Wine, Memory and the Senses at Boston University

365 Days

Wine, Memory and the Senses at Boston University

Posted 02/26/2008 at 11:13 AM by Cathy

Tasting a new wine is like meeting a new friend.

That’s the perspective of an (overly) romantic friend of mine. A new wine, he says, gives you the opportunity of a new relationship. You get to know them, they get to know you, you feel each other out, you learn new things, and maybe you get to someplace you’ve never been before.

I see the point, but the metaphor has always been a little too much of a stretch for me.

At least it used to be, until tonight.

During a Wine Studies class at BU we tasted nine different wines. Mid-way through the tasting I suddenly felt like I was at a cocktail party: every time I turned around there was a new drink to try and, just as when you’re at a decent cocktail party, a new introduction to make.

The good news is that, with the wines, we took a very methodical approach. For each wine we systematically evaluated Appearance (things like clarity and color), Nose (smell intensity and description), Mouth (sweetness, acidity, astringency), and general Assessments like body, mouthfeel, concentration and length of finish.

For me, labeling aroma and mouthfeel come easiest, in much the same way that I can identify perfumes and describe textures of a fabric or a landscape. Each of us has a sensory skill (or several of them) – smell, sight, touch, hearing, taste – that’s worthwhile to identify and come to trust, because sensory awareness enhances exponentially the experience of drinking wine.

Say you smell a wine and you think you smell nail polish remover; what you’re smelling is in fact ethylacetate, something that’s common in Sauternes because that’s a highly acidic, highly concentrated wine. Say you smell another wine and you’re overpowered by an aroma of a walk in the woods; that might mean the oakiness is too aggressive and it wasn’t properly integrated into the wine.

Tonight I took one whiff of the 2005 Marc Bredif Vouvray and I immediately thought “tip of a match.” The smell was incredibly distinct and, for me, unmistakable. It had its appeal (of recognition more than anything else) but since that smell in a wine indicates a too-apparent presence of sulfur it means the wine is off in some way. Back at the cocktail party this Vouvray would be the one smoker in the room who has an appeal, not because smoking is attractive but because he looks sexy doing it. Damn him.

Anthropomorphizing a glass of wine? It’s easily possible to take this game too far.

But it’s a fun exercise, and it generates a lot of what I call “glue.” Glue, when it comes to drinking wine, is that association that makes a wine stick in your memory. Tonight, for better or for worse, it was the lit-match aroma in particular that will forever adhere the 2005 Marc Bredif in my mind.

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About the Author

Cathy Huyghe

Cathy Huyghe writes about drinking wine every day in the Boston area. She finds the quirky characters, the after-hours events, and the surprising stories that make up Boston's vibrant local wine scene. But no matter where she is, what she's doing, or who she's with, she mostly just wants to drink the stuff.

Her first restaurant gig was at Chez Panisse, when she knocked on the kitchen's back door and asked if she could work there. She's also worked for Jean-Pierre Vigato in Paris and Thomas Keller in Las Vegas. She went to graduate school at Harvard (twice), and her writing has run in Boston magazine, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Edible Boston, and on Nevada Public Radio and Grist.org.