Ep 201: How to Develop Your Wine Palate

Wine for Normal People

Alcohol, Lifestyle, Arts, Education, Food, Wine, Dining, Grapes

4.6 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 15 September 2017

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We received two very similar listener questions so it was time to make a podcast of it! They were....

Caryn R: I am trying to learn more about aroma and taste. How does one discern that a wine has notes of pineapple and honeysuckle, for example? Is all of that really true or just marketing? Can i learn to smell and taste with more nuance?

Ted A: I'd like you to discuss palate. Can it be enhanced? How do you improve your palate? Do some people like me just not have a great palate, and it can't be improved?

We address all the questions above:

First we discuss the biology and building blocks of aroma
We talk about a number of categories of aromas from a chemical perspective (which, actually, as I look at them, remind me of names from Game of Thrones!): Esters, Pyrazines, Terpenes, and Thiols. Lots of great info on http://winefolly.com/review/where-wine-flavors-come-from/
We discuss some other broader smell categories and what they manifest as in wine: oak, botrytis, and the yeast brettanomyces too!
Then we give you some action items:
- How to separate broad categories: fruit v herb v earth v other stuff
- How to become a student of smell and flavor by paying attention
- The importance of slowing down to experience wine and food more fully
- How to learn what certain structure terms mean by tasting certain things

And finally, non-conventional advice like: don't buy aroma kits and stop with the blind tasting, already!

Enjoy!

Special thanks to our sponsors:

www.hellofresh.com - use the code Wine30 to get $30 your first week of meals!

www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/wine -- don't forget to check out: The Everyday Gourmet: Rediscovering the Lost Art of Cooking for the tasting class we discuss!

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for
0:08.0	downloading Wine for Normal People Radio,
0:10.0	the podcast for people who like wine but not the snobbery that goes with it.
0:14.0	I'm Elizabeth Schneider, a certified Silmaier and certified specialist of wine.
0:20.0	And I'm MC Ice, just a wine-loving normal person.
0:23.0	Episode 200 was last week.
0:26.2	We took some questions from listeners, and we really based the podcast around a particular listener's idea. Troy Moore. I'm giving you a
0:36.3	shout again Troy. Awesome dude. Hope I meet you someday. Promise I'll try some more
0:41.3	BC wines. He's in in Canada but that does not mean that other
0:46.0	people did not have fantastic ideas for the podcast and this is the runner-up
0:50.6	show this is not the runner-up show. This is not the runner-up show. This is another idea that I didn't think would work for
0:57.1	episode 200. But for 201 it does? Well it's a great idea and I will say that we have gotten off track on two fronts.
1:05.0	One, we have stopped begging for iTunes reviews.
1:08.0	Oh, you haven't done that in years.
1:10.0	I know. We have a big bank of them, but I do feel like every now and then I know this is very odd but I feel like some people come and do seagull management on our
1:21.3	Podcast they fly over, they drop their droppings and then they fly away.
1:27.5	So if you do like the podcast and you haven't read it us on iTunes, please either give us
1:31.0	a good star rating if you like what you hear or write a little
1:34.2	comment because it helps other people realize that we're still current because some of the stuff's
1:39.6	old so anyway okay so that's the bag on that.
1:42.8	And then the other thing that we haven't asked for
1:44.9	that people still do occasionally
	...

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