Does your wine speak to you? by: Matthew

Sounds like a silly question, but in a metaphorical sense it’s what we’re all looking for.  To be more specific, when we taste and subsequently assess a particular wine, the basis for our judgment can really be distilled into whether our sensory perceptions of the wine are intriguing enough to produce intellectual stimulation also.  Are we saying, “This wine tastes like a lot of other wines in this category, it’s what I expected”, or are we saying “This wine really reminds me of a flavor I tasted in great meal about five years ago”?  The difference may seem trivial for some, but a sensory perception of any profundity should, by definition, always provoke a deep mental connection in addition to one’s basic sense of taste.  Wine can arouse our minds through our sense of taste and smell (and touch maybe?) like few other things in the world.  It can introduce us to brand new flavors and smells, it can fondly remind us of past sensory experiences and it can dazzle us by arranging those elements in new combinations, thereby creating something new altogether.  If wine can do all that, then how can we claim a wine to be great unless it meets the criteria of affecting our taste buds and our brains?

Ironically, this phenomenon is sometimes an impediment to bridging the awareness gap between wine professionals and consumers, for many people who get to drink quality wine regularly find themselves lost in a cerebral maze of sensory-based memories, having appreciated wine to a point where the figurative becomes the literal.  This may be why the wine descriptor “Forest Floor” makes perfect sense to some people and no sense at all to others.  As long as we remember that wine does not actually have legs, then I consider it all good, clean fun.