There’s No Accounting For Taste.
Chapter Two, Part Four.
Imagine you’re sitting at a desert resort when you spot a man dragging his haggard body across the sand. The tattered remains of his clothes cling to his emaciated body. His face is covered by a week-old beard. He looks up at you pleadingly.
“Good Lord man!” you cry. “You must be thirsty. Here, have some wine!”
In a raspy voice he croaks, “How many points did it score?”
Now I don’t want to get off on a rant about the wine rating system, but have you ever noticed that a wine that tastes great to The Wine Spectator or The Wine Advocate doesn’t always taste so great to you?
Read MoreThe Nose Knows.
Chapter Two, Part Two.
The most revealing aspect of wine analysis comes from olfaction, the sense of smell. Odorants are sensed by olfactory receptor neurons in the nose, or as they’re more commonly called, smell buds. O.K., I just made that up. They’re not really called smell buds, but it’s my blog and I’ll call them whatever I want. Besides, olfactory receptor neuron sounds like some kind of hi-tech weapon used to deduce wines complex aromas, you know, one of those weapons of mass deduction.
Humans possess about 40 million smell buds. To put that in perspective your average dog has about 68 billion smell buds, yet oddly enough there are only a couple of dogs writing for The Wine Spectator.
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