TASTE
When you eat something, bacon for example, you get the intense smell of bacon wafting from your plate to your nose. This brings an intense amount of enjoyment for you – this is due to the large degree that we rely and refer to the smell of something to determine if we like it. You know that you are going to enjoy it before you even put it in your mouth. Then when you do, all you do is chew and swallow. In this process you aren’t gaining much more information about the bacon aside from texture to tell your brain that you are indeed eating bacon. You have most likely heard that 70% of taste is smell. Hopefully now you can understand what this means. The majority of recognising what you are eating is from smelling it with just the smallest amount of information being gained from putting it in your mouth to eat it.
In wine tasting, however, there is an incredible amount of information that we can learn about a wine when putting in our mouth. When you see the word: palate, it refers to your tongue.
You have probably seen tasting notes where people will reference the tannins, body or acidity, amongst other things. In this section you will be able to understand all of these terms more clearly as well as giving you a point of reference to understand what full bodied is versus light bodied, for example.
SWEETNESS