Chemosensory scientists study how we process smell and taste. With the latter, they estimate the human tongue has between 2,000 and 10,000 taste buds, with the average adult having between 2,000 and 4,000. Each taste bud also has between 50-150 specialized receptor cells that respond to the five basic tastes. Those being sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami/savory.
The big five remind me of the tongue map of old. The slightly alarming graphic depicting a large human tongue divided into different zones, each demarcating sensitivity to one of the five tastes. The concept was formulated by a German scientist named David Hänig. Harvard psychology professor Edward G. Boring later took Hänig’s concept one step further and created what came to be known as the tongue map. Science has since debunked the idea, proving that every part of the tongue can detect the five basic tastes.
We also now know that there are taste receptors throughout the oral cavity down into the esophagus. But there’s more. Taste receptors can be found throughout the body. But instead of sensing flavor—and I’ll quote an online source here, “they act as chemical sensors to regulate metabolism, trigger immune responses, and control digestion.” These receptors can also be found in the digestive tract, the pancreas, the respiratory system, the brain, and even the reproductive system.
Regardless of location, the good news is that the taste receptor cells are naturally replaced every one-to-two weeks. So if you scald your tongue on something hot, or nuke it with a mouthful of Carolina Reaper peppers, your tongue will eventually recover.
Now for the so-called supertasters. The individuals who have a significantly higher density of fungiform papillae, or the mushroom-shaped bumps on the tongue that contain taste buds. If we talk tongue density, supertasters generally have 35 – 60 papillae in a six-millimeter area vs. the average Joe, who has just 15.
You might think being a supertaster would be a plus. In reality, not so much. Because supertasters have more densely populated papillae on their tongues, they experience certain tastes like bitter, sweet, and spicy more intensely. Not only that, they also have more pain fibers surrounding their taste buds, so are more sensitive to the extent that they experience outright pain when eating spicy foods. In other words, a nibble of a Carolina Reaper might send them to the ER. So one man’s spicy meatball is another’s gustatory tragedy.
Curiously enough, the supertaster thing doesn’t necessarily map over to wine expertise. Sure having a hyper-sensitive palate is a good thing when it comes to tasting a complex wine. However, more than a few wines have high tannin, high alcohol, or high acidity, any of which might send a supertaster over the edge. No Barolo for you!
There’s something implied with all the previous as it has to do with wine. The notion that the palate is the most important part of the tasting experience. That’s definitely true for a certain demographic in the industry. I think winemakers, at least some of them, seem fixated on texture. How their wine feels on the palate. To them, fining trials and filtration methods are critical aspects of winemaking. The same goes for tannin management in red wine. Consumers would be the first to agree with the latter, saying that their favorite red wines taste smooth.
I will go one further with the palate-centric idea and mention the Geosensorial Tasting Method taught by the International Wine Scholar Guild (WSG). The term geosensorial was created by Jacky Rigaux, and further developed by Julien Camus of the WSG with the help of French industry professionals and winemakers.
In the summer of 2020, during the COVID lockdown, Julien sent me a beta tasting grid based on the Geosensorial Method. It was a complete departure from traditional tasting grids that use the sight-smell-taste sequence. Instead, it focused entirely on the palate with criteria such as geometry, shape, energy, induced salivation predicated on soil type, texture, consistency, energy, and vitality.
The geometry section of the grid used symbols to describe the energy of the wine. For example, a wine can have a direction with options such as vertical, horizontal, or radiating. Also, a wine could have a shape with the possibilities of sharp, broad, squared, or round.
The grid also asked the taster to quantify the energy of the wine using colors, ranging from yellow, red, green, blue, and brown. Then matching those colors to qualities such as repulsive, troubling, neutral, benevolent, and attractive.
Another underlying premise of the Geosensorial Method is the idea that looking at a wine’s appearance predisposes the rest of our tasting experience. According to Gabriel Lepousez, a neurobiologist from the Institut Pasteur, our eyes override our taste preferences. Given that presupposition, the method intentionally reduces the amount of visual and olfactory data, enabling a taster to experience—and I’m quoting a source here—”a more objective, holistic, and stable map of a wine’s physical architecture on the palate.”
At the time, I thought the Geosensorial Method was curious and a significant departure from traditional tasting philosophies and grids. I also found some of the criteria to be subjective and wondered how they could be standardized, so they could be taught and used in examinations. If anything, the ethos of the method is a return to a time when non-technical terms were used to describe wine. Which is why the so-called reductive tasting grids as used by the WSET and CMSA were developed.
What does it all mean? That some in the industry believe that the palate is the end-all, be-all of the wine experience. My viewpoint is different. Our capacity to smell, and the number of things we can potentially smell, exponentially dwarfs the number of things we can taste. While the exact number varies with the source, all accounts point to well over 100,000 things.
My tasting process is olfactory-dominant. When I work my way through a wine, I already know at least 70% of the information about it after looking at it and then smelling it, with emphasis on olfactory. When I finally taste a wine, I’m confirming what I’ve already smelled and then assess the structure—the levels of acidity, alcohol, phenolic bitterness, and tannin. Further, the combination of the wine’s color and fruit ripeness has already clued me into the structure levels.
As for sight biasing my judgment of the rest of the tasting sequence, I think that’s how it’s supposed to work. Humans are visual-dominant internally in that over 90% of us think in pictures and movies. We process the world visually, so what we see always informs our experience. In the context of tasting, all aspects are interconnected with each aspect informing the others. Looking at a wine then, can—and should—set up expectations about what it will smell, taste, and feel like on the palate. In other words, all the dots should connect. And things that impact wine color also play a part in how the wine smells and tastes.
Stepping back from details to overview and big picture. Regardless of how we teach tasting or what grid we use, the end goal of any wine certification or training is for the individual to be able to judge wine quality. At the end of the day, that’s what we as professionals are hired to do in any industry job, regardless if it’s buying box wine for a corner market or choosing Grand Cru Burgundy for a three star Micheline restaurant. Any grid that we use then should help us judge wine quality by using as many tools in our brain kit to assess wine. And that includes how it looks, smells, tastes, and feels.
In the end, multiple viewpoints are always good—and there is more than enough room for different methods of how to taste wine. It’s what makes our industry so dynamic and ever-changing. Nothing could be better.
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