NutriWine
Ralph Quinlan Forde
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Published in 2011 by Health E Books Limited
Smashwords Edition
NutriWine Copyright 2011 Ralph Quinlan Forde
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
The author asserts the moral right under section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Book Cover Copyright Francis Lanuza
British Library C.I.P.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-0-9571318-3-5
This book is available in print at most online retailers.
Disclaimer
The
publisher and author make it clear that this work is for general use
and may not be substituted for medical advice by a qualified medical
professional. Nothing in this book should be construed as an attempt
to offer medical advice, opinion or engage in the practice of
medicine. The author and publisher shall have neither liability nor
responsibility to any person or entity with respect to any loss or
damages arising from the information contained in this book.
Sales enquiries please contact rqf@nutriwine.net
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To
Professor Leo Pyle
Ian Scott Naomi Mathew
Isco
Javier & Checho
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Table of Contents
5: Wine as Preventative Medicine
6: Artificial Intelligence Vineyard
Preface
Champagne?! You treat depressives with Champagne?...Wow.
Those were the words of the high end magazine editor in response to my answers in an interview, born out of a story beginning to circulate about my clinical work. Yes indeed, I do treat depressives with Champagne. You see, wine has a very long tradition in preventative medicine world wide and particularly in France. A fashion photographer who also worked for the magazine came to consult with me. As part of the healing protocol for them, I included a glass of Champagne a day for two weeks, to lift my patients’ spirits.
When the magazine found out about this they ran straight to the phone.
So welcome to the world of wine - a $107 billion industry. The USA is now the biggest consumer of wine today, overtaking France and Italy. The global wine industry will soon produce over 27 billion liters of wine a year. Wine enthusiasts in the USA alone are some 80 million people. Thomas Jefferson, American President who was a wine enthusiast and visionary founder of the republic, would be very proud indeed.
French physicians actually prescribe wine for different ailments as part of a preventative medicine protocol with their patients. This long and ancient tradition of wine as a preventative medicine should not be lost, which is why I am writing this book. We need to re-engage western medicine with wine and its health benefits. Wine has been a big part of the global materia medica for millennia.
Medicine without wine has actually cut itself off from its ancestral lineage of integrative and preventative medicine. Prohibition caused the impasse between wine and health, but wine has always been a culture of moderation and studies demonstrate this. A whole generation of physicians have been educated without ever having been taught the health benefits of moderate wine drinking. With one out of eight Americans soon to develop diabetes we need to be open to all solutions, even natural ones like wine, to prevent this epidemic.
The French Paradox is taken up with why French people eat more fat daily than Americans but suffer less heart disease in a modern world. They are also slimmer. Much slimmer. The French are not haunted by obesity the same way as in the USA. Medical research points to the effect wine has on the French in keeping them healthy and they live longer too. Wine contains some powerful biochemicals such as vitamins, minerals, amino acids and especially antioxidants that can boost peoples’ health. These are in a form that nature designed and not what marketeers have invented. Wine contains natural vitamins, not chemical ones. Some people even say wine is close to the composition of blood in ways.
We need to reconnect people to the blood of the earth once again. Some of the healthiest longest living cultures of the world regularly drink wine in their diets. There is no doubt now that diet plays a crucial role in health according to scientific studies. If we add wine to that healthy diet regimen you can immediately help boost your health and wellbeing in terms of the amount of antioxidants you ingest and fat managing properties you add. Wine has been shown to help heart disease, cancer, obesity and even offset dementia. These are just some of the ways that wine appreciation can contribute to your wellbeing, prevent a heart attack and even extend your lifespan. However more research needs to be done which will reveal more astounding health factors if the example of resveratrol is anything to go by as a ‘magic bullet’.
The wine industry is awash with lots of great characters and fascinating innovators. Wine is far more than just Chateau, taste, bouquet and price scale. Wine appreciation is a way of life that generates social communities and new experiences. Wine is an art form imbued throughout with an alchemy from the earth and the sun. This alchemy is imparted to us through the medium of wine. This same alchemy can heal us and the ancients in their universal wisdom have long known this. Modern people are described as suffering a form of starvation that is called ‘Dionysian’ that wine is said to cure. This starvation refers not just to food hunger but a hunger for the joy of life itself which is very prevalent in a society today that lives to work rather than works to live.
China is fast becoming a producer of wine and Hong Kong has now become the centre of fine wine auctioning, surpassing New York. How we influence the global wine industry as the people who buy wine, such as opting for organic green wine, can hugely influence how they develop. In doing so, we can also help sustain the global ecosystem and inspire a green movement within China with the new young generation of wine makers on their way.
Wine is also under threat from climate change and the industry could entirely disappear within 20 years if we don’t reduce levels of greenhouse gases in our environment. Due to global warming, alcohol levels are increasing which is changing the traditional taste of wines. Vineyards are being affected and some even destroyed in flooding and fires from the instability of the weather systems due to climate change. We don’t need to wait that long to see this outcome. Australian vineyards have already suffered terribly from climate instability in recent years. The good news is we now have the first carbon zero winery and a bodega in Spain is heated using geothermal power from the earth. So it can be done.
The industry also needs to stop looking in the mirror and start looking out the window. For far too long the industry has been a bit stagnant and not directly engaging with consumers.
There are now over 14 million conversations about wine taking place online every year in social media. Part of this fear of engaging with the consumers is about losing profit margins by enthusiasts who judge wine quality in terms of price when there has been no other evaluation method. Wine in glass bottles is no longer sustainable or acceptable to enthusiasts who have an ‘eco conscience’ and most of them now do.
Wine enthusiasm will save lives, catalyze social communities and could even revolutionize agriculture. The wine industry could take the lead and cover all vineyards in healthy living soil rather than the dead soil and monoculture it currently manages which needs ever more fertilizers and dangerous pesticides. They could, in fact, initiate a movement that would eventually trap all the excess CO2 in the atmosphere which is causing global warming, using a natural easy to make substance called biochar. These are just some of the exciting stories you will read about in this book.
You know, the wine purchasing power of all us enthusiasts could save the planet by opting for wine with more eco-bling. We could save ourselves in the process due to the substantial health benefits. We, the wine enthusiasts, are the wine world and we can conserve it for future generations but we need to take action now. Our green purchasing power can shape the future of wine. This is why we need to become more involved and informed about the wine we use or should use in our daily life.
As an Irish person, I am also inspired by the effect Irish people have had on the wine industry the world over. The Irish diaspora, such as the Lynch Chateaux in Bordeaux, MacMahon in Burgundy, the Celtic Saints who started vineyards in Europe, the Barry and Horgan families in Australia, Francis Mahoney the ‘King of Pinot’ in the Nappa Valley and Jim Barrett, the owner of the Californian vineyard Chateaux Montelena. Barrett produced the Chardonnay that was the wine that stunned the critics at the historic Judgment of Paris - a landmark blind tasting that changed the world of wine forever. Wines of caliber, after this event, were accepted to be in the new world as much as the old. I hope that this book I have written continues the tradition of the contribution of Irish people to wine culture.
The wine universe is very exciting, interesting and well worth your exploration through the lens of NutriWine. So here’s to your health. Slainte! That’s Irish for a toast to your health and wellbeing.
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1: The Wine Mind
If you’re a wine enthusiast it’s really important that we establish who you are - as YOU are the world of wine.
You take 38 seconds to decide what bottle of wine you want to buy.
You are particularly attracted to wines with medals on their labels. What the psychology of your mind appreciates about wine in terms of seeing, tasting, smelling, thinking and most of all buying, perhaps even believing, drives the industry both in culture and innovation. Psychology Professor Larry Lockshin found that it takes you this time on average to buy your bottle of wine and much of that decision is based on what the label is and its design.1 More than ever we want wellbeing, escape from stress, relaxation and meaning.
Wine appreciation delivers on all three. The world of wine is easy to understand, enjoy and belong to with a few basic pieces of information. The first place to start your journey is to know who exactly drinks wine and why? After all, in the USA alone there are over 80 million of you.2 Globally over 26 billion liters of wine is consumed annually.3
The Wine Enthusiast
Every month you wine enthusiasts drink wine in:
- the USA once a week
- the UK once every month - lots of women drinkers
- Australia 21 glasses per month4
- China at the weekends socially by young professionals or at banquets.
You would all drink more, you say, if you knew more about wine and could easily get that information in a way that was not education. If you’re a man wine is about status and success; if you’re a woman then it’s about socializing and in fact 80% of all wine now purchased in the UK is by women.5 If you have an oenological ‘instinctual drift’ or wine mind in the U.S. then you will be living generally in the east coast and have a professional career.
The three words that are key to being a wine enthusiast are color, smell and taste. People who like to explore wine for relaxation are as much enthusiasts as the ones who love the world of wine as a pet subject or who become sommeliers. You are the ones buying all the wine. The world of wine has lots more than the history of the Chateaux to offer you. There are wine pairing, health benefits, new wine makers, technology and a green organic movement full of eco-bling. Something for everyone.
You don’t have to make tasting notes to be an enthusiast; you just have to be interested in taste. Don’t think the world of wine requires you to swirl wine and start spouting poetic descriptions as such as ‘dark as Madagascar’ and ‘flavors unravel like a striptease’. With a bit of exploration, like knowing the wine regions and grapes, you could deepen your choice. Right now the vast majority of you base your purchasing decisions on price scale. High priced wines are better, and cheap wines are just that. But are they? What about the taste? Aroma? What region? What is the grape? What is the terroir or land they have been grown in? Have you ever asked yourself what wines you actually like? Taking some time to explore this would be great. As the ad says - ‘You’re worth it’.
You might like wines from a particular region like Bergerac rather than Bordeaux. Your wine may be cheaper on the scale but that does not mean cheap in ‘experience’ which is what you truly value if you are a millennial. The flavors will all be there and by a great winemaker and vineyard too perhaps. Price does not reflect totally on quality or individual experience or reflect the meaning of the wine for you or your friends. Price is not a guarantee on quality totally. You have to develop your nose and connect with some great winemakers and vineyards.
By exploring different wines, imagine, you can taste the world. Even if you have a regional wine favorite one can still explore and find other likes from a whole range of wines. Plus you get to socialize and have fun. If you always drink what you always partake of in terms of wine that is all you will get. Go lateral - as the mind once stretched never regains its original shape.
Generation X & Millennial Digital Natives
There is one of two groups you will generally belong to with your wine enthusiast peers – the Baby Boomers and Generation Xers or ‘Millennials’. If you were born before 1980 you’re in the Xer’s 35 – 46 age set and if it’s after, you’re with the Millennials. The two groups have very interesting psychological outlooks when it comes to wine. If you’re generation X, then your appreciation of wine is with food and dining. Wine is the reward at the weekend for all the hard work and helps you to relax and unwind. As you get older you seem to get into wine tasting more and deepen your sensory understanding. You do seem to slip back to beer but some good reasons, starting perhaps with health, could keep you in the vineyard.6
Millennials are the darlings of the wine industry. Marketeers everywhere are bouncing up and down about them. You love new, go for adventure and love ‘experience’ products. As a millennial you will be under thirty and will already have an appreciation for the taste of wine as it will be your first legal drink. You will use wine as a lifestyle choice and in social settings, and as you age and settle down it will become part of meal times, enhancing your dining experience. The industry is getting very excited about you Millennials, but seems to be doing little to engage with the 35-54 age bracket who are responsible for 44.1% of all wine purchases. This is double what the Millennials buy and as the Boomers (45-65) age, they are more and more likely to drink wine. As a Boomer you will account for one in four bottles of wine consumed in the USA. The Wine Department of the Silicon Valley Bank recently stated that the Boomers in fact drive the luxury wine market.7
All of you are also very smart. A third of you have completed graduate school.8
Where the Millennial generation is starting out is different from Boomers and Generation Xers. The Baby Boomers were born just after the end of alcohol prohibition and were the children of men and women who grew up in that era and through The Great Depression which did much to stigmatize wine appreciation and culture. They dined with wine but only started appreciating wine and socializing with it later in life. Much of the wine they drank was actually made in the garage. For them it was something that went with food and was part of traditional family life, especially if they were Italian. There were no sophisticated Chateaux or wine regions. If it came from the garage or cellar there would have been little art and craft in the wine such as we see in wines today like Pinot Noir. There were no wine tasting evenings and wine was not used for socializing, but dining. The wine health connection did not come into the everyday vernacular until much later in the 1990’s.
The Millennials clearly start wine appreciation at a very young age. They view wine with leaps of value as a social product which satisfies their needs for sophistication and also has value in terms of luxury and health. Health is a major trend you follow. Over 20% of males in this bracket drink wine as opposed to 6% of the older age groups. Half of them, nearly 36 million, have yet to reach the legal age limit to start appreciating wine.9 Being the first generation of ‘digital natives’, in other words computer savvy, they appear to break beyond the fear that blocks generation Xers in exploring wine through the internet. They ask their wine questions online and get immediate answers. This digital space allows them to ask the questions a Generation X person is afraid to ask for fear of embarrassment. Social media is all about conversations and Millennials understand that new questions create new answers that generate new possibilities, especially in their choice and experience of wine.
They like to be part of a movement generated by the other enthusiasts rather than slick ads. This is what gets them all twittering. They trust their peers’ evaluation more than an expert or critic. In other words they tell you what wine they will be drinking. They also buy the higher priced wines as a luxury wine. You see they are already onto wine sophistication through sensation: color, smell and especially taste. They want quality not quantity, and experience not bumper value packs. They are curious about wines from other countries like New Zealand, Australia and Chile. Their wine choice does not suffer any xenophobia. However, even though Millennials are transforming the wine industry through social media which influences news feeds, Generation Xers are also being encouraged to explore their wine and expand their range of taste and experience too. The Millennials are actually fuelling the growth in diversity right across the generations. How exciting and even more so when you consider what power they have to shape the future of the wine world.
In reality, the wine and health connection is going through a sort of renaissance from the damage of prohibition, and viticulture is now being truly valued as a craft and science beyond the bottle. Wine culture certainly has an allure or x factor which the Millennials are attracted to. Certainly the young professional Chinese. The new wine appreciation movement taking place on social media is rapidly revolutionizing the world of wine for people in every demographic and the industry too.
One thing no one seems to have thought about is how to increase the amount of black people drinking wine - a minority who only account for 20% of wine drinkers. In addition over 30 million Millennials are Hispanic and will need to be marketed to in a specific cultural way. In both cases there is a danger that if the industry is not mindful they may loose entire generations to beer.
The Wine Lady - Entertainment & Elegance
If you’re a lady living in the UK, you purchase 8 out of the 10 bottles of wine in your home.10 However you only drink wine once a month. If you’re a young professional female in Manhattan then you are more than likely drinking foreign wine - Italian in fact - and ordering wine by mail order. Over 80% of the mail orders for wine are by your good selves which may surprise people. Women purchase nearly 60% of all wine in the U.S. You may have 12 bottles on the wine rack on average and will be the one to pay $15 and above for your wine. Women are pushing sales in both sparkling wine and rose globally. In the last few years the glut of rose wine can be clearly seen increasing in the supermarket aisle. When confronted with the wine wall in a supermarket perhaps it’s just easier to grab rose and head off to gather the rest of the weekly shop. As women are loyal to their brands, both of those sectors of the wine industry are booming. Women want to entertain and sparkling wine helps create a bubbly ambiance with friends for parties.
On the other hand women are fast becoming connoisseurs openly. The wine industry, looking inward as usual, has been marketing to women through the creation of kitsch feminized marketing. Like the pink labels and even the sweetness of the wine. Most sensible women would not touch that stuff with a long barge pole. Women know when they are being given a hard sell as it’s they, 75% of them, that do the shopping at the supermarket. There is no meaning other than profit for the producer in these generic wine products. When a women goes to buy wine it’s not an impulse decision, it’s well thought out and needed to enhance her time with her friends, family or lover. Wine feminists are beginning to be very vocal about this whole ‘girlie’ marketing issue and clearly feel they are being patronized. Many women are more knowledgeable about wine today.
A study in the UK found that women believe that buying wine with groceries was not really ‘buying’ wine.11 They felt that it was the man’s job to get the specialist wine and even order it in the restaurant. Meridian wine makers are helping to change that awkwardness with their publication ‘7 Things Every Gal Needs To Know About Ordering Wine’. Women, wine marketeers believe, buy wine for a moment, whereas men tend to hoard the wine. Ladies shop with their experience in mind. For example Italian wine with Italian food. Men are looking for high ratings perhaps a trophy. These are just general observations and in time this will change with the female Millennials.
The keyword for women and wine has got to be elegance.
The $835 Billion Pink Dollar
As you can imagine I have had to read a lot of marketing reports on wine to get an idea of who is drinking wine. Crawling over them and through them. One of the most fascinating observations about those reports is that there is not a mention of the pink market. The pink dollar is now worth $835 billion.12 The word ‘gay’ is not referred to even in terms of happiness. How bizarre? If you’re LGBT (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender) then apart from drinking fine wine, you will have the best professions, the best jobs, the best holidays, the best bodies, the best homes, the best education and if that is anything to go by - the best wines. So what on earth is stopping this Goliath of an industry making reference to you people? You are driving the luxury goods market. There is lots of DINK going on with you and by that I mean double income no kids. Not Donna Karen. Families consisting of gay parents are now increasing. If you have anything, it’s taste for the finer things in life. You have loads of disposable income.
The only wine specifically marketed to your section of society is called ‘Pansy’ and created in Australia. Not surprisingly, it’s a sweet rose and the label owner is a drag queen called Miss Onya Knees. That’s it globally? Over 500 people turned up to the product launch. Perhaps the industry is afraid of upsetting people, like Guinness when they decided to block a gay-themed ad of theirs airing. The ad was leaked to the press in the UK who had a field day and Guinness even tried to deny the ad’s existence. When it’s played to gay audiences it gets a standing ovation. The pink dollar is an economic reality. One bank never even mentioned them in their economic forecast. Now that same sex couples can marry, what do you think they are going to be drinking at their weddings? Ribena? The gay wine market in Sydney has been estimated to be worth $4.5 million a month.13
Can you hear the corks popping, Bubbalicious? So why are you not included in the marketing reports? Is the wine industry homophobic? Bass beer is not afraid. They have invested and have even been advertising in gay publications for years. Gay people must be drinking lots of wine for its sophistication, elegance and culture which resonates with them naturally. We need more research about why they like wine. Over 10 million people in the USA are estimated to be LGBT.14 If you include all the people on the fence and who live in Narnia this could easily be pushed up to 20 million safely.
When you consider that the industry is jumping up and down with glee about 35 million Millennials, why is there not the same excitement or care about the 20 million gay people? A large proportion of whom are probably drinking wine? Is this still a love that, for the wine industry, dares not speak its name? How tragic and shameful.
Chinese Wine Aspirationals
China is booming and fast developing a thirst for premium wines. Wine is part of a trend towards luxury goods there. With an ecosystem of a million millionaires their thirst for fine wine will only increase. The Wing Lung Bank in Hong Kong recently started to offer loans of over $600,000 to build wine portfolios from a select list of over 50 wines from the Bordeaux region. Hong Kong has removed taxes and importation duty on fine wine. Most of the wine you buy is red and the color red has lots of meaning in your Chinese culture, not least as being very lucky. Fine wine is a status gift for you. Wines are repeatedly reaching record prices at the Hong Kong auction houses. Every year China drinks 1 billion bottles of wine and has a market that is growing by 30% annually.
If you’re a new Chinese wine enthusiast, chances are you’re one of the new jet set, entrepreneurs who are into sports cars, designer clothes – all luxury goods that include wine. You are a wine neophyte but wine gives you prestige. Luxury putajau is the badge of your sophistication. First growths of Bordeaux are what you have been focusing on. You drink fine wine as part of your lifestyle rather than hold onto wine to invest. You like to be seen drinking wine at fashionable bars but you don’t quite understand wine appreciation. You want any wine as long as it’s French, which for you is the height of sophistication. You are a sophisticated consumer and you will easily pay for an ‘interesting’ wine.
You are all young and excited about wine. However you find it hard to get good information. As regards wine tasting, flavors like blackcurrant are culturally foreign to you. So you need reliable sources to explain wine culture to you and perhaps culturally translate it. As you are growing exponentially, this is wine history in the making and is the responsibility of everyone involved that your own wine culture premier cru grows in the right direction. Your lack of wine education can lead to you being ripped off. You may end up paying $100 for a $1 wine relabeled as Bordeaux or Burgundy. Counterfeits abound. You want to drink wine as you don’t want to be a baijiu drinker, which is a traditional grain spirit. In fact the Chinese government has been trying to encourage people away from its use and are promoting wine culture as a healthier alternative. Every year in China, over 2.5 million people graduate from university, most of whom will become wine drinkers.
Simon Tam is seen as the key contact for wine and Asia. He has recently been appointed by Christies as Head of Wine China. For over 20 years he has been educating the Chinese wine market. Hong Kong Futures is becoming a hub for Asia. All of the great names in the world of wine have been attending this new event. As the market potential in China is so huge, wine making will become more and more popular in China. Yao Ming, the Chinese basketball player, has launched his own label of Californian wine. He has strategically positioned himself to welcome all the Chinese interest in wines of the Napa valley. What a hook shot. He is clearly a visionary and entrepreneur and will be in position when the Chinese interest in wine will naturally evolve to California after their entry via Bordeaux to the wine universe.
The fine wine makers in France want to put a ceiling on what they export to China. Some Bordeaux wine producers have capped the levels of their stock to protect their wine and culture being entirely exported. This could be some crafty economic oligopoly too. Your market is so huge you could swallow what they produce in one national gulp. Some of you are even beginning to buy your wine by the vineyard.
Wine speculators need to remember that standard wine is imported and mixed with Chinese wine and there is a very low profit margin. So the way to profit from the Chinese market is through the luxury wine route, even though the Chinese wine market is expected to be the biggest in the world in the next few decades. Chinese people also may take easily to wine tasting as they have a sensitive nose. If you look at the world of perfume they like soft scents and therefore can notice and appreciate delicate aromas.
Chinese wine making is about to explode in production and innovation. Some years ago when I attended a conference on stem cells, the western scientists told me that when they visited labs in China they were amazed at the dexterity of the Chinese scientists in working with stem cells. Wine will be no different for the Chinese, especially if they start moving into luxury wine production. When they figure it out with government support. This century will belong to China.
Future Trends & Innovations
We as wine enthusiasts are shaping the new trends in wine. Man, woman, Baby Boomer, Generation Xers, Millennials, the young Chinese aficionados. All of us. Our minds and our perceptions are influencing this global industry. Over the next decade we will want more information about our wine as we will firstly be more informed. Eco packaging will be something that will impress us, as well as wines with eco-bling. There looks like a beginning of a BYOW (Bring Your Own Wine) movement to restaurants where they will cork it for a charge. More people will be exploring the world of wine through trial size bottles, the size of a single glass of wine. Hopefully with this book, people with medical conditions will be encouraged to start moderate wine drinking to help extend their lives.
Wineries may be able to sell more wine direct to their consumers. People will be storing more wine in their houses. Wine appreciation will move away from snobbery and critics and towards an open and inclusive culture that is based on experience and moments of meaningful living. Wine is going to be discussed in terms taste, quality and perhaps tradition but even more so what your wine label means to people. The fans of your wine label may even create a new meaning for it. There have been a few cases of this happening on Facebook, about which people say that if it was a country, it would be the fourth biggest in the world. More and more of us will be talking about wine and when we get to Wine 3.0, this will have such a huge impact that none of us can predict what the outcome will be. This is the next stage in social media when the www (world wide web) goes semantic.
Chinese wine quality will improve through joint ventures. More people will be buying bag-in-a-box containers, as glass bottles are just not sustainable. The world will be awash with sparkling wine - all types - not just Champagne. Wineries will start talking directly with their consumers through social media. Wines with a lower alcohol content will be in increasing demand. Millennials, as social groups, will start making fine wines in the garage creating a demand for technical kits and expert advice. Wine brands will need to have a narrative to succeed. New technologies will have to be invented in viticulture to reduce alcohol levels and protect taste in wines which are being affected by climate change. Organic wines will be more on the consumer purchasing radar. Enthusiasts will go to classes to learn more about wine but they won’t be in traditional settings. More wine tour tourism. You’re going to be drinking wines from every country as part of your exploration and fine tuning your palate. Most of all wine will be increasingly connected to health and wellbeing. Innovations and new product developments will take place around this trend.
So there is a lot to get excited about and many different doors for someone to enter the fascinating world of wine.
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2: The Tasting Lab
Your nose has over 15 million sensors to experience the aromas of wine. The way in which you then cognitively order them in your mind is what makes you an expert.
The whole point of wine appreciation is to come to an understanding about the different characteristics of wine. To have a knowledge of the tastes, colors and aromas of different wine styles. This also has significant benefits, as the longer you hold the wine in your mouth, you absorb 100 times more the anti-aging phytochemical resveratrol than you will by the stomach. Sommelier Raj Parry gives the best guidance when he says, “Taste what’s in the glass, not what’s in your mind”.1
See Swirl Smell Taste & Savor
When you come to wine tasting you just need to remember five S’s which are: see, swirl, smell, taste & savor. See the wine’s color, swirl the wine to release the aromas, smell the wine but seven times, taste but swash it around in your mouth and swallow and savor any aftertaste.
Wine appreciation is normally known as wine tasting, which should have really been called smelling, as this is the primary sense you’ll be using. Wine tasting is similar to learning a new language and all the benefits that can bring in expanding your mind and life experience. You start off with the basics - the wine varietals - Cabernet, Chardonnay or Pinot, and build a vocabulary around those of 12 categories of scents, two examples being fruity and woody. When people go and learn a new language, one of the main motivators is that they have fallen in love with someone. Many people fall in love with wine; once they touch the mandala they fall deeper into wine culture.
Learning Chinese is more than just the language, it’s about the people, geography, culture, history, innovations and new discoveries. So it is in the wine universe. This is more than just a table wine experience, there are so many flavors and enticing odors to encounter. This is also a way to connect back to the earth through the soil in which the vines are grown. By learning about the regions and having a different wine type every week, within a time frame of six months, you will broaden your tasting experience and increase your choices and options. Not to mention probably also get a lot more quality for your dollar.
Wine appreciation does not mean by any means that you become a wine bore or snob. By getting a handle on the art of wine, how it’s made and what the different features of wine are, you can have an interesting journey that will benefit your brain, diet, life and health. You get more out of it. Most importantly, there may be a varietal that is much better than the one you always choose. The truth is that even though there are lots of wine labels, wine falls into a number of categories that we can easily handle, more so today with the availability of apps on your smart-phone. A few tips first.
When a waiter comes to your table and pours some of the wine you ordered into your glass, don’t sip it. This wine etiquette comes from seeing if your wine has corked or not, which means spoiled. Rather, swirl the wine and then smell it and as long as the wine does not smell like soggy paper, then gesture to the waiter to continue. Tasting the wine shows you don’t know that step. When you enjoy wine, this does not mean impressing your date by doing it the professional way at a conference - slurping and making vacuuming sounds. This is only needed in wine education not at a restaurant, unless you’re Steve Martin in a comedy. A wine aficionado may do this very very quietly, otherwise the dining area could turn into a Monty Python film set.
The first step in wine tasting is to swirl the wine in the glass. This allows oxygen to get into the liquid and to break open the flavors which will evaporate with the alcohol and which you will use your nose to sense. The more the oxygen gets into the wine, commonly known as being allowed to breathe, the more the aromas will unwrap themselves and their alchemy.
The Wine Rainbow
One of the features of wine appreciation that you are first taught about is color. Wine ranges in color from golden yellow right through to ruby red. Wine color can tell you the age of the wine - even the freshness - and can be a reflection of the wine’s character. White wines gain color as they age, whilst reds do the exact opposite and loose color through oxidation. Young whites will have a slightly green hue and five year old wines, a yellow color with a thick ‘legs’ when you swirl it around the glass. These legs are telling you of the sweetness from the higher levels of glycerol. White, left to age, becomes what is known as ‘maderized’ which looks like a brown ruby color. Red wine, on the other hand, is generally made from two types of grape - thin and thick skinned. When red is a young wine, you will see the red color in the ‘legs’; as it matures it does so towards a tawny port color. See? It’s all very easy. Now when you walk the aisles of white wines at least, you can know the ages of the wines based just on color. Scientists now know that the compounds responsible for much of red wines’ color are anthocyanins. They have found that the way they bond with other wine chemicals can even create a blue affect.
With novice tasters, it’s been seen that they are influenced by the color in terms of taste. When researcher Dr. Jeannine Delwiche was Professor of the Sensory Science Group at Ohio State University before moving to Princeton, her team colored white wines to look like rose and found the novice tasters were very influenced by the colour.2 Wine experts were not taken in by the color doctoring in another study in New Zealand done by Dr Wendy Parr. When, despite the wines having been colored, the experts relied on their tasting experience and training. They were right - unlike the novices. So, even though color is an important point, taste experience is more reliable according to scientific research.3
Taste & the Electronic Tongue
When it comes to the tasting of wine with your tongue, you need to both taste the wine’s sweetness or acidity and the sensation the wine creates on the tongue. The tongue not only tastes but feels the textures of foods and liquids. Texture, by the way, is due to the fat in food according to food technologists. Great wines have great mouth-feel, and taste will be as a result of acids in the wine, whereas sensation will be as a result of the tannins. You can discover the body of wine - basically its subtle viscosity - in how the wine feels in terms of weight - light or heavy in the mouth. When the wine flows across your tongue the texture gives a silky, velvety or buttery sensation. Sometimes even a chalky feel if the wine has minerality. The tongue also allows you to experience what tasters describe as the wine’s ‘finish’ on your palate. A great finish is when the tastes and the flavors last on the tongue after you swallow the wine.
Your tongue has roughly 10,000 taste buds that allow you to taste generally five tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter & umami. In five areas of the tongue, they are separately depicted and have the same surface area. You also have taste buds in the soft palette and some in the throat. Some scientists believe that all the taste buds fire neuro-electrical signals that recognize all tastes. The tongue receptors also have a taste threshold that most wine supersedes which is why there is more reliance on smell in the practice of wine tasting. The individual production of saliva also either increases or decreases taste sensation.
Saliva is slightly alkaline and therefore cleans the tongue and wipes the tongue clean of taste stimulus. This allows the tongue to calibrate to a neutral tasting threshold. People who are stressed have less saliva in their mouths which is why it’s always dry. So noticing your saliva levels will tell you a lot about your stress levels. Normal saliva levels will help you taste better. If you watch closely how Chinese people dine, you will see that they eat rice between mouthfuls of ginger beef or stir fried chili chicken. The reason is that rice alkalizes the tongue which gives the Chinese a superior dining experience in terms of taste. The rice pH resets the tongue to zero after eating a cooked dish. Each time they taste the main dish, it’s as if it’s the first time again and again. Try it?
Tongue wine experience is a dance between the acids in wine, neurotransmitters and the alkaline saliva. On that basis, wine really adds to a dining experience in the level of taste and flavors that will be fired back to the brain electrochemically via these neurotransmitters. In a world of sweet-tasting sugar overload and sour-tasting junk food, you can see why wine tasting could improve a person’s quality of life by helping them sense more. This would encourage them in terms of food to eat healthier choices.
Tongue feedback on wine will tell you whether a white is sweet, dry or even buttery. If it’s bad white wine, it will taste like boiled vegetables or worse. The tongue will also tell you, most importantly, about wine’s acidity which is the ‘nerve’ of wine. Red wine on the tongue will have more texture as well as flavor. The texture will range from soft and velvety to hard and leather-tasting depending on the tannin levels. Tannins are also found in tea and give that dry earthy effect on the tongue depending on how strong the wine is. The taste of sweetness from berries in reds and the citrus of whites depends on the tongue and the alkaline saliva balance across 10,000 taste buds exploding like fireworks.
Wine connoisseurs understand the balance in wine through the acidity. The main acids in wine are tartaric and malic. The acid in wine gives the wine its elan vital - too much and it’s sour, too little and it’s flat. The acid triggers taste buds, which in turn trigger the production of saliva, which will help you chew and digest your food. So between each sip of wine, as you dine, both the saliva and food reboot the sensory slate for the next wine sensation. The relationship between saliva production and wine acidity is rarely referred to in wine tasting. This dynamic could be causing an expanded gastronomic experience in terms of taste. Another great reason to have wine with your food to expand the quality of your dining experience.
The acidity on the tongue could also have the same effect as bitter herbs on the digestion. These herbs are known to help stimulate the production of digestive juices including insulin, encourage appetite in people convalescing and act as a digestive which also protects the stomach lining. So you can see why hospitals should also serve wine. Many already do. Wine must also stimulate the vagus nerve which is connected to the stomach and sensitive to stress. Scientists now believe that a person’s wellbeing depends on the vagus nerve’s vitality. When it’s switched on, so is the relaxation response which will reduce your blood pressure and heart rate and keep you out of fight-or-flight biochemistry which can be damaging. According to Tibetan Medicine - the oldest medical system in the world - stress is a form of self-attacking.
The acidity in wine plus the gastric juices it stimulates, particularly in the stomach, can aid women with osteoporosis. The stomachs of over 44% women turn alkaline during menopause and stay that way in post menopause. In order to absorb calcium, the body needs it in a form called calcium acetate not calcium carbonate which is the supplement form. Acidity in the stomach provides this and this is one theory as to why osteoporosis develops in the absence of acidity in post menopausal women. Enjoying wine can reduce bone deterioration for this reason.
Researchers in Barcelona have a special penchant for electronic wine tasting tongues. The university has developed a computerized tongue that detects different types of cava or sparkling wine based on sugar levels and mathematical algorithms. Google was developed with an algorithm. Cecilia Jonquera-Jimenez and her team at the Institute for MicroElectronics (IME) developed a tongue that is able to taste wine and tells its grape and vintage. The device uses synthetic membranes connected to a silicon chip and each membrane detects a specific chemical. This electronic tongue can be further upgraded to detect a whole range of chemicals in wine which is a complex subject, as you can imagine. This could help in terms of quality control and standards of wine making whereby the tongue would screen wines before they got to tasters to ensure projection bias was not taking place or ever could. This robotic tongue from IME measures acidity, pH, alcohol, sugar, potassium and ions.4
These new technologies will be able to do what all humans, no matter how trained and experienced, can do. This is the potential. However the robots will never make wine an art the way humans do in a passionate way. These machines are needed as quality control devices. We will essentially need both in the future and these devices may be one of the future tools in how we educate people about wine. This could be quite fun to taste and to see how correct you are against the computer. A device for what wine makes you feel is just not possible as it’s not a mathematical equation, it’s a way of living and individually feeling.
Smell - Vino Aromatherapy
When you have swirled your wine and the aromas have started to unfold, you need to take seven inhalations of the vapor arising in order to truly smell the aromas wine possesses. Slowly that is. Even when you drink wine, the exhalation blows wine aromas from the mouth to the nose and the olfactory receptor. So it’s important to savor and breathe through your nose. You know, it does not matter if you can say what you smell at the start, it’s more important that you notice what aromas you can connect to, build on those. Some scientists would say it’s better not to label as you will end up in an area called ‘verbal overshadowing’. This is a nice way of describing someone who is just intoxicated by the fluency of their verbosity. For them they are only experiencing their projection of what the wine is.
There are three aroma types in wine: primary, secondary and tertiary. Primary aroma is referring to the aroma created from the grape varietal. Secondary refers to the bouquet created from the fermentation and the oak aging. Tertiary aromas derive from the aging of the wine in the bottle.
Natural fragrances have a major affect on the receptors in the limbic part of the brain and therefore can improve emotional mood. The brain has a profound memory for aromas. The alchemy of wine is in this zone for smell. There are over 700 aroma chemicals in wine. Smell is one of the most interesting parts of wine appreciation. The nose olfactory nerve is connected to the limbic part of the brain which happens to be the emotional part of the brain. This is nowhere more appreciated than firstly in aromatherapy and perfumery. To be able to taste wine fully you have to be able to go beyond taste which is limited in range by tongue receptors. These 700 chemical wine compounds are called phenols and these also affect the taste, color and mouth feel of wine. If you want to get more out of wine, start appreciating the aroma.
Synthetic fragrances are made from amines and these amines do not have the same affect as the aromatic quality of wine. Synthetic vanilla aroma is one chemical amine whereas vanilla essential oil can have up to 30 different aroma compounds. People who live in cities and who love wine can also appreciate the smell of the wine region through the bouquet. In heavily populated areas polluted with fumes, this could do a lot of good where wine not only addresses Dionysian starvation but also sensory deprivation in terms of smell which will depress the mood. The space agency NASA is well aware of what sensory deprivation does to humans. So much so they send astronauts to space with vials of essential oils, one of which is basil. There is no smell in space.
Margarete Maury, the founder of aromatherapy, said that essential oils are the purest form of living energy that we can insert into man. The chemicals that wine aromas are made of are based on the same structure some plant aromatic essential oils have. Her husband was also famous in health, as he was a doctor who prescribed wines and wrote a book to promote this in medicine. He also knew the power of natural plant compounds in promoting health and wellbeing. These extracts are the core of the plant’s being. To get an idea of how much so, remember it takes three tons of rose petals to make one liter extract of rose essential oil. These natural compounds are also in wine in the form of aromatic compounds.
Detection Theory & Wine Judges
Wine smell is the current area of research into wine sensory science. Researchers have started with the nose and in particular the olfactory receptor. Wine sensory research started out in the 1950s but there has been little research since in comparison to food products. My own university faculty at Reading UK had its own sensory research lab for foods and drinks for the industry and sensory research was constantly taking place. This area of research is very important when you consider what a 90 point judgment from Robert Parker does to a wine and all the mini Parkers out there. Our ability to detect a smell has done well in terms of areas that have been researched, but our ability to asses cognitively has been practically ignored.
In the last decade or so scientists are investigating why even experts can only distinguish between four separate odors from a complex bouquet. However when they are given more than four individually, they are able to name them all. In terms of wine smell we all prefer to identify a mixture, like face recognition, rather than separate individual components. The best wine experts have been shown to have an edge on perceptual skill in terms of how they order their thoughts and recall taste memories. However we all have the same level of smell ability and potential.
Asnomia is the term to describe a person’s inability to smell or even taste certain aromas. Something like a blind spot in smelling and tasting ability of the body. We all have smelling blind spots to some degree or other, which is interesting to note and makes the individual tasting even more interesting to see if you or your friends can smell the same aromas. If they can smell cherry, apricot, peach and apple and you don’t smell the cherry you may have cherry asnomia.
Detection theory has been used in a number of different disciplines and is now being investigated in the area of wine tasting.5 Detection theory in psychology is the study of the decisions people make in situations of uncertainty, such as studying what pilots would do in turbulent weather. In those circumstances, one can measure what is called ‘response bias’ and this is also applicable to wine tasting. Could even an expert transfer his experience of wines onto others? Those with an untrained nose will probably copy language they have heard an expert use, but there is no cognition in the frontal cortex of the brain. They will be using the emotional parts of the brain.
Clinical psychology is for two types of people - those who are too highly strung and need to tune down and others who need to be tuned up. Two very important parts of how we see the world or how they are clouded by our ego perceptions are called projection bias and transference. Knowing how these two work will even transform some peoples’ relationships. Projection bias is when we project onto people our own unwanted feelings and issues. Transference is described in psychoanalysis as when we redirect feelings of one person onto another. This also has relevance in wine appreciation and judging and needs to be studied, especially the whole area of bias. People can project onto wines irrelevant information, as much as they do onto people, without basic wine education and tasting experience. This is why China needs wine education courses as soon as possible or they will start trying to project onto all wines attributes exclusive to Bordeaux wine.
Every person according to NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) is more capable in one of the five senses. As your sense of smell is connected to the brain, there is a case to be made that the more you start to smell wine and appreciate and learn the range of tastes you could possibly become more emotionally intelligent, as the olfactory nerve is connected to the limbic part of the brain which is concerned with emotion. If you start using these parts of the brain more, expand the range of scents, you could also evolve emotionally even perhaps balance the brain itself and contribute to your wellbeing. But is brain activity mind activity?
There is lots of psychological research to show that smell has an affect on mental processes and our behavior. Why else would British Airways have used essential oils in their arrivals lounges? Why does the Conrad in Bali bask in a cloud of lemongrass as a little perk for jetlag? Science also knows we have difficulty labeling a smell. We tend to have a memory trigger rather than the right name. Basil essential oil will remind people of baby gripe water, which their soothers were dipped in to get them off to sleep as infants. Our memory connections with smell can go deep into the brain.
Wine Aroma Wheel
The Wine Aroma wheel was invented to assist people in terms of understanding and remembering wine aromas. The wheel, you could also say, acts as a memoronics tool to help people get started on the range of smells there are in wine appreciation. UCDavis Professor Ann Noble saw the problem that whilst we have words to describe primary colors we don’t have this for smells. We had no aroma visual cues. When we smelled orange aroma in wine we had no clue and had to recognize this without the cue. Being a wine scientist she knew what the exact range of wine aromas were and from this devised the Wine Aroma Wheel to help people have cues for smells. The wheel is a catalyst to develop the sense of smell for wine appreciation. The wheel is also rainbow color and the smells are categorized into three sets I will call primary, secondary and tertiary. Practice with the wheel will enhance the cognitive ability to discern between different wine smells.