Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:06 — 26.5MB)
Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS | More
Drinking Italian wine anywhere — even in Italy — can be fraught with complications. Is that wine from the area in Piedmont known as the Langhe? Better not say so on the label, unless you have express permission to do so, or risk a fine. Labelling was one of the few topics I didn’t cover in an extensive conversation with Marco Lori, a sommelier who kindly agreed to be grilled. I’m somewhat in awe of people who seem really to know their wines, and so I took the opportunity to ask Marco to try and lift the veil. That he did, with great good humour. There is so much I don’t understand. Like, what exactly do wine people mean when they talk about the smell of green peppers in a wine? Try as I might, I just don’t get that. And the resurgence of natural wines. And I had no idea that careful winemakers go through the harvest bunch by bunch, selecting this one for their top-notch wine, that one for a slightly lesser version. So much to learn. So little time.
Notes
- Jeremy Parzen touched on the latest labelling madness on his website. Absolutely sweet winemakers, quoting Bob Dylan: “to live outside the law, you must be honest”.
- Marco Lori’s website is Off the Vine. Say I sent you; it might do us both some good.
- This is that wine I mentioned. I haven’t managed to find it for sale locally. Yet.
- Intro music by Cerys Matthews. I hope she doesn’t mind. I mean, I don’t mind her website playing music to me unbidden.
https://media.blubrry.com/eatthispodcast/mange-tout.s3.amazonaws.com/2020/taste.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:35 — 18.9MB)Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Android | RSS | More
This is the third in a little mini-series on taste. First came Margot Finn discussing disputations about taste and then Chad Ludington explained how you are what you drink. Now they’re both back, along with a snippet from a long-ago episode with sommelier Marco Lori to round out the discussion. I can’t guarantee that I won’t return to the subject again in the future, not least because I find it endlessly fascinating.
The challenge, I think, is disentangling aspects of gustatory taste that are common to all human beings from those that are overlaid — or do I mean underpinned? — by personal experience or cultural context. So when we say sweet is pleasurable and bitter aversive, what does it mean to say that an adult has a sweet tooth? I freely admit to having a bit of a sweet tooth myself, but I also revel in bitter tastes. How did that happen?
Another puzzle is the memory of complex flavours and how we analyse, process, store and recall the memory. I’ve never put much effort into being able to discriminate among similar but different tastes; I can just about recognise certain wines, for example, but am in awe of people who can discern a particular maker or, even more so, a vintage. So I’m intrigued by Chad Ludington’s thought experiment, that a bunch of randomly selected people would, over time, converge on liking the same few examples of a particular food. Would they? I’d love to see the experiment tried.
Our conversation sent me back to consider some things I first read back in 2011, on the website of Seth Roberts. He was an extremely interesting psychologist and writer who was a great one for self-experimentation. Seth wrote that side-by-side comparisons provided the best opportunity to learn about differences and resulted in an almost instant connoisseurship, which he called the Willats Effect after a friend who pointed it out to him. And, as Seth explained, there’s a downside to this:
Starting with The Willat Effect: Side-by-Side Comparisons Create Connoisseurs and following the links from there you’ll see that although the results are sometimes confounded, it does seem to be the case that side-by-side comparisons very effectively show you what you like.
I’m ready to try that with chocolate. Or bitter liqueurs. You know where to find me.
Notes
Food Fights, the book that prompted this mini-series, is published by University of North Carolina Press.
Chad Ludington teaches history at North Carolina State University.
S. Margot Finn is “inconsistently” on Twitter.
Marco Lori’s website is Off the Vine
Banner photo from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Those barbels around its mouth are where it keeps its taste buds. Cover photo by Anne on Flickr. Twitter photo by Jason Lam from Flickr
Huffduff it
[…] and Jeremy talked to a wine expert about how to become a wine […]
[…] and Jeremy talked to a wine expert about how to become a wine […]