Post a Comment On: Viti-Culture

Well, today I am finally getting over my cold that has prevented me from bothering to drink wine, since my nose was so stopped up I didn't have a prayer of tasting anything.

Thinking about scent and taste made me consider a bit of well-meant advice that I have seen in more than one "wine tasting tips for beginners" style of article. Many times, particularly when advising newbies on things like how to tell if a wine is sweet or dry and sensing the bitterness of tannins, the authors of these articles suggest a "taste map of the tongue" to focus concentration on areas of the tongue that are supposedly better at tasting sweetness or bitterness. This taste map theory is widely known, and has been put into countless textbooks. I even believed it for many years. But the truth of the matter is that the tongue's taste perception is much more complicated than that.

The quickie version is that there is a bit of truth to the notion that some areas of the tongue are better at tasting some flavors than others: but it seems that most areas of the tongue can taste most flavors. The tongue-maps can be misleading because they imply that each area of the tongue is discrete in its taste-sensing capability. Wine students might be better served by not worrying overly much about the physiological location of their sensory impressions and concentrating more on the impressions themselves.

Here is an interesting article about those taste maps by a wine educator that describes the problem with using these taste maps in regards to wine-tasting.

Here is a section of an article about the tongue and the sense of taste that gives a more detailed response. And here is another good general article on taste. An example of a taste map of the tongue (which does a good job of pointing out that the taste map only shows areas that are better at sensing various flavors, and specifically stating that flavors can be tasted all over the tongue.)