How to top the tip of the nose phenomenon

Tasting wine can be thrilling, intriguing, and, let’s admit it, at times, a bit perplexing.

It’s exhilarating when a distinctive scent leaps out and lands as a bullseye on the aroma wheel and satisfying when flavors blend together softly to reveal themselves in layers from first sip.

Then, again, there are those brow-furrowing moments when we get the hint of something vaguely recognizable but naming it remains elusive.

This scenario could be described as the “tip of the nose phenomenon.” It’s our mental block to come up with names for more than a few aromas, despite our biological ability to distinguish between hundreds of thousands aromatic compounds.

The hypothesis here is that smell is one of our most primitive senses, developed to guide eating habits and mating choices – presumably so that we could avoid digesting poisons or copulating with relatives.

As an evolutionary trait, smell would have helped us to survive rotten or dangerous foods and promoted diversification of the gene pool. The flip side is that smell is not easily grasped by the verbal-semantic parts of the brain.

Our semantic memory is our ability to recall facts and definitions unassociated with personal experience, which makes up our episodic memory and is specific to each individual.

It’s our semantic memory that allows us to differentiate between blackberries and blueberries, while it’s our episodic memory that may kick in with a particular snapshot of a place and time from eating those fruits.

Semantic memory generally evolves from episodic memory. Over time, an episodic memory softens in its personal associations to a particular event and instead becomes hardwired as general knowledge in semantic memory.

Catastrophic berry-related events aside, we likely don’t remember the precise instance when we learned to identify blackberries from blueberries. Yet, the distinction is there to help us decide which berry we want.

Though our sense of smell may have trouble connecting with semantic memory, it has a much easier time relating to episodic memory.

Several behavioral studies have shown that smell is more powerful than imagery in prompting emotional memories and creating a sense of time travel back to a specific moment. Fewer studies have looked at this connection neurologically and how our brains happen to get fired up on these particular cylinders. 

In 2014, one study found evidence that suggested a correlation between a memory prompted by smell and greater activity in the brain’s limbic system. The limbic system includes parts like the hippocampus and the amygdala, both strongly tied to emotion and memory.

The olfactory bulb’s location gives it direct access to both the hippocampus and the amygdala. Whereas other senses – sight, sound, and touch – do not process information through this area.

Scent’s association with the hippocampus and the amygdala may be why smell holds a special place in eliciting strong emotions or memory.

The same 2014 neural study also found greater activity in the limbic system when the memory was evoked by smell than with a verbal cue. Additionally, the memories incited by smell showed heightened action in areas of the brain associated with visual vividness.

These findings are consistent with other behavioral science studies that have demonstrated memories linked to smell are internalized and stored visually.

Research by Master Sommelier Tim Gaiser and behavioral scientist Tim Hallborn started exploring this topic in 2009. In their work together, Gaiser became aware that the aromas he identified in a glass were represented to him as images.

Scent’s relationship with long-term memory, and its association with imagery, means that we have a full archive and tools available for beating the “tip of the nose phenomenon.” The key is working with our brains to process otherwise familiar information in a different way. Think of it as taking the scenic route to reach the same destination.

What Is Blind Tasting?

Blind tasting refers to the evaluation and analysis of a wine without its label information. As a tool and as a training, blind tasting is used by professionals to help them describe a wine to guests during table-side service.

The idea is to provide diners with a quick and easy understanding of what to expect from the wine without having to download a full dossier on its vintage, varietal, appellation, and producer. This information is valuable, and can help with a wine selection, but it’s not always intuitive.

Though blind tasting refers to a particular practice within a specific setting, the term is particularly apt as we cannot see the many aromas present in a glass of wine

Picture a glossy magazine spread showing the spilled cornucopia across the fold – overflowing bowls of fruits, scattered spices, bursting flower bunches – as a way of interpreting what’s in the wine.

Humans are different from other animals in that we have evolved to rely mostly on our sight. Wine has its own visual clues, but they are different from how we typically react to and process information.

Imagine strolling the produce section and spotting the lineup of apples. It would seem that our sight and semantic memory team up to let us know to expect tartness and crunchiness from the green Granny Smith and sweetness with a mellower bite from the yellow Golden Delicious next to it.

A white wine may have notes of either type of apple, but we have to sniff it out.

The steps for a blind tasting go through four different stages, known as the deductive tasting method. Without this structure, the process could more accurately be described as tasting blind. We’re adrift in our senses trying to reach familiar but elusive conclusions.

Start by letting sight play its part. There are four major visual components to tasting wine.

Clarity: Rising trends for natural wines, which ferment using native yeasts and spurn such practices as fining and filtering, seem to be pushing aspects like clarity to the forefront.

Fining and filtering are techniques to remove tiny particles that would otherwise remain suspended in the wine.

Fining is the addition of a coagulant, one example is egg whites, that attaches itself to the particles. Clasped in a sort of chemical hug, the new molecule that forms is heavier than the original particle and drops to the bottom, where the remaining clear wine is racked off. The coagulant and particles are left behind and are not part of what gets bottled. Fining is also used as a method to remove excessive tannin.

Filtering is more or less a straining process. A common form of filtering is to pump the wine through porous pads. The size of the pore will determine how strenuously the wine is filtered. The process can be used to avoid the wine being spoiled by bacteria. However, filtering can also remove flavors and aromas.

A wine’s clarity, or brightness, is its ability to reflect light and is an indication of to what degree fining or filtering may have taken place. Wines that are unfined or unfiltered appear hazier, with more of the tiny particles remaining in the glass to dull the wine’s ability to reflect light.

Color: The spectrum, pale straw to deep gold for white wines and rich purple to a rusty garnet for reds, is a hint toward the varietal. Color is drawn partly from the pigmentation of the grape skins.

Red wines, which are typically made with more time for the grape skins to sit bathing in the fermenting juice in order to extract color and flavor, will fade in color as they age. Over time, the pigments will solidify and settle along with other sediments in the bottle, leeching color from the wine with them.

Conversely, the color of white wines will intensify, a sign of oxidation. Think of the golden layer a sliced apple picks up from sitting out on the cutting board. Oxidation not only comes from age but can be imparted from the winemaking process. Oak barrels are more porous than, say, a stainless steel tank, allowing for more oxygen to come in contact with the wine.

Concentration, how easy it is to see through the wine, can be a further tip toward varietal and cellar techniques. Certain varietals have thicker skins, which can give the wine a deeper color density. The size and shape of the vessel used to ferment the wine will affect how much of the fermenting juice comes in contact with the grape skins and therefore how much color is soaked in. Concentration can be observed through the relative translucence or opaqueness of the wine.

Rim Variation: Best seen when the wine glass is tipped away at a 45-degree angle against a plain white background, rim variation is the change in color from the center to the edge. It is typically a factor that is considered for red wines.

Since red wines’ color will fade over time, the rim variation will be more pronounced, with the color most intense at the center and perhaps even clear at the rim. Younger reds can paint a swath from center to rim in colors that are characteristic of the varietal.

Viscosity: Perhaps the best-known visual component thanks to catchy monikers as “legs” or “tears,” viscosity is an indication of a wine’s alcohol, sugar, and the dry extract – what remains in the glass after the liquid has evaporated.

After a swirl and allowing the wine to settle, the thin layer that sticks to the side of the class will start as a ridge at the top before droplets start to form and fall. The thickness of the droplets and how fast they settle back to the bottom of the glass is a measure of the viscosity.

High alcohol or sweeter wines will have thicker, slower moving droplets. Lower alcohol wines will have smaller, faster moving droplets, which may fall more as a sheet than as distinct tears.

An estimation of a wine’s alcohol offers one suggestion for where it was made. In general, Old World wines, mainly those from Europe, tend to be made from vineyards located in cooler climates and from grapes harvested with a lower sugar content.

New World wines, including those from Australia, New Zealand, U.S., Chile, Argentina, and South Africa, tend to be made from vineyards in warmer climates, where the grapes are harvested with a higher sugar content.

The simplified equation for alcohol is: yeasts + sugar = alcohol + C02. From location and tradition, Old World wines tend to be lower in alcohol while New World wines tend to be higher. On the wine scale, low alcohol would be less than 10 percent and high alcohol would be over 14 percent.

There are, of course, cooler vineyard climates to be found in the New World and warmer vineyard climates to be found in the Old World. Wine has very few absolutes. As a basic rule of thumb, the Old World-New World distinction on alcohol is one way to start orienting a wine on the map.

With the visual clues of clarity, color, rim variation, and viscosity as scene-setting, the next stage is smell. There are several reason why this component steals the show.

The Nose Knows

Corny as it is to say, there’s science to back up the claim that the nose knows. A wine’s flavor is approximately 85 percent scent, seven percent tactile, and, lastly, six percent taste.

As if these figures weren’t lopsided enough in olfaction’s favor, taste is limited to four categories: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. (Include umami and round it up to five.)

Whereas scent opens up a world of hundreds of thousands of possibilities. By some estimations, our olfactory bulb can differentiate between 300,000 aromatic compounds.

Add to these numbers the fact that what we typically consider as “taste,” the flavors coming from sipping wine, is actually another way of smelling wine.

Sipping wine starts our retronasal olfaction, or, reverse smell. At the back of the throat, aromas travel up and back to reach the nasal passage behind the bridge of the nose. The nasal passage is the same meeting point for aromas inhaled directly through the nose, otherwise known as our orthonasal olfaction.

This ability to smell both externally through the nose and internally through the mouth is why spirits, with the burn of their high alcohol, are better softly inhaled on a breath in through the mouth to take in their scent.

Whether inhaled through the nose or mouth, the aromatic compounds of wine reach us because the compounds are volatile, meaning they’re able to fly in the air.

Volatile has the Latin volare, “to fly,” as its root and was originally used in the 14th century to described birds or other winged creatures. In the 16th century, volatile was adopted as an adjective for anything that seemed ready to take flight, and by the 17th century volatile had made its way into the vocabulary of the chemistry lab as a characteristic of vapors and gasses. So, viola.

Some of wine’s aromatic compounds float easily in the air, while others stay tucked in closer to the liquid in the glass. Swirling the wine glass helps activate all this volatility, encouraging the compounds to travel and allowing them to rise more quickly than if the glass stood still.

Because alcohol itself is also volatile, it can help jetpack some of these aromatic compounds. Perfumes contain alcohol for this very reason.

With all of these aromatic compounds now zipping about, those that reach our sniffers travel the gauntlet of our nasal epithelium, a lining which is covered with microscopic hairs called cilia.

Cilia sit in a thin layer of mucus (0.06 millimeters) that bogs down the compounds and enables the cilia to access them and kickstart the chain reaction of carrying information to the olfactory bulb for interpretation. How this fast-falling domino effect from cilia to olfactory bulb works is not precisely known. 

As powerful as the nose is, it’s also very delicate. There are approximately five million receptor nerve cells in the nasal passage behind the bridge of the nose that work to carry information to the olfactory bulb. These nerve cells are the most exposed in the body and are stimulated by everything we breathe in and out.

Not only can we hit information and sensory overload from smelling too frequently, to the point of becoming desensitized and no longer distinguishing between aromas, the muscles in the nose can also fatigue easily.

Short, quick sniffs over long whiffs is the way to go. Breaks are also important for the nose, and returning for another round has the benefit of also letting the wine evolve.

What to Smell for in Wine

Any one glass of wine can contain hundreds of aromatic compounds to delight – or appall – the senses. One man’s “saddle leather” can just be “barnyard funk” to another.

The first checkpoint in smelling wine is to determine if the wine has turned or could otherwise be considered “flawed.”

Aromas of vinegar (volatile acidity), mildew or wet cardboard (trichloroanisole, or “corked’), or barnyard (Brettanomyces) are indications that the wine might have come in contact with certain bacteria, been unfortunate to draw a tainted cork, or met one too many of the Brettanomyces yeast cells, which can cause wine to spoil.

The tipping point on flaws can be in the eye of the beholder. A touch of Brettanomyces, can give off earthy, musky aromas. Too much can come across as Band-Aid or manure. Where notes of Brettanomyces, or simply Brett, intrigue and where they repel can be up to the individual

Natural wines, again, are pushing boundaries for what may be considered acceptable in the realm of flawed or not. 

In most cases, the sniff for faults is a cursory check, and the wine can be considered for its full range.

A wine’s smell comes from the combination of its aromas, the characteristics of the grape varietal itself, and its bouquet, the traits as a result of the winemaking technique.

Certain varietals, such as viognier, gewürtzraminer, and torrontes, are known for having a stronger perfume. Aspects like oak, a divisive topic, would lend baking spice notes like vanilla.    

Taken all together, a wine’s aroma and bouquet make up what’s called its nose.

In unpacking the rush of aromatic compounds that wine has to offer, and to help top the “tip of the nose phenomenon,” start with the broadest categories.

On a glass of red, for example, is the wine fruity or earthy? If it’s fruit-forward, would it be red fruits, blue fruits, or black fruits? Follow the trail to the type of fruit it might be and then ask the questions about the fruit’s condition. Is it underripe, fresh, mature, or stewed?

These sort of step-by-step questions can go on all day, and not just for fruits. There are spice notes, floral components, minerality, and more to consider.

After the Sip, Spit

The peak in the action may come from smelling wine, but the sip gives us the closure of the final act. It’s a way of confirming what was observed on the nose.

“Taste” may be something of a misnomer given how the nose and tongue are working together at this stage.

A sip of wine sets off our retronosal olfaction, where we distinguish the flavors that are often considered to be taste. These flavors can be qualified by their taste: salty, sweet, sour, and bitter.

For example, the flavor could be lemon, and the taste could be sweet (the juice, say, of a Meyer lemon), sour (a puckering sensation), or bitter (perhaps the inner rind).

At one point, common knowledge held that the tongue’s taste receptors were localized, with each area responsible for absorbing one of the four tastes.

Bitter was sensed at the back of the tongue, sour was noted on either side, salt resided in a sort of horseshoe around the tip of the tongue and overlapped with sweet, a sort of half-moon at the tip.

This theory of the tongue map turned out to be a misinterpretation and mistranslation of German research at the turn of the 20th century and was debunked in the 1980s and 1990s. All taste buds, in fact, are capable of detecting all four tastes (five with umami).

Beyond taste, the tongue is also sensitive to texture. A tingling or salivating effect would indicate high acidity. A numbness would be a sign of minerality, and a fuzziness is one of the signatures of tannin.

Tasting wine necessitates spitting. Otherwise it would be drinking, a different kind of exercise.

After spitting the wine, a small exhale will help the compounds travel the retronasal circuit one more time. A helpful trick to help save those nose muscles from fatigue.

Four primary categories to consider in tasting wine include acidity, sweetness, alcohol, and tannin. Each of these elements becomes easier to evaluate on a scale of low, medium, or high.

Acidity: Certain varietals are naturally more acidic, Sauvignon Blanc or Pinot Noir, for instance, than others, like a Chardonnay or a Merlot.

The counterpoint to acidity is brix, the amount of sugar content in the grapes at harvest. The sought-after balance between acidity and sugar as grapes ripen on the vine is one of the determinations of when to pick. Uncontrollable Mother Nature is another factor.

Sweetness: Wines may contain residual sugar, the natural grape sugar remaining after fermentation. Sweetness takes stock of the amount of residual sugar.

The counterpoint to sweetness is dryness. The less sweet a wine is, the drier it is said to be.

“Dry wine” is one of those not-even oxymorons that likes to infiltrate the wine vocabulary. How can a liquid be dry?

Generally, a wine is considered dry when less than 0.2 percent of residual sugar remains.

Taking stock of a wine’s fruitiness can help calibrate its relative dryness or sweetness. Most times when people ask for a “sweet” wine, they are in fact looking for a fruity dry wine, one that would typically be served at the table with a meal, as opposed to a dessert wine.

Riesling, with its burst of tropical fruits, is a characteristically fruity white wine varietal that would fit the bill here. It can even be made in an off-dry fashion, leaving some of the residual sugar.

From the red wine list, Zinfandel, which holds the distinction of being the only red to cover all three red wine fruit categories – red, black, and blue – would also work.

The ripeness of the fruit can also create the perception of sweetness without affecting the amount of residual sugar there actually is.

Alcohol: A heat sensation felt in the nose, back of the throat, or in the chest is an indication of a wine’s alcohol level. The greater the burn, the higher the alcohol.

With the simplified equation for alcohol (yeasts + sugar = alcohol + C02), the riper the grapes are at harvest, the more sugar content there is for the yeast cells to eat and convert into alcohol.  

The level of heat detected with the alcohol is a great reflection point back to the viscosity noted on the sides of the glass. Does the thickness of the viscosity match the amount of alcohol felt and the traces of residual sugar tasted?

In considering wine pairings, alcohol enhances the perception of spiciness. Classically piquant cuisines pose a challenge to wine pairings for this reason, but good combos have been found. Riesling and Thai dishes have become a favorite. 

Tannin: Perhaps one of the most overused and overvalued wine terms, tannin is a type of compound that resides in grape’s skins, seeds, and stems, and is also present in oak barrels. Certain varieties, Sangiovese for example, are naturally more tannic than others, such as a Pinot Noir.

Since red wines will sit longer on the skins, extracting colors and flavor, and because they are more likely to be barrel aged for some portion, they tend to be more tannic than white wines.

Tannin can have a bitter or astringent taste, but our reaction to tannin is mostly tactile. Tannin can be sensed as a fuzziness over the tongue, a filmy lining of the inside of the cheeks, or a slight soreness where the teeth meet the gums.

A popular analogy for tannin in wine is the taste and feeling of over-brewed tea.

The ways we detect tannin, admittedly, do not sound like the highlight of tasting wine. Descriptors like “harsh” or “rough” may also contribute to casting tannin in a bad light. Differing sensitivities to tannin, too, can sometimes place tannin in the position of being the make-or-break point for determining if a wine is “good.”

Wine is the sum of its parts, however, and tannin is more than a necessary evil in winemaking. It acts as a preservative, giving wines staying power that allows them to age into flavors they may not otherwise reach before spoiling.

Tannin also plays a part in a wine’s structure, serving as a sort of spinal cord, a nerve center for keeping other elements in place. It will also become less pronounced with time.  

Historically, regions such as Italy’s Barolo in Piemonte or Portugal’s Bairrada, with their native Nebbiolo and Baga, respectively, challenged international palates because these chockablock tannic varietals required aging time in the bottle. Producers from these appellations made inroads to world markets when they balanced local technique with practices that made their naturally tannic wines more palatable when drunk younger.

As with most aspects of wine, the “proper” amount of tannin is a matter calibrating extremes and placing the wine within the context of traditional style and personal preference.

Be Kind, Rewind

The final step in tasting is to take a moment and reflect back on the first three stages. Did the senses all align? Were the visual clues in harmony with the scent and taste?

As with an Impressionist painting, we may want to get up close to admire the brush work, but the full picture comes into view when we step back for a broader look.

In tasting wine, the objective is to understand a wine. Is it a representation of the people, place, and varietal(s) that produced it? This is what makes tasting different from drinking, where the objective is enjoyment.

The tools and practice of tasting can enhance the experience for when we sit down and drink. Even though we may have the varietals and styles that we’re instinctually drawn to, in tasting we can appreciate new kinds of wines or even discover new favorites.

The biggest lesson we might all gain from tasting? Don’t knock it til you try it.

Sources

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Puckette, Madeline. “Learn How to Taste Wine and Develop Your Palate.” Wine Folly. 9 July 2014. 7 Feb. 2019 <https://winefolly.com/review/how-to-taste-wine-develop-palate/>

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