Inspired Tastes...How Music and the Science of the Imagination Can Make Us Better Tasters

 

 

“If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.”

- Isadora Duncan



I wasn't always a wine rep.   Weighing my career paths early on in life, sales and fermented grapes were not in the picture.  I was exposed to so many wonderful art forms and live and recorded performances growing up.  My father is a classical "musician by trade and a mailman by necessity" as he puts it.  He was a trumpeter who played in the Marine band and as a percussionist with the National Ballet.  After many years not winning a symphony chair and not cut out for full time teaching, the financial demands of supporting a young family on a patchwork of  gigs and part time teaching made the Post office look pretty good.  At the time it was still one of the places you could look to for some hope of security and quality of life-a reliable schedule, paid vacations, health benefits, a pension.  Sadly, there are fewer and fewer options for young families today, and in light of these tough economic times and the political attacks on labor and on the very idea that government has a role to play in the welfare and quality of life of it's citizens, things are unlikely to improve any time soon.

Like my father and the millions of musicians and artists of every ilk who haven't yet figured out how to make a living in the practice of their art, the demands of earning a living wage push us in varied directions.  For my Dad it was the Post office.  For me, it was the very common theme of the Restaurant Industry.  It's become cliche, but Restaurants really are full of students and artists.  Not always struggling, although of course they don't have health care or paid vacations, but often pursuing other paths.  The difference between my Dad's choice and mine, is that my Dad saw this as a long term prospect.  Something he would one day retire from, as he has, 40 years of rain, sleet and snow later.  On the other hand, I think many folks working in restaurants while pursuing and fostering knowledge in other mediums, are hoping their big break is right around the corner-be it landing that Broadway show or one of those "real jobs" deemed worthy of health insurance and paid vacations.  What I expected to get out of working in restaurants was a paycheck.  Well actually a pocket of cash at the end of a shift (you know waiter checks are barely worth a trip to the bank, right?)  What I didn't expect to get out of restaurants, was the on the job training I received in Wine, Food, Sales and Service( also I know some really cool napkin folds. )

I didn't appreciate this or absorb much right away.  The Hot Shoppes(a local chain of restaurants no longer in existence) was not a bastion of culinary insights.  But as I worked my way up the food chain over the years, I was exposed to more and more sophisticated food and wine by more and more sophisticated teachers, all for free.  It didn't feel free at the time.    It felt like two hours before a shift or on a Saturday morning that I would rather have spent doing something else.  But in that time, culinary school graduates, food and beverage managers and yes wine reps, lent me their time and expertise.  I am grateful for it today.  I am grateful for the opportunity I was eventually given to oversee a terrific wine program and to my great reps who were my early teachers.    They taught me how to taste and how to sell, one wine at a time. 

There are a lot more avenues to learning about wine today.  The list of potential certifications is long.   Court of Sommelliers, Society of Wine Educators, Wine and Spirits Education Trust(WSET.)  The MS (Master Sommelier) and MW(Master of Wine) titles have moved off the covers of books and TV screens and into our daily lives.   Well do I remember my first serious wine text purchase, the Oxford Companion to Wine, with a very imposing picture of Jancis Robinson MW, nose in glass, on the inside cover.   As their numbers increase,  you are likely to encounter one of these hallowed professionals yourself (the Washington DC area boasts one of each.)  You can follow Jancis Robinson on Twitter.    An MW is also likely to have overseen the wine selection at your local chain restaurant (Legal Seafoods/PFChangs.)     In one way this is great, the quality of the wines is assured.  But I hope it doesn't entirely replace the good old fashioned system.  Having someone on site who has a role to play in wine selection is key to the overall interest, passion and proficiency of the entire staff.  And I really love the idea of passing on the knowledge hand to hand.  We have historically been an industry that trains ourselves...a true trade.   As the streets fill up with wine professionals, let's hope some kind of balance can be struck and that the current surge in wine consumption and interest continues apace. 

So it makes a lot of sense to me why artists end up working in restaurants.   But it began to occur to me, maybe because my husband is a musician, that there are a lot of musicians in the wine industry.    And I began to wonder if this was merely a symptom of exposure in the service industry...discovering wine while paying the bills in the pursuit of other artistic endeavors?   Or was there maybe something more to it?   Were musicians and artists drawn to a career or love of wine as an art in and of itself, and are they perhaps possessed of some natural ability or skill, a quality that draws them to and helps them to succeed in the wine business?

Music as Analogy
 A bottle of wine is like a piece of music, with many layers going on at once.  We can talk about the composition of a wine horizontally and vertically-the same way we talk about harmony and melody-the vertical and horizontal elements of music.  I and many others will frequently describe wine in musical terms.  We talk about low notes and high notes.  The palate of a wine is described as having a beginning a middle and an end, like a  musical phrase, or the arc of the writer.  When we learn to taste, some people will get lime and others will get grapefruit.   We have the aroma wheel, like the painter's color palate, that puts the many elements we can smell and taste on a spectrum, sharps and flats...lemons and limes.

Here's a classic example of this idea from Bob Goyette's site (Robert Goyette is a veteran of the California wine world who was the original winemaker at La Crema and worked for years also at Benziger Family Vineyards among many others.  He now has two of his own labels, Stephen Vincent for value and Goyette for more boutique bottlings from Napa and Sonoma.)  "For his Goyette label, Bob seeks out the premium grapes from the heart of California's wine country and does what he does best, working to achieve the ultimate balance between the elements, matching strengths and frailties, high notes with lows, in order to create a wine that evokes the purest beauty, as it is experienced both through the senses and the emotions. Only when he feels that the basal and auxiliary melodies of a given varietal are resonating perfectly does he feel comfortable calling the wine his own."

To tease out this idea of a potential link between wine and music, I enlisted the help of Jeremy Parzen, PHD, Italian Wine Guru, Guitarist, translator and widely published author who pens the wonderful Do Bianchi blog http://dobianchi.com.  Here is what he shared with me;

"There's definitely a connection between music and the wine industry. There are SO many musicians who work in our trade... but I think it's more of a life-style affinity than it is an intrinsic physiological confluence... I've been recording a lot of music lately in my home studio and the challenges of mixing have been exciting for me.  I do think there is analogy to be made between mixing and making/blending wine... in a great mix, you can hear every instrument/voice clearly and in balance... and the same applies, no doubt in my mind, to wine... in the wines I like the best, no one element eclipses another and I can "hear" the fruit, acidity, alcohol, and tannin clearly without any one element trumping another...I recently spent some time tasting with the great Italian winemaker and legendary blender, Giorgio Grai... the analogy he made was with the same balance you try to attain in great cooking..." Jeremy Parzen.

When do we listen and when do we play? 

I have long suspected a connection between the ability to discern, pick out and hear tones in music, "an ear" with the ability to discern characteristics in wine, "a palate."   My husband is a very talented lead guitarist and songwriter, now also a wine rep.  He got into wine seriously a little bit after I did, and seemed to just fall into it naturally, especially the tasting part of it.   I had done all the studying and he somehow had all the answers.  He tells me that for him it "uses the same muscle" as his playing.  I believe the ability to pick out the many things going on at once, dissect the layers of flavor, coincides with an ability to pick out the notes of a chord.  Not just the Major C chord, but the C the E and the G.  Not just the melody, but the bass, the drums and the rhythm guitar.  When I took piano lessons, my teacher told me I had "relative pitch."  Play me a C and I can sing you a C.  It's easier to sing along with the piano, right?  But some people have what is called perfect pitch.  Ask them to sing a G and they will sing you a G.  No piano needed.  Most of us have relative pitch and I would assert, relative taste.  Our sense of taste, like our ear for music-is a lot more accurate with a reference point to work from.  In music, it may be a note on a piano, or a chord strummed on the guitar.  In wine, a familiar group of flavors like citrus may be the accompanying chord, and it's your job to pick out the lemon, the lime and the grapefruit, the notes of the chord.  This is one of the reasons it is so important to taste styles of wine side by side.  An inexperienced taster may struggle to define the body weight of a basic Merlot all by itself.  But if they try that same wine next to a light bodied Pinot Noir and a full bodied Cabernet...chances are they will quickly put it in between the two and arrive at medium bodied.   The skim milk, whole milk, cream is a useful analogy that most of us can associate with to help us with the idea of the weight of a wine.

Tasting, especially blind tasting, is in many ways  improvisational. The elements are rehearsed.  But they can't be exactly replicated.  Tasting many, many wines over time in a strategic fashion will train your ability to differentiate and evaluate its characteristics..how much acid?  Is it sweet? Is it full bodied?  Young or old?    These things can be studied and practiced-like running scales.   But wine is a living thing, and the glass of cabernet you taste today, may not show itself in the same fashion in another hour let alone another day or another bottle.  The nose may shut down or reveal itself.  The fruit may shake off or be swallowed by the oak.   The temperature affects the wine, the glass affects the wine, the aromas in the room affect the wine.  You may have a sinus infection.  But there is something else, too.  Your preconceptions and the opinions of those around you will also affect your perception of the wine.  It is often advisable when tasting with others to walk away.  It is illuminating and helpful to have a back and forth when you taste, sharing impressions will often provide the all important reference point or backboard.  But it's also important to give yourself a chance to interpret your own information first.  Once you hear pear, chances are you will get pear...whether you taste it or not.  There is also a left brain/right brain thing.  The part of your brain that knows all the laws about the brick of Nebbiolo, and the black pepper and leather of Syrah will try to fill in the answers for you, before you have completed one sniff, swirl or sip.

"I can taste the Resin"

We are very impressionable when it comes to what we taste.  I was once presenting a clean, aromatic Greek white called Moschofilero at an in store wine tasting.  A very friendly lady upon hearing that the wine was Greek, leaned into me confidentially and breathed, "I can taste the Resin."  She was referring to the pine resin that is infused into Savatiano grapes to make the Greek wine Retsina.   Obviously Retsina was the only Greek wine she had  previously experienced and it had left quite an impression.   Because pine and pine resin are not subtle aromas or flavors, and you could not come up with a wine that is less like retsina than the sunny orange blossom and peach laced Moschofilero. To her great credit when I assured her there was no pine resin added to the Moschofilero she had a good chuckle at the trick her brain had played on her.  And let me assure you, as someone that is frequently on the receiving end of taster impressions from amateur to professionals....this is by no means a lone incident.  I could fill these pages with the impromptu proclamations of tasters.  Over the course of a common three hour tasting you are likely to hear evaluations of sweet, dry, tart, bland, light, very heavy,  all about the same wine.  And I'm sorry folks, you are more likely to fall in with the vocal fellow who chimes in just before you have made up your mind than you are to get an accurate account of what's in your glass.  

If we accept that we are all relative, impressionable,  tasters...than we also acknowledge that we can all learn to taste.  But, are any of us predisposed to be better tasters?  And if so, why?   I personally believe that there are natural tasters, but I am not at all convinced that this is a physical or sensory attribute, so much as a mental one.  Jay Miller, formerly of the Wine Advocate, once said to me that he didn't believe there was such a thing as palate fatigue.  That people had difficulty after many hours of tasting many wines, not because their sense of taste was diminished, but because they lost their concentration.  If tasting is concentration, than everything that affects our ability to concentrate can also affect our ability to taste.  This seems daunting unless we flip it and say, by improving our concentration we can also improve our ability to taste.  We can enhance concentration in a myriad of ways, and truly we might be able to enhance our tasting ability by tweaking our approach.  Since it has long been known that we can only taste four things (ok 5 for the Umami camp) I find it surprising and frustrating that so many studies and attempts to pinpoint the hows and whys of wine tasting continue to focus on the sense of taste.   Sense of smell would make more sense, since that informs most of what we "taste" and more people are better able to identify the vast array of scents that we smell.  But what would make more sense to me, is to try to pinpoint the source of that concentration.  That ability to mentally stay with the sensory input you get from your taste and smell, until you can decode that bottle of wine into an Australian Shiraz or a White Burgundy.  The same way a musician can stay with a piece of music and deconstruct it's harmonic and melodic components.

"Concentration is 100% important."

"Do you think there's such a thing as perfect taste?"  I posed this question to Scott Calvert.  I first met Scott Calvert when he was the Wine Director at The Inn at Little Washington.  Scott has an amazing palate and an infectious enthusiasm.   Extremely generous with his abundant knowledge, Scott is one of those guys who makes it look easy and if I was going to start nominating candidates for this perfect taste business, he would be at or near the top of my list.  "What would perfect taste look like?   You can't measure the vibrations of a lemon."  Good point.

"When I was at The Inn," says Scott, "we would taste 200 wines in one day, six hours at a time.  Concentration is 100% important."    Scott does believe in the phenomenon of palate fatigue, but also that it can be overcome.  Initially, "after five hours your mouth was coated.  But, after six months of six hours a day... it's like working out.  Like any other muscle, you have to tune it up."

Scott got a very early start in wine, caught at 13 tasting wine behind the bar.  He also traveled extensively with his uncle who was a passionate wine enthusiast and by the time he was studying Jazz composition, trumpet, voice and electric bass at Berklee College of Music, he was already working in Boston as a wine steward.     He has also practiced Martial Arts since the age of seven.   He points out that people learning to taste, like improvisers, often close their eyes.   Like massage therapists, musicians, chefs, they are shutting everything else out to concentrate on the one sense.  In the way that someone who has one impaired sense will also have another that is enhanced.  I asked Scott if he would share an "expert tip" for tasters, and he gave us this great advice.  "Do whatever it takes to be in the moment.  Minimizing the effect of time and place, constantly remove it and get in the glass."

Tasting as a creative process

There is a phenomenon in sales known as third party endorsement.   Our opinions are easily swayed by a once removed recommendation.   Something akin to expert testimony,  it's just as likely to come from someone whose credentials are dubious.  When I worked in fine wine retail, people were always coming in with little lists.  There were the usual newspaper column/magazine clippings.  But just as often, they were an unintelligible scrawl from "someone at the office," " my friend's daughter,"  "my buddy's dentist."   The unifying credential for these folks is that they "really know their wines."    In this regard, perception is 9/10ths of the law.  Association is the basic function of our brains and the very fabric of our consciousness (individually, societally, spiritually, professionally)  We think of ourselves in relation to things, not in a void.  We need definitions, contrasts and similarities, to exist.    We need to boil the complexities of our world down to easy associations.  This is the common Point A to point B road map we follow every day.

This is not a terrible method, and it's what gets us functionally through the minutiae of our responsibility laden lives.  It may even land you a not too terrible bottle of wine ( thanks for the tip Uncle Bob.)   But wine tasting, like playing music or improvisation, requires a more complicated activity in our brains...part learned association and part insight(unexpected association.)

Enter Jonah Lehrer and his fascinating new book "Imagine: How Creativity Works"  I was lucky to catch a little bit of Mr. Lehrer's interview on NPR's Fresh Air.   He was talking about how a study had revealed that Jazz musicians while improvising, have an ability to shut off the part of their brain that is chiefly associated with impulse control, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC.)  Jonah Lehrer describes this part of our brains as "a neural restraint system, a set of handcuffs that the mind uses on itself."   By switching this off, the musicians were "inhibiting their inhibitions, slipping off those mental handcuffs.  According to Limb [Charles Limb, the neuroscientist who conducted these studies at Johns Hopkins] this allowed them to create new music without worrying about what they were creating.  They were letting themselves go."  "The lesson of letting go is that we constrain our own creativity.  We are so worried about playing the wrong note or saying the wrong thing that we end up with nothing at all, the silence of the scared imagination."

I think it is really easy for tasters, especially inexperienced tasters to suffer from this"deer in the headlights" syndrome. Sometimes you present someone with a glass of wine and you can watch the "oh, here we go" come over them.  They tentatively put the glass to their nose, nervously cast glances side to side to see what other tasters are doing, startle themselves with a sudden reminder they were supposed to swirl and give the glass a couple of violent sloshes.   They strain to hear what others are smelling and lodge their nose in the glass willing that aroma to reveal itself... what a former boss of mine termed "Poor Nostril."  The more we sniff, the less we smell.  We become so worried about getting it right, getting what other people are tasting, that we silence our own ability to hear the wine.   So many tasters and consumers think they have to be critics.  I think this colors their perception in a not so useful way.    Anxiety 10...Insight 0.   People seem to be better tasters with more observation and less evaluation. It's a straight up case of putting the cart before the horse.  How can you evaluate what you can't taste?  By drawing a conclusion without data, you may gain a sense of self satisfaction, but little else.

Mr. Lehrer asserts that critique is only helpful in the second stage of creativity(the painful and labored editing process) and not in the moment of insight wherein I believe the true art of tasting lies.  The ability to evaluate what is in the glass is precluded by a presumption of a score or rating.  Even very established professional tasters are extremely limited by this...their judgement is continually colored by the constraints of their sales ability and their clientele, and even a certain bravado that can encourage us to fall sway to perception.  Ego in this scenario is inevitable, and the opposite of getting out of the way.  Confidence, in the sense that it gives you the space to trust your own opinion and block out the fray, is invaluable.   Over identifying in the value of the wine in the glass by definition misplaces your perception.




Part Insight

"We're an absent minded species.  Constantly disappearing down mental rabbit holes,"Jonah Lehrer tells us parenthetically in a chapter called Alpha Waves (Condition Blue)  He is discussing the state of our minds when we daydream and the studies of Marcus Raichle, a neurologist and radiologist at Washington University who discovered that the brain is incredibly active while daydreaming.  "People had previously assumed that daydreaming was a lazy mental process, but Raichle's fMRI studies demonstrated that the brain is extremely busy during the default state.  There seems to be a particularly elaborate electrical conversation between the front and back parts of the brain....  These cortical areas don't normally interact directly; they have different functions and are part of distinct neural pathways.  It's not until we start to daydream that they begin to work closely together.  All this mental activity comes with a very particular purpose....The result is an ability to notice new connections, to see the overlaps that we normally overlook."  In other words, daydreaming engages our brains in a way that promotes insight."

One of my favorite dance pieces is "Esplanade" by the famous modern choreographer Paul Taylor.  I had seen the piece many times and it was already a favorite, when I and a good friend stumbled onto a free outdoor performance by the Paul Taylor company at Lincoln Center.  They finished the evening with Esplanade.  Who knows how many times the company members had previously danced this piece that is one of the classics in their repertoire, but this particular performance on a beautiful late summer evening in the open air of Manhattan, was a wonderful and magical one.  One that in my experience eclipses all others I have seen before or since.  

Wine, at least fine wine, is not a replicable commodity.  There is no better example of this, I think, than the revered and fickle wines of Burgundy France.  Often referred to as "the wine of arrival" or jokingly as "the crack cocaine of the wine industry" there are many tales of that first unforgettable bottle, the aha moment when all of the bluster and books upon books finally made sense, not through explanation, but through experience.  "Aha!  So this is what it's all about," we say to ourselves, and wine is at once elevated to the level of art.   Many of us will have spent many disappointed hours(and dollars) pulling corks, trying to figure it out.  And many more hours and dollars will then be spent trying to relive that experience,  chasing the next beautiful bottle through all of the ups and downs of vintages and vineyards.  Our favorite producers will delight and disappoint us, but this is what motivates wine lovers.

Jonah Lehrer describes insight as the aha moment, and there is an aha moment in every glass of wine-not always the brilliant insight of a fine burgundy, but the real story of what is going on in that glass at that time.  Our job as tasters is to show up and listen.  But how do we crowd out all of the competing fray, the scores and rules vying for our attention and silencing our creative minds?   Well apparently some tried and true methods are things that promote relaxation, like hot showers and the color blue, which in turn promote the all important insight producing alpha waves in our brains.  Says Lehrer, "It's not until we're being massaged by warm water, unable to check our e-mail, that we're finally able to hear the quiet voices in the backs of our heads telling us about the insight.  The answers have been there all along-we just weren't listening."

So am I telling you to taste wine in the shower?  No, but be my guest.   But if you can remove the elements that take you out of your relaxed creative mind and put you into your critical/analytical mind-you will be amazed by all of the things you are already tasting.  Taste by yourself.   Form a tasting group that meets regularly where people are free to express impressions without judgement.  Actors and improvisers play games and do trust exercises to free themselves, to be in the moment.   The goal is to have real time, authentic interactions, where they are fully engaged with each other and with their own senses.  Wine tasting should also happen in real time, when our senses are fully engaged.   If you feel you are in a safe place, you will be able to hear the things you are tasting and smelling and begin to make sense of them. 

Part Learned Association

"We suddenly look at reality through a slightly different lens, as the new idea is seamlessly incorporated into our perceptions.  Instead of just seeing a scattering of dots, we notice the pattern, things are starting to make sense.  We have stared at the world, and the world itself has changed."  Jonah Lehrer, Imagine.

So you silenced your inner critic.  Threw aside the Wine Spectator and started listening to your palate.  I've got good news and bad news.  As anyone who has ever tried to play the guitar will tell you, a little noodling around in the Pentatonic scale does not turn you into Jimi Hendrix.  Learning to play music is like learning a language, you have to develop your vocabulary and fluency only comes after years of practice and study.  Musicians train for years.  Sommeliers train for years.  They read and read, taste and taste, groomed by a network of those who have gone before them, reading and tasting.  Aside from all of this mystical thinking about relaxing warm showers and alpha waves, there's some real practical work and study ahead if you want to take the next leap into wine tasting.    Time to break the books back out and start learning the vocabulary of wine-varietals, regions, vintages, producers- to add the familiar flavors and patterns of fine wine into the working memory of your wine lexicon.  The good news is, all of these facts will make a lot more sense to you (and be a lot more interesting) once you have an informed framework of taste in which to place them.

So before you set out to be the next Robert Parker, I want to share this bit of advice from the great dancer/choreographer Isadora Duncan.  She was speaking of how her many imitators would attempt to flutter their arms in the same way she did to evoke her style.  Isadora told us that she developed these movements watching a palm tree flutter before her windows at a villa in Abbazia.  Her imitators fell short she said, because "they forget to go to the original source and contemplate the movements of the palm tree, to receive them inwardly before giving them outwardly."   So don't forget to go to the source.   Experience, listen, smell and taste.  Go back to the wine in the glass and you can't go wrong...that's the fun part anyway.

My Dad, Robert Brackman, Luthier

Violins and a Viola, Luthier-Robert Brackman

Music by Wine Guys!

Check out my new page of music by wine guys.  I'll be adding music, arts and events as I receive it, so if you have material or a performance opportunity you would like to share, please send it along and I will post it here.

http://thenativegrape.blogspot.com/p/music.html