so. I think the issue is how words are used and how different types of words are not distinguished from each other. In NLP they talk about Sensory Language, Fluff and Super Fluff as 3 broad categories. Sensory is kind of self explanatory. Things that are a direct experience of our senses, like “hot” or “sweet”. Fluff a is made things that are not sensory, but with interview can be broken down into sensory. Like “Tasty” or “Old World Syrah Notes”. There is no way to directly sense these things, and we might have an idea of what the OP means, but if we ask questions, we could find out exactly what they mean in sensory terms. Super Fluff is stuff like “soulful”. We might have an idea of what we think the OP means, but no amount of discussion can clarify it to be sure that we know precisely what they have in mind when they say it in reference to a wine. Some people use words from all three categories in a single note and I think some readers have the false impression that they actually know what the writer meant.
Using words to communicate is tricky. It is best we can do, but far from perfect.
This sums it up pretty well. The best evaluators of aroma and flavor simply do a couple things better than others. If you want to improve your smell and tasting ability, do this.
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Smell and taste EVERYTHING. If the descriptors peachy, plum, cherry are what your tasting your describing loquat fruit which you knew if you had tasted one. Don’t taste one popular variety of fruit, vegetable, spice or herb. Go to ethnic stores and taste them all.
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Memory recall EVERYTHING you smell and taste. Sounds difficult but once you start concentrating on it, it happens quite easily. It could be a smell in the air, an alleyway or urinal. Once you “store it” in memory, its there to recall.
Tom
Colors are conceptual categories. There are quite a range of blues, for example. We have specific words and qualifiers to describe various blues, because if we just read “blue” we’ll assume it means our default blue (for that context), which may be quite different that what the writer is trying to convey. Of course, if the blue being described is what the reader would assume, there’s no need to say any more than blue.
With smells, we have hundreds of types of receptors. (350 functional types, according to wiki.) We conceptualize a lot of smells and flavors the same sort of way, with broader categories, more specific one, to quite specific. We conceptualize plums as a category, despite the vast range in types. One major curve ball here is many of the smells we conceptualize are composites of several compounds. Many of those compounds (as well as similar ones) exist in multiple foods. With something as complex as wine, it’s easy to have different people’s brains processing the same data differently, grouping those compounds in different ways. If you have two picture puzzles made from the same picture, but cut differently, is one of them wrong? It’s a different grouping of the same components. Then we have our individual sensitivities and our individual histories of sensory experience to draw on. Also, we should realize that as we experience a wine evolving in the glass, a lot of that is how much of each compound reaching our receptors changing. That change in proportions leading us to perceive the same compounds differently.
In our modern world we have a vast array of inputs, a lack of importance to focus on most of them, no life-an-death importance for standardized terms. When we get into wine, we’re beginning a sort of remedial education for skills that hunter-gatherers learn as toddlers.