Ah, the gorgeous aroma of number 23…so beautiful on the nose of this white Burgundy.
Or, wait, is that number 15? Let me run the glass under my nose again…
…okay, no, I was wrong. It’s number 27.
Oh, screw it. The wine’s nice, it’s chilled, I’m with my wife, and it’s a lovely evening. Who the hell cares?
It’s made in Spain and was created by an Australian wine expert and contest judge. It’s a trim metal box comprising 40 vials of different aromas that one can find in many wines. They range from the easily identified, like raspberry (number 4) and vanilla (13), to the more obscure, like honeysuckle (23) and quince (15). The bottled aromas also include hay, boxwood, mushroom, mildew, and what the kit calls “skatole,” which is a word for – I had to look this up – shit.
My Twisted Journey with Wine Appreciation
This strange journey began when I discovered wine a couple of years ago. By this, I mean that – late in life for this kind of thing, I know – I rather suddenly came to appreciate just how remarkably distinctive, complex, and delicious wine could be. A glass of (expensive!) Chateauneuf du Pape nearly shocked me in my seat with its elegance and WTF-that’s-good-ness.
I was quickly inspired, then thwarted. As I drank more wine, I realized how much I had to learn to identify bottles that would satisfy and fascinate me. I spent several frustrating months reading books and wine reviews, buying bottles, writing notes in little wine journals, and failing utterly to taste and smell what I was supposed to taste and smell.
No, I could not identify the blackberry and red currants at the nose and the finishing notes of coffee. Forget the fig and leather. Limestone? Ha. I laugh.
Deductive Is Reductive
I struggled to “train my palate” using the “deductive” approach, where one learns to match flavors and scents to words. It is one part of the way sommeliers are trained. They famously do blind tastings of wines sheathed in brown paper bags, sussing out aromas and flavors at the nose, the mid-palate, and the finish. There are “right” answers, and they must learn them.
When they take their grueling exams, they must pass a blind tasting element. All of this helps them eventually become able to tell you, with a knowing nod, that a wine has a nose of blackberry and red currants and a finish of coffee as they hold the bottle in front of you like a sweating newborn swaddled in a napkin.
As I tried to advance my wine education in the worst possible way, some geniuses on the Internet said there were deductive wine tasting kits you could buy, and so you could train your palate like a sommelier. I saw the Pulltex Wine Appreciation Kit. It cost $189. I hit “buy.”
I must have been drinking.
Two Stinkin’ Problems
As I learned, this approach to wine appreciation has two big problems.
Wine Appreciation: Problem Number One
The liquids in the vials don’t smell like the things they’re supposed to smell like.
To understate, this is a quite fundamental product flaw. The vials all smelled like stuff you hope the spritz girls in the department store don’t spray on you as you walk by: Brash and intense and only vaguely like the fruits or flowers and agricultural things they’re supposed to smell like.
The rose essence smells, indeed, like cheap perfume. Strawberry smells like cheap shampoo. The raspberry essence smells like cheap candy.
To compare a real thing with what’s in the vial, I pulled a vanilla bean out of the bottle in my spice rack and smelled it. Lovely and soft. Sweet. I wafted the vial of vanilla essence (number 11) under my nose. It smelled like a bar of white chocolate you’d buy at the CVS counter. Strangely, the skatole doesn’t even smell like shit. I have no idea how they got that one wrong.
Wine Appreciation: Problem Number Two
Training yourself to isolate individual smells is a fool’s errand on the path of wine education.
Identifying specific scents to appreciate wine is like learning to name paint colors to appreciate a Van Gogh or learning window styles to understand Frank Lloyd Wright. Van Gogh’s paintings explode with colors that seem to crawl across the canvas, while Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses slyly pull nature inside through the windows.
I don’t need to distinguish between burnt sienna and yellow ochre, or know that those are called clerestory windows, to appreciate these extraordinary creations. In fact, bothering with those details may actually distract from the work rather than enhance it.
So after a few maddening weeks, I banished the Pulltex kit to the cupboard. For $189 I could have bought a case of cheap Sauvignon Blanc, and who cares if I smelled the quince and granite?
Tell Me a Wine Tale
As I’ve settled into my wine journey, I’ve learned that one thing that heightens my appreciation of a wine is its story. I discovered this when I joined a club called Wine Access, which trades on what it claims is insider access to certain wines that aren’t available through standard retail channels. Based on my research into the bottles it sends, this appears to be at least partly true.
The club sustains its image of being your friend on the inside by sending, with each bottle, a card bearing an elaborate story about the wine – something that presumably only an intimate of the winemaker or the winery would know. For instance, there’s this gem about a bottle of 2021 Ludovic Montginot Cote du Py Morgon Beaujolais:
It doesn’t get more “artisan” than a lone vigneron, pruning his Gamay vineyard in solitude on a cold February morning, tossing the canes into his wheelbarrow-brazier to burn. You’ll also find him working in the depths of the cellar unassisted, racking barrels and making wine by hand. Ludovic Montginot is a one-man band like this, driven by his passion for the land and biodynamic farming.
Stories to Appreciate
It goes on like that for two more paragraphs. I sometimes read these cards to my lovely wife while the wine breathes. The stories do far more to help us “appreciate” the wine than knowing to look for (as the card also states) “the bouquet of red berries, such as strawberries and raspberries.”
It brings me much more pleasure to sip and imagine ol’ Ludovic carousing around the vineyard in April, doing biodynamic this and that to keep his winemaking simple and clean.
I’d end this by saying I have a slightly used $189 Pulltex Deluxe Wine Appreciation Kit for sale, but I won’t do that to anybody. I think I’m going to mix all the essences together in a glass, run it under my nose, and see if it smells like skatole. Either way, I’m going to dump it in the sink and open a bottle of something from Wine Access. I’m sure there’s a good story there.
Craig Stoltz’s writing about travel, food, and drink is at craigstoltz.com.
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