Taste calls on every sense. The tongue is nothing without the nose, nothing without its whole sensory retinue. A miserable cold will throw off your palate the second it blocks your nose. What of the eyes? Naturally, the first taste of a dish comes from its sight. Plating is the signature box, whether Cartier red, Hermès orange or Tiffany blue: the essential accessory of any grand table. With a little training, one can be made to salivate at the ring of a bell, or, failing that, at the glorious bubbling song of cassoulet rising from the oven. Touch matters too: who likes their gazpacho hot? (I am sure you just cringed). In India, a touch of crunch sprinkled over a soft dish is a must that travels rather well to our shores.
Picture forty-seven Bordeaux wines from the same sunless vintage, from the same bank of the Gironde (the left one, the Médoc) and so, broadly speaking, sharing the same blend: dominated by cabernet sauvignon, rounded out with a handful of merlot, a spoonful of cabernet franc and, perhaps, a pinch of petit verdot. Now, your editor assigned you a mission: describe them, one by one. Once you are done with the first, its aromas of green pepper, of black and red fruit, its oak still finding its feet, its gritty tannins and medium-high acidity, you still have forty-six more to go. At some fifty words a wine, that is not far off 2,500 words to spend, slaloming between repetitions all the way. You will, without fail, keep hopping through your vegetable patch and your herbarium in breathless efforts to vary the register. So yes, mouthfeel matters, and the musical metaphor is unavoidable: ah, the gentle melody of a well-bred wine, its tannins pleasantly clawing through an early-summer undergrowth, humming (without quite naming it) of wild strawberry on a bed of wayward grass.
Every wine journalist dreams of inventing a wholly new way to describe wine. Because the fruit basket only stretches so far. The English (namely the Wine and Spirit Education Trust, a.k.a. WSET) gave us a scoring system of precise criteria for sight, nose and palate, rating intensity and complexity on the nose, then acidity, tannin and length on the palate, with markers running from low to high via medium, nuanced with a plus or a minus. A commendable effort at objectivity, one that results in scores fit to depress even the dourest accountant. For my part, when I put my nose in a glass of wine, I like to close my eyes and watch the aromas dot an impressionist canvas with colour.
Of course, in a red wine, ripe fruit conjures black and red (one thinks of prune, of blueberry, of strawberry, fresh or stewed), brown too (for toast, for vanilla, if the wine has seen oak)… The trick is to move past tasting by analogy, to step away from the colour of fruit and matter, and let the picture unfurl, then to look at the canvas in its complexity, and ask how to describe it, how to capture its energy, its message.
This approach, born with wine, now presides quite naturally over my cups of tea, my plates, in the wake of a perfume… I compose a dish the way I compose an outfit: it needs harmony, a complementarity of texture and flavour. Contrasts throw down thrilling challenges, to be taken up with poise. A touch of madness does not merely suffice: when it strikes just right, it wins the day!
Following so far? Let’s get cracking.
Further afield
Sarah Heller MW is as much a painter as a Master of Wine. She signs off with fascinating Visual Tasting Notes. See them on her Instagram →
And in her column for Gambero Rosso, Diario di una Master of Wine, where tasting and drawing talk to each other.
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