I received an e-mail this week. It was advertising for the ‘India Wine Challenge 2007’. For brands trying to establish themselves in ever increasingly competitive markets, any form of differentiation assists in allowing a brand to get their nose in front. A medal at a wine competition can offer one such differentiation.
In fact in the Global Wine Industry, the power of independent critical acclaim can go a long way in augmenting the financial aspirations of a winery. It seems that in making a decision on which wine bottle to buy off the shelf, the consumer does take into account Independent industry critique – which is what a wine medal represents.
Now I don’t know anything about the panel assessing for the India Wine Challenge this year, but they claim to be Independent, which is critical – and also state that the wines will be tasted blind which adds to the integrity of any competition. When I worked at Sacred Hill in New Zealand, the winery had much success in wine competitions, particularly for its range of Premium Reds such as ‘BrokenStone’ and ‘Deerstalker’. It was great to win such competitions, but it was always the Marketing Department who were happiest.
Tasting wines is quite a different phenomenon to opening a bottle of wine and drinking the bottle over the course of some time. Often wines are tasted in flights of anywhere between 5 and 50 wines. No matter what assessors say – If you have a flight of 50 Reds to taste, after half way, even the most experienced tasters experience fatigue. Even though experienced tasters may recognize this fatigue of their own palate, and compensate for it in scoring – it tends to be the ‘upfront expressive’ and ‘front loaded’ wines that often catch the attention of tasters.
Let me explain this a little more. Emile Peynaud wrote an excellent book on the ‘Taste of wine’. [The Taste of Wine: The Art Science of Wine Appreciation, 2nd Edition by Emile Peynaud]. In this book he outlines the sensory nature of taste, and how to apply sensory evaluation to tasting. If a wine within a flight of wines, can tick the boxes in all of these sensory areas and in a balanced way between them – it is likely to perform well in the competition.
Let’s run through the senses of taste. Basically when a human person tastes something, the sensory information is processed in the Olfactory bulb (just behind the nose) and then the signals from here are sent to the brain for interpretation. Taste includes both aroma and the oral taste. Infact the Olfactory bulb is far more sensitive to aroma than to oral tastes. The aroma in many ways sets the stall for the tasters evaluation of the wine.
There are Four Traditionally acknowledged sensations of taste, and more recently a fifth. The first four are the sensations of sweet, sour, savoury and bitter. Sweetness in wine is predominantly found in the sugar and also the alcohol (after alcohol is derived from sugar). Sweetness is often the first thing encountered when a wine is tasted as sweetness receptors are clustered around the front of the human tongue. Sourness comes from the acidity of the wine – usually malic and lactic acids aswell as a few others. The receptors for sourness tend to be clustered around the sides of the tongue.
Savoury i.e. salt receptors are actually located right at the tip of the tongue, but are not usually employed in tasting wines and are often more likely to be seen as a wine fault. (Do not associate this with savoury descriptors which may be used to define a wine)
Bitterness is derived from phenolics and tannins and is at the back of the tongue. Many wine makers saying that achieving appropriate levels of bitterness is essential for making wines compatible with food, and some wine with long and ever so slightly astringent finishes often accompany food incredibly well.
The fifth and newer sense which is still under debate is given a Japanese term ‘Umami’. It ascribes the ‘moreishness’ of a taste – something like Monosodium Glutamate. Then of course on top of all this is the ‘mouth feel’, ascribing such characters as body, depth, texture.
So if you want to wine a medal a possible tip is to stimulate the sweet sense of the taters with lots of extracted fruit and possibly alcohol. In a flight of wines this can give your wine the differentiation over the rest of the flight necessary to put a strong signal into the tasters mind. Of course if your wine is not ‘balanced’, nothing is going to help you.
So good luck to all those who enter the competition and let’s hope it’s a fair fight.
Author: Puneet Dhall