Just about all my friends are wine drinkers. Gaggles of us have even taken trips to Napa, Santa Barbara, the Temecula Valley, Washington State, even Hawaii (yes - Maui has a winery) to tour wineries and sample the faire. A number of my friends even have climate controlled wine lockers.
While we are certainly not "wine snobs", our discussions on wine occasionally have veered into the surreal - discussing viscosity, color, clarity, the right glass for the right wine, whether it has nice "legs" or not . . . at which point I am left silently wondering, "We are still talking about the wine, right?"
Then there are the flavors - chocolate, lavender, gardenia, blackberry, raspberry, gooseberry (okay, I made that last one up)
Most of the time I start to get very quiet during these discussions. I just can't differentiate all these nuances the way some people can (I suppose I don't try very hard either). Truth be told, in the past I have been more concerned about quantity than quality (told you I am an uncultured lout). An approach I should probably abandon seeing as how there are increasingly more children at these gatherings and I'M AN ADULT FOR CRYING OUT LOUD.
I have three basic descriptions for wine - "WOW!", "Pretty Good", and "meh".
One of the endearing things about our friends the Monticelli brothers (3rd generation wine-makers in Napa Valley - link to the right) is their standard response whenever someone asks them, "Is this a good wine?" or some similar question . . . "Do you like it? Then its a good wine!"
All that to say, this article in the Telegraph brought a smile to my face this morning: Scientists prove wine buffs are talking rubbish
The title of the article overstates but it's worth reading. Key graphs:
". . . Today a US team publishes hard evidence that people smell the world differently because of their genes.
". . . It reveals that small changes in a single gene – identified as OR7D4 – can cause a person to perceive a key ingredient of male body odour and urine as smelling like urine or, most remarkably, vanilla.
"The Telegraph's wine buff, Jonathan Ray, commented: "Shock horror! So there is scientific proof that wine lovers talk rubbish. Doesn't everyone after a glass or two?
"'How does one describe what scrambled eggs tastes like, or smoke smells like, without comparing them to something else? So it is that we wine lovers might describe a wine as tasting of truffles, leather, game and rotting veg. Well, dammit, that's what old red burgundy often resembles. It certainly doesn't taste of grapes.'"HT: World Net Daily
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