How much of what we taste in wine comes through our nose and palate, and how much of our tasting experience do you think sneaks in through our active minds?
To restate the question, is wine tasting a scientific process? Will a dozen tasters, each tasting the same wine, come up with similar results? Or will their conclusions be simply random?
In other words, is analytical wine tasting replicable? Or do individual tastes and psychological effects leave it entirely subject to personal impressions?
Based on my own experience at wine tastings, I’m just about certain it’s both. Back in the ’00s, I had the good fortune of serving as a judge at major wine competitions from Italy, Slovenia, and France to Australia and New Zealand.
It didn’t take long to learn that experienced wine judges would consistently come up with similar reports on each wine, even after a morning session with hundreds of wines on the tables.
But one consistent rule demonstrates that there’s a clear boundary where science ends and art – or psychology – begins: Judges in most competitions work in silence. It’s not just bad manners to compare notes with fellow judges or yell out descriptors (“I’m getting raspberries! Anyone else?”) There’s actually a firm rule against such collaboration.
So, the wine taster’s dilemma: We can train our tasting skills, but our human nature makes aromas and tastes highly suggestible. Once the idea of raspberries comes out in the open, just about everyone else will start imagining raspberries, too.
These violets that blossomed in our yard in April smell pretty, but they don’t really remind me of the Fleurie featured in today’s tasting.
Most of us aren’t wine judges or even trained tasters. But even if our wine tasting experiences are limited to family and friends around the dinner table, we’re still subject to influences that go beyond simply sensing what’s in our glass. The wine bottle itself might prime our senses with glowing descriptions printed on the back label. Or we might look up the wine with our favorite search engine, only to find a descriptive review on the first results page.
Wherever we find the information, once it’s in our heads, it can be mighty hard to push it out and bring a clear mind and palate to our tasting. This is why, when I taste wine to review for this column, I try to avoid reading tasting reports until after I’ve drawn my own conclusions.
But sometimes that’s unavoidable. This week’s featured wine, for example, comes from Fleurie, one of the 10 villages in the granite hills in the northern end of Beaujolais, whose consistent quality has earned them the right to place their village name on the label rather than simply the generic “Beaujolais”.
The French word “Fleurie” literally means “flowery” in English, but it’s probably no surprise that the wines of the region, as Wine-Searcher.com’s Fleurie information page puts it, are often described as “typically light, silky, and supple, with characteristic floral notes.”
Nevertheless, Wine-Searcher goes on, “Fleurie’s widespread recognition is often attributed to its evocative name. However, the region is actually named after a Roman general, Floricum, rather than for any floral traits in the wine.”
Even so, importer Kermit Lynch’s page featuring this wine declares, “Fleurie … is thought to be more delicate, pretty, and floral, as its name suggests.” The 2022 Chignard Fleurie, it goes on, boasts “a harmonious balance of heft and gravitas, laced with violet and a fresh-cut, blossoming bouquet.”
If I had read that before tasting, would I have found violets in my glass? It’s hard to deny the possibility. In fact, though, I didn’t detect any floral character at all. Heft and gravitas, though? Absolutely! This is one excellent Fleurie, flowery or not.
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