When tasting wine, we are celebrating the unique expression of a place and time harnessed by the grapes’ cultivators. However, the language used to express what we taste is limiting and rarely reflects upon the taster, the places and experiences that construct their understanding of that world. Learning to taste wine is a skill. It involves creating flavour networks with memory and, essentially, playing a very complex game of word association. If you can recall tasting wine for the first time, the only thing wine would taste like was… wine. As you drink more, you can begin to identify individual flavours and aromas like fruits, vegetables, herbs, or spices. You can then attribute sets of characteristics to different grape varieties, winemaking techniques, or vintages. Terroir comes in here somewhere along the way as you see how the different things that make up a place can shape the wine. In tasting a lot of wines, you start to map similarities to other things you’ve tasted in the past, building sensitivity and precision. It’s an extensive rote learning exercise, really.

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When it comes to taste, it’s important to draw out what is and isn’t objective. Aromas and flavours in wine emerge on a molecular level through these things called volatile compounds. They occur naturally, can be created as a by-product of fermentation, through maturation in oak or develop as a wine ages (i.e. reacts with oxygen over time). Our scientific understanding of how smell is perceived is still actively being researched and the picture of how smell works is incomplete. When we smell, molecules are directed up to the roof of our nostrils where specialised receptors called olfactory neurons detect aromatic molecules. This sends signals to the brain’s olfactory bulb, the place where smell information is processed. But the olfactory bulb also sends signals to parts of the brain that are responsible for triggering memory storage, recall and emotional response.
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Ever caught the whiff of an ex’s perfume in the wild followed by a strong emotional reaction or a flood of memories? This pathway helps make sense of why smells can elicit such an intense and personal response. Sometimes with wine tasting, there can be an air of authority on what the objective taste of a particular wine is. But, if everyone has unique memories associated with smell from a lifetime of exposure to different environments, foods and drinks, objectivity seems a fallacy. The only way you could be right or wrong about what you’re sensing is if you were to perform spectrometry on a wine sample and look at the different ratios of volatile compounds in that wine and link these to the known olfactory pathways. But even so, the interpretation of that tasting note is going to be different from person to person, based on their contextual experiences. Differences between genetics also makes a difference to what you’re able to taste. For instance, around 20% of the population isn’t able to smell rotundone, responsible for peppery aromas, and 30% can’t smell mousiness in wine. The issue then becomes a matter of how accessible this ‘skill’ of wine tasting is to people outside of the dominating Western hegemony. For the most part, the contexts where you learn about wine are white spaces; the reference points that are used to build flavour networks and the skill of tasting wine are built around, and for, Eurocentric palates. It’s also done in such a way that implies objectivity which, as we’ve discussed, doesn’t really exist.

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“...if everyone has unique memories associated with smell from a lifetime of exposure to different environments, foods and drinks, objectivity seems a fallacy.”

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Consider how one becomes an authority on taste; the Wine Spirit Education Trust, the global wine education and qualification program.

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For a supposed global organisation, the WSET exclusively teaches flavours and aromas that are normy as. Four spices are covered in the course: black and white pepper, liquorice, and cinnamon (like, tell me this course was made by white people without telling me it was made by white people). The tropical fruits covered only consider bananas, melon, and passionfruit; those readily available year-round at Coles. But, if you don’t stick to their lexicon, you don’t get the marks. It fails to consider the diversity of fruit strains and how different they can be when grown in other places, which is the whole fucking epicentre of the terroir conversation in wine. You’re made to think about wine in a rigid way and to not consider the breadth of flavours and aromas which are actually out there. People who pass the WSET love to flex that the WSET has a pass rate of 50%, but they don’t realise that unless you’ve grown up in the Western world you start off with a disadvantage (classic).

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It’s also important to recognise what being in tasting spaces feels like for someone who isa person of colour, or from a culturally diverse background. First off, it’s immediately tense because you’re likely the only non-white person there. It’s also a performative space which requires being confident and vocal in order to receive validation. Contributing to conversations about what you’re tasting is essential in building an understanding of flavour. This is a challenge for English-second-language speakers where imperfect English, through racialisation, is misconstrued as stupidity.

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Then, consider the spaces where people practise being authorities on taste; wine judging. Traditionally, what is good, correct, and what a wine is supposed to taste like is classically judged through a technocratic lens or fault-based assessment. Yet, palates are different across cultures; when you grow up eating one set of foods, your preference becomes skewed towards things that you have familiarity with. The classic examples of durians, or century egg being unpalatable to Western populations come to mind. Granny Smith apples never made it to South-East Asia either. Frameworks of flavour and balance construct the notion of quality, yet such imaginations are drastically different across cultures. Without representation in these authoritative spaces, the power of what is good and what is correct is restrained by Eurocentric tongues. There’s arguments for wine judging to be useful in progressing benchmarks of style, and there’s arguments for programs like the WSET to be good foundations for developing initial understandings of flavours and aromas. But, it still stands that diversity isn’t a priority.

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“Tasting with people who are different to you opens an entire world of flavour and instead of seeing a wine for what it has been, you can see it for what it could be.”

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Wine is scary; there’s a lot of wine out there and you don’t want to be spending money on something that you’re not gonna like. When you’re at the bottle shop or staring at a wine list, it’s helpful to have someone to trust and look to as an authority on taste. While it’s a cool party trick to be able to taste a wine blindfolded and name exactly what it is, it doesn’t necessarily equate to being a useful authority of taste. Context is important. A long-macerated orange wine with heaps of tannin that needs to be decanted for a few hours before it starts to smell like anything, other than bruised cabbage, is probably unsuitable for a house party. That yuppie going to a meeting just wants a Champagne that his client will recognise. Understanding people is just as important as understanding terroir.

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Precision is really important, so having to nail yet another language, while navigating the middle ground between objectivity and subjectivity can be a triggering experience. in these spaces and this world is largely inaccessible to culturally diverse people.

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Naming the parts of the wine sometimes means you don’t see it as the whole that it is. If you look for faults, you’ll find them. If you look for certain flavours, you’ll find them. It’s a matter of opening your vocabulary and trusting yourself. Tasting with people who are different to you opens an entire world of flavour and instead of seeing a wine for what it has been, you can see it for what it could be. If you’re into wine, you’re probably interested in flavour, and there are nuances out there you don’t know about. You kinda just gotta stick it out and make those taste memories. And don’t forget your palate changes over time, something you find yuck might just be yum later down the track.