▷S3E5 Blind Tasting with Dr. Rachel B. Allison, Wine Flavor Scientist (Part 1)

English

Dec 20

Blind tasting—deducing the grape, age and geographic origin of a wine based on sensory analysis alone—can seem like the wine world’s most mystical practice. Wine flavor scientist Dr. Rachel B. Allison came on the Modo di Bere podcast to break down exactly how it’s done. You can watch Dr. Allison blind taste a wine in the video version of the podcast, and maybe even start to learn how to blind taste wine yourself.

Dr. Allison chats with RT about how she grew up bilingual, thinking in a language the rest of her family didn’t understand. They contemplate whether Montreal’s favorite swear word is actually a wine term, and they discuss how getting in better touch with your own sense of smell is a lot like learning a language.

Dr. Rachel B. Allison, a wine flavor scientist, educator, and competitive blind tasting champion who grew up bilingual in Canada. Dr. Allison has a Ph.D. in wine flavor chemistry from Cornell University, and an Undergraduate degree in Engineering Chemistry from Queen’s University. Her paper with Austin Montgomery on hydrogen sulfide formation in canned wines was selected as the Best Enology Paper of 2023 by the American Society for Enology and Viticulture. Alongside many previous accolades, Dr. Allison was just named one of Wine Enthusiast Magazine's Future Forty in 2024.

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Learn more about Dr. Allison's work at www.rachelballison.com.

In general, not absolutely, but blind tasting. And I think that's what throws off a lot of people getting into it. This idea that someone can deduce down a wine and is like, "Oh, they're going to get it right." You could deduce it very well and describe it very accurately and still be wrong. The nose is very powerful, but we are easy to trick. Welcome to Modo di Bere, the podcast about local drinks and local sayings. I'm your host, Rose Thomas Bannister. This episode features strong drinks as well as strong language. Today I'm super delighted to interview Dr. Rachel B. Allison, a wine scientist, educator, and competitive wine tasting champion. Dr. Allison has a PhD in wine flavor chemistry from Cornell University and an undergraduate degree in engineering chemistry from Queens University. Her paper with Austin Montgomery on hydrogen sulfide formation in hand wines was selected as the best analogy paper of 2023 by the American Society for Anology and Viticulture. Dr. Allison has been awarded and recognized for her research and communication skills by the American Chemical Society, the Association of African American Vintners, Women of the Vine and Spirits, the COSI Award in Food Science, the National Association of Flavors and Food Ingredients Systems, and many other academic and viticultural institutions and societies. Dr. Allison, thanks so much for coming on the show. - Thank you for having me, excited to be here. - Before I start the interview with this exciting guest, I wanna let you know that Modo di Bere is a listener -supported show. So please take a moment to visit patreon.com/mododibere and become a supporter. Dr. Allison and I will be here when you get back. I understand that you also, in addition to these awards that I mentioned, you have some news about a new accolade as of this morning. I do. So this morning, the Wine Enthusiast Future 40 was announced and I am very happy, honored, grateful. Oh, I sound like a LinkedIn post to be on that list. Listen, that is really exciting. I was absolutely jumping up and down when you told me. That's so cool. Congratulations. - It's a really cool group of people. I would have to spend even more time just looking through everybody's bios. I'm really excited to meet everybody on that list. Although I'm happy to say that there's a few people that I do know and I'm so glad to see them getting their flowers as well. And including one of my former lab mates. It's so exciting to see him getting recognition for all his work too. - That's amazing. So this is a wine magazine's list of wine professionals to watch. - Beverage professionals as well. So wine, spirits, there's cocktails in there. Sometimes there's, I've seen people who work in wine packaging and sustainability. So really a range of, let's say future, hopefully thought leaders, taste makers. - That's amazing, congratulations. I understand that you grew up in Montreal and Toronto. Did you grow up speaking French? - I did, but kind of uniquely even in my family, I'm the only French speaker in my family. I went to school in French with children who didn't speak English So I had to learn to speak French But my parents don't speak French and my siblings were too young to start school So I'm the only person in my family of six I mean a family of six who speaks any French, which is odd, but you know, it worked, I guess So your parents weren't from Montreal originally? No, my parents came from Jamaica. my parents grew up in Jamaica. They moved to Montreal because my mom went to McGill to do her PhD. So they went there for grad school and then they ended up staying there afterwards. So you were actually the first person from Canada that I've interviewed for Motodiveri, which is great because I want to ask you about local language because the only thing I know is a swear word, "optismal" or something. Oh yeah, "tablinax" is definitely curse word and I think it's just... I didn't grow up in the Catholic Church, but I'm assuming it's just so deeply sacrilegious to say something like that outside of its formal religious setting that it is a pretty bad swear word. Because I did, my family didn't speak French, it was never even like a swear word that was on our radar as like something we thought about because I don't think my parents even thought to tell me not to say it. So what does that refer to? I think it's like something related to like the the Eucharist, Body of Christ, the cup for the wine, maybe. All right, so a wine reference. I think it is a wine reference. A lot of Christ, Body of Christ. Having not really engaged too much in Catholic Church, I wasn't totally sure what it is used for other than I wasn't supposed to say it. - Yeah, you know what? That's so interesting going back into wine history. Just the fact that red wine kind of looks like blood has had a lot of ritual meanings and in a lot of different cultures and histories. But that's cool. I didn't really think of that as like a wine blasphemy. So I'll have to keep that in my lexicon as actually maybe a somewhat drinking related term. (upbeat music) So what was it like moving from Montreal to Toronto in terms of like accent? I definitely had a Quebec accent as a kid, although I think now for the most part it's gone mainly because I don't speak French too much. I went into French immersion school when I moved to Toronto as a kid. So I think I was with other children speaking French, but they were not native speakers. So it just the fact that I could speak French already was the main thing people focused on, not the accent. The accent or lack thereof was not so noticeable in Canada. Although when I started traveling abroad in my 20s, that's when people would start, particularly in France, when someone might comment on my accent. - How is the Quebec accent sonically different from France -French? - It's more nasal sounding and the words seem narrowed and like drawn out differently. My understanding is that French people see it as kind of like a hillbilly accent, but like, I don't know, it just is what it is. Can understand it. It sounds normal to me. I'm always happy when people are focused more on communication than accent style, unless it's true appreciation of the diversity of different sense. I think it's like maybe having a pretty heavy southern drawl or something. Yeah, like it's you can understand it's just you have to get used to the cadence of the cadence of language is a little different. We have lots of wine stuff to talk about. I'm really interested talking to bilingual kids, different languages are spoken at home. So what language were you interacting and communicating with at home? I mean, I spoke English with my family, but I thought in French a lot. So I was translating in my head, which is interesting because now I have to go in the other direction because I don't speak French often at all. So I have to translate in my head. If I'm traveling in France, it takes me at least a week to start thinking in French. But as a kid, I thought in French and so I would get frustrated when I was trying to talk to my parents and I couldn't think of the right words and I would just substitute in French words or I'd switch to French when talking to them and then they would get frustrated because I was obviously not speaking English. So I feel like you end up spending a lot of time in your own head with language like that. And there's, I don't know, it's just some, there's some words, some concepts, some things that just, they'd exist for me in French that that's just their natural state in my head versus in English. - So when we were talking earlier, you mentioned not really speaking Pachwa. - My parents grew up speaking pretty formal English as well. They actually spent part of their childhoods in London. - Okay, okay. - Actually at the same time, 'cause both my grandfathers went to school in London. So both their families were there at the same time in different parts of London, which is also kind of random. My parents have extremely formal English as well. My parents do speak, they can speak Pachwa, but they never really spoke it around us. And then we all grew up just sound Canadian. Like we sound Canadian. And I didn't even realize I had a Canadian accent until I was in Nevada visiting like a mining site. And one of my friends was like, "Yeah, you have a super strong Canadian accent." - So that kind of generational immigrant experience was one that your parents had already had with their parents. - Oh, that's so interesting. - Yeah, my family comes from all over the Caribbean, so my parents grew up in Jamaica, but their families are from Jamaica and Barbados and Guyana and Trinidad. Even before that, people are from other places, like my family, well, my mom's side is from China. - Wow, okay, all right. So you've got this amazing multicultural background. Are your grandparents still in London? - No, my grandparents are in Jamaica and in Canada, actually they came up your family are all scientists so how did you get from science into wine I mean I definitely linked the two but I always figured I would be in sciences because that was in my head like a normal like everybody just did sciences and it never really occurred to me that you could do something I have my whole family's just, it's a lot of sciences, a lot of sciences, bit of math sprinkled in there. I went into engineering 'cause it seemed like you could learn a lot of good fundamental science there. Also, I guess in just like, I don't know what the way sometimes 17 year olds are, you're like, this seems hard and I wanna do a thing that's hard. I just went after what I thought would be a hard program, but I realized a couple Years into the degree that the jobs that were coming out of it didn't look like anything I really wanted to do in engineering in engineering. Yeah, particularly that just the exposure you got in chemical engineering was a lot of pure oil and gas work environmental engineering Applications which like conceptually very interesting. I really enjoyed studying that but I didn't really want to do it today I'd always been interested in food in flavor in seeing how like ingredients come together, how they're transformed. Like to me that was, that was chemistry. I'd always liked that. I really love baking. I still really love baking. So I Googled food science summer classes to see if I could learn some more about this idea I had that I could be in food sciences. Cornell has a food science summer scholars program or that's aimed at non -food science majors to expose them to that field through like a summer research program. I had about 10 days I think to make the deadline to apply and I threw something together. I wrote about my interest in my application essay. It's just like probably rambled about flavors and stuff I thought about related to flavors. And I was matched to a lab that happened to do wine and grape chemistry, which is, again, I wasn't specifically going after wine and grape. I was pursuing it from a flavor standpoint, flavor science, but I think like a lot of people, once you get into wine, it's very hard to fully like go over that. Like it's easy to fall into it. And it was like the first time that I felt like this is how you're supposed to feel when you study things. Like this is how excited I was to do it. For example, the PhD student that I worked with then, he's now a professor at Penn State. His work was a lot in plant pathology. So he was working on treatments for powdery in grape vines. So my job was literally to like make smoothies of rotting grapes and then test them for like residual fungicide. And like, honestly, gross, like why was I like, I think about that like gross, but it was so interesting that I was objectively, this is very gross, like, and I didn't find that as gross as probably much cleaner work that I was doing in other parts of science. So I think I kind of knew for the time that if I was willing to do something that was objectively pretty gross and it was very interesting. - You were like, "This is it." - I was like, "It's gotta be this. Yeah, I guess the ticket's gotta be this." I went into that lab, he went on to be my PhD supervisor. He was the first person to really encourage me academically in research, other than like my family. And he also had that, I got that sense of someone who was just really excited about research and just wanted to tell you cool things about research. I remember walking into the lab tour and he just started taking things out of one of the research fridges like smell this, what do you smell like? Which is not a thing you usually do in chemistry labs, but in food science, you can kind of do stuff like that. And I was like, this is great. I love it. That's awesome. All I want to do is like, smell random things. That's a lot of what we do. In fact, I'll tell my Somalia students that the program where I teach to just go into the grocery store and sniff all the fruit. The other day I was in a store where the peaches were really ripe. It was hitting me like a wave. - No, totally. Apparently, I was talking to some childhood friends and they were saying that there's a video of us from one of their birthday parties where maybe about nine years old. And it's just a scene of nine -year -old girls just running around, yelling, laughing, all these things. And I'm sitting at the dining table with a plate of food smelling all the foods on my plate. - Oh my God, you're natural. - It's just like, oh no, it's always been true. - That's beautiful. - I feel like I was just like, I was very, well I was always very particular about food, but it was like, I wanted to smell every, I wanted to, what are these foods? What are they, what am I smelling here? - That's so great, I love that curiosity. That makes complete sense. Dr. Elson, because when we met at an event for the podcast, point in hip hop, you told me that you had been a competitive blind tasting champion and I was so impressed. Can you explain for our listeners what is blind tasting? Blind tasting is when you assess a wine visually, orthonazily, retronazily, you taste it and you have to elucidate its origin, describe bit, describe its characteristics, and then use deductive reasoning to figure out what the wine is, what the grape varieties are, the blend, set its place of origin, quality level based on, you know, what you know of the wine making in that region, what wine making techniques have gone into making this wine, what vintage it might be from. In some cases, in some competitions, what winery it's from, depending on where, what type of competition you're in. And I will say that I obviously very exciting to have, I did all of this when I was at Cornell in the blind, we have a competitive blind tasting team called Cuvay, which was a lot of fun. And I learned so much about one through that group with the Professor Cheryl Stanley, who is our team coach. We did win one competition, but we absolutely did not win. And it's, I don't know, a good, a good learning experience to see how things swing in wine tasting and some days you're on and some days you really are not. Really in a way what got me into wine was someone who could do that, demonstrating both blind tasting and also just some really beautiful poetic tasting notes and the fact that she could identify the grape, the vintage, the region. I just was immediately Like, how did you do that? I must know. I want to do that. That's so cool. I thought it was really amazing the precision with which these flavors could be picked out and described and it just seemed like magic. But all these years later, I'm like, no, it was science. Yeah, I think there's a little overlap for the science we don't yet understand or can't yet fully capture. We see a lot of that. But that's our job in political chemistry to separate and quantitate compounds. So in things like flavor chemistry and aroma chemistry, you're usually dealing with extremely small molecules because particularly with wine, we're dealing with things you smell. If you can smell it, it has to be small enough and light enough to go into the air and go into your nose. So very small molecules and usually at very low concentrations. So it is very hard to separate those out from all the other stuff in wine, which there is a lot, and then count them. We barely have equipment that is sophisticated enough even to count them. - So this is the machine? - The machine is, the nose is actually quite an effective machine for this in isolation, but we obviously, we can't reliably smell a thousand samples in a day, like we can't do it. So we're not like We're not consistent machine, but the noses usually can be more sensitive to compounds than even our limits of detection in analytical methodology. That is so cool. I like to tell people it's not becoming this magical bloodhound. It's a result of the real trick is the books that you read as much as the wines that you smelled. I guess our noses are pretty astonishing. Our noses are pretty powerful. It is the combination of the, let's say, the books that you read and the wines that you taste that you smell, because you have to develop, it's like, you have to develop it like a muscle, like in the same way that we're very used to visual, auditory stimuli, like, I can look at like a thousand different shades of blue and still probably say, like, yeah, that's blue, like, I would still recognize that it's blue, that's because I've seen a lot more blue and I've been taught that we learn colors as kids. I didn't get that with smell, And I didn't get that with taste so I like when you do blind tasting you have to teach that to yourself I do think of it as language learning Yeah, and then the way that like blue is something that I see but I have words for it I had to translate between two different senses to communicate it. It's the same thing with smell And we have to translate into this is raspberry or this is Violet violet and raspberry have the same key odorant It's the context that kind of tells you which one you decide which one you're smelling. Tell me more about that. So a lot of flavors, a lot of flavors smells are not just one compound. There's often a key odorant, so one compound that you have to have that compound or it's not going to be recognizable as the thing we think it is. Just on its own, it wouldn't actually be enough to qualify it. So for something like violets, it's beta -ionone. And if you you'd be like, "Yeah, it's floral, like kind of like punchy floral." And you'd be like, "Sure, that could be violets, but you smell violets and they smell different." Because there's other things happening as well. But the thing is that smell, that compound, it's also raspberry. I was wanting to ask you to translate or define a couple other terms, which is the orthonazole and the retronazole, but maybe it would be easier to just demonstrate. Are you down for a little blind tasting? I mean, I'm game as long as we could, we could talk through it, that should be fun. - All right, well, cheers. Thanks for coming. I guess you maybe don't want to taste it yet though, so take us through the process here of blind tasting. - You do all the steps of typical wine tasting, so you're going to assess it. Usually you start by assessing it visually. You hold the glass at an angle. You take a look at the center. That kind of gives you the truest color, but you also look at the rim of the glass to see if there's any discoloration there, any change in the color, or change differences in the, I guess, undertones of the wine. Can you talk more about that? What kind of rim, when we say rim variation? - So like rim variation, you might have like a wide watery rim or a thinner rim. Usually a thinner rim means that there's like more color intensity overall, and that can indicate a younger wine. In general, not absolutely kind of situation with wine tasting, and I think that's what throws off a lot of people getting into it, this idea that someone can deduce down a wine and is like, oh, they're gonna get it right. You could deduce it very well and describe it very accurately and still be wrong. The nose is very powerful, but we are easy to trick. - I think people are sometimes confused by rim. Can you-- - Oh, what exactly are we talking about? - Let's say you hold the glass at an angle over, you wanna hold it over like a white background so that you can kind of assess the color of the wine. The surface of the wine is the main thing you're assessing. The rim is the edge of that surface of wine. Kind of like around. So right around the around here. Yeah. So the edge of that surface. So you can see on this particular wine, I would not say there's a lot of rim variation. Sometimes that we see there's like a little gets lighter as you know, the meniscus forms at the edge of the glass. Sometimes that there's a lot more lightness than just a Domeniscus, and that kind of tells you about the like the extraction, the opacity of the wine, like maybe other things have, over time, sometimes solids will fall out of a wine, so you will have like less kind of color intensity. So we can kind of tell you maybe about which grape you're starting with. Can tell you about the grape you're starting with and age. In terms of grape you're starting with, you're also looking at the opacity of the wine, of course. The color for most wines is coming from the skin of the grapes. So typically speaking, if it's thin skinned, you have, there's a maximum amount of color you're realistically going to be extracting from that versus if it's a thick skin grape, there's going to be just a lot more color that can get into the wine. So you have a greater source of color compounds. So typically if the wine is, let's say not inky dark, if it's kind of see kind of translucent, we're dealing with a thinner skinned grape, not a thicker skinned grape. There are exceptions, but blind tasting is it's deductive reasoning. You're making your the best guess, so you're usually going to pick the most statistically likely thing. So if you want to take us through what you're seeing here, what are some of the deductions you're already making just from visuals? So I'm seeing this as like a garnet color. It's not a lot of rim variation, but it is a little paler. This is a translucent wine, so I would guess it's a thinner skinned grape. There's no sediment and there's no bubbles in this, so I wouldn't guess it's super old. So you can already knock out, I would knock out sparkling wines, I would knock out thick skin grapes. I would put them in a very low likelihood category right now, because it's possible to do light extraction on thicker skin grapes. And I see that sometimes, particularly in cool regions where you may have grown a thicker skin grape that didn't get as ripe as you wanted. So you made a heavy rosé versus a full red wine and you might end up with something colored like this. - Do you have a visualization that you use for deductive reasoning? - I mean, often I'll take notes just because that usually helps me to have stuff written down. I also just like to verbalize a lot of it. And for me, I think I have a somewhat unique experience in that all of my competitive tasting was in a team. So in terms of exams and for a lot of people who do blind tasting, competitions are like individual exercises, but I always did it as a team exercise and that was honestly something that I liked a lot. I'm sure it makes everybody stronger. To have to communicate. Yes, it makes you have to be a communicator and our team, like I said, it was run out of the Cornell's hotel school, the hospitality program. And I was the like V &E captain, so the vidculture analogy captain, and we had a hospitality captain as well, who I actually saw yesterday. We were chatting about wine. She works here in the city, in a wine shop. We had people from a lot of different academic backgrounds even then as undergrads, as grad students. And we were also one of the only teams to send undergrads to competitions. So, understandably, You can only drink once you're 21 so someone had to be 21 before we could train them in our team Oh, wow So we had very short runways of how long we could practice together actually get used to tasting together and also catch them up on all the knowledge all the tasting miles they would need to compete with Entirely European teams all the other teams are European schools where people had more access to wine and a lot more experience than us So we had to be very strategic in the ways that we communicate and in the ways that we train. - So how did you choose the people to be on your team? - So we had a bigger team selection of, you know, it was like a written test of just general wine knowledge. And then from that, as a captain myself and Evelyn would choose individual people to assign to different competitions so that they could focus their learning. Honestly, like my strategy as a captain and like as a captain of a team that went to compete. I chose people that I felt did well when uncomfortable. Like that was what I look for in my team. Turn out the air conditioning and see how they did it. I mean I guess I pick people who if you're doing something that's you don't need to be doing or that that's uncomfortable then like if you're here and you don't need to be nobody needs to be here like this is not the specific thing that you do. I don't need to do blind tasting in the hotel school to like get my PhD. Like they're unrelated things kind of. - It's a big commitment. - It's a big commitment. At the end, like you are, we train as a team, like all of us together. So you're probably tasting wine like five, six times a week. We're all full -time students, researchers and all that stuff. I picked a PhD in chemical engineering. I took one PhD in chemical engineering on my team. David and a human ecology pre -med, Susie, hotel ops, Megan, and food and beverage, Brian. Again, so no one was like, ah, you're going to be a psalm, like that's a specific thing you're doing. It was like, you're here extra. Like it's a little extra for you, but you're still here and you're still doing it every day. So like, and it's like, especially the like chemical engineers, the pre -med, like you definitely don't need to be here. I just love this idea that's like, you know, actually something that's a side quest and the fact that you're there doing something really hard as a side quest as a plus, as a sign of commitment. I think you just killed my conservatory music minor heart. I wish I'd had an advisor like you to pick me for a team. Wine can be very snobby, but I guess we have, I'm a scientist. Like I'm a scientist who happens to do wine and then I got into really loving wine and like loving blind tasting and like really a greater appreciation of what assembly it does and it was not to say that the people in our group who were going on the assembly to track were like not good they were excellent but like you don't need me to look further for that I already like it's already there I'm gonna look further because I also feel like I'm I'm a bit of an oddball coming into this I remember going to my first blind tasting with the other V &E grad students and it was like that thing where it's like oh it's magic how are they doing this like and I'm smelling this wine and I remember the only notes I wrote for that whole tasting were like old world new world question mark like what are they talking about you know so you pick these people from off the beaten path who didn't have the snobby credentials they were in the club you know they passed the basic knowledge test that we did they were showing up to tastings And they all could do it, like everyone could do it. And I just felt that we competed in Switzerland at a competition held by a big hotel school there. I mean, we don't know a lot about Swiss wine, but I looked in the library system, found every book I could on Swiss wine, ordered them to our library, and I assigned them to people. This is your book now. You got to learn about this. We got to learn about this. And like we crushed the theory section of that competition because we actually study, we prepare, we're trying to make up for the things that we lack. My teammates, some had amazing palettes, just not the tasting confidence of a song. But like, I would take down every note that he said because he was always spot on. Just his ability to pull it together, not quite there. For theory, I mean, no one can memorize like a pre -med. Nobody can remember obscure things like a pre -med. It's like, oh, we need to know what are the top five countries for like, Sofina Blanc plantings in the world. She knows that. So we get points for stuff like that. And like, statistically, where could this be from? She'll know something like that. So you created like this a ragtag super team. Like, we shouldn't be good, but we are. And you won. We did win. You won. And honestly, like, all the teams are so good. Like, it's, It does come down to a little to luck at the end of the day like all the teams are good But like you can throw anybody off on the day of like what did you eat for lunch? Like and the ability of people from different parts of the world to actually familiarize themselves with Different wine everything. Yeah, there was one round where I know that we all guessed wildly different Things and I think the team from Bordeaux guessed an Italian Italian wine, our team, I think we guessed a French wine, and then the UK team guessed, I think they guessed a French wine as well, but from a completely different place, and it was like, see, we're all smart. Everyone here has lots of wine knowledge, but we all, as teams, decided vastly different things. We didn't even think about Italian wines. How do we even get into that one? I've never even had that wine. How could we call that we've never had it, But they have this palette of knowledge that we don't have and like it's, you know, makes a whole industry to have all of it together. Yeah, we need everybody. Yeah. I feel personally really strongly that the more something goes towards becoming elitist or snobby, the more mediocre it gets because of like resting on laurels and because of overconfidence, you know, just not really having to do what you guys do. Just be like, we're going to read every single book about this as always with any field. The more somebody knows, the less they give off this, I know everything, because they know. - The more you realize you don't know, yeah. So coming back to this one, when you analyzed the visuals and thought about what we might deduce from that, what about the nose? And can you explain those terms orthonazole and retronazole? - Orthonazole means things that you smell, let's say directly up your nose, and retronazole is things that you smell through the back of your nose. So once wine is in your mouth, the wine warms up, the pH of your mouth is different. So like certain compounds that may not be as volatile might become volatile, some things get released. There are volatiles, so aroma compounds that are released in the mouth that you can smell through the back of your nose because we know it's a channel. So you can smell things through the back of your nose as well as through the front of your nose. But the things you smell through the back of your nose may be slightly different than what you're smelling through your nose. Oh, this is so interesting. Sometimes you will see things that will appear that you didn't get so much initially, or things that were very faint that are now stronger, and that will give you maybe a clearer picture of what might be going on. Oh, so let's do the orthonazole tasting. So on the orthonazole, I guess like upfront, I get kind of like a luxardo, like a maraschino cherry, like the dark, the dark cherry, a bit of like Plum, but interestingly, it's not like it's not a particularly powerfully pretty wine. It has some I guess reserve That's the feeling I get on it. It's a bit reserved I know like Old World New World stuff when we talk about that in wine It's I honestly feel like a lot of it tends to blend together these days just because like one is such a Global thing and you have winemakers moving all over the world So and the climate change and the climate changing because you explain what that typically is supposed to mean? Old world is typically European wines and New World is anywhere else. When you get into Eastern Europe also technically Old World wines like Georgia, Armenia and a lot of Eastern Europe does produce wine. Greece, oh my gosh how could I leave out Greece? I love Greece, I love Greek wine but a lot of Eastern Europe further east do produce wine as well but I would say they're just not as much of a commercial scale globally. - In the blind tasting, when you say, okay, I'm gonna decide first this wine, it's Old World or New World? Like what is that in the glass? - Usually what I'm looking for stylistically, very, very generally, Old World wines, or let's say, New World wines tend to be from slightly warmer places, tend to, and tend to stylistically be a bit more fruit forward. So when I smell a new worldwide, usually the first thing I smell is whatever the fruit characteristic is. Again, not an absolute. There are some, some regions sometimes that don't really encourage that kind of precursor, but usually new world wines we think of as being like more fruit forward and old wood wines is being less fruit forward, more something else, whether it's earthy or mineral Something else just speaking of non fruit in here. Are we getting I know you like flowers or for me It's like floral and maybe like light potting soil. I feel like it's not quite the Not the forest floral round of dirt like not the de comp kind of smell but just very light earth And like dried flower. What about that compound you were telling me about before that could be Expresses raspberry or could be expressed as violets. - I could see that being in here. Beta, I don't know. - Beta, I don't know. Note of beta, I don't know. - Honestly, tasting sometimes with our grad student group, particularly like the wine chemists, the wine microbiologists, like we do talk about it that way sometimes. We're just like, do you feel like this has with thought? Like the, you know, people love to talk about the oxypherosines, but we're just like, IVMP? Like how, parts, parts for billion? Like how much do you how much do you think is in here? I think this brings up a good point. Who you're tasting with really matters if you're tasting for a competition, if you're tasting with flavor scientists, if you're tasting with food writers, if you're tasting with a team or not. Right. You're trying to reach like a consensus versus we're just talking about it and everyone comes up with their own guess. Coming to a consensus you do a little bit have to be persuasive. Right. I would never say with oxypherosin as if I was tasting at a team 'cause I'm gonna sound like an asshole. Like, I'm not gonna start saying like percentages. No, that's - - Unless you knew that the whole team was on the chemistry. - Unless the whole team was doing that. But like, I've never been in a team where we were all that background. So it was like, no, that will come across as kind of obnoxious. So I'm not gonna do that. - I do have a few little factoids in the brain pan that I really like that I don't always pull out. Like we were talking about colors and I was like, oh, or like like San Giovese, that's low and isolated anthocyanins. You know, we have our terms. I'm getting more of those kind of floral raspberry notes as I kind of hang out with it a little bit. So what are you deducing from what you're finding on the nose, or what process are you going through? Well, I start with thinking about Old World. For me, this feels more Old World 'cause it's a little more reserved and it's for equality. I immediately start trying to match Old World wines, regions, grapes, regions that have grapes that are thin skinned. And I start to think of what things could it be? And then before I'm like really gonna start thinking about the structure. And then when I have the structure, I'll go through that list and cross things out because I want to make sure my list is comprehensive before I start taking things out. - What's interesting about the book learning part is you gotta populate that list. - Yeah. - Right, you gotta know what's on the list. - So you need to know what's thin skinned and which parts of the world might I be in? Like do I feel like this is, I don't feel that this one is particularly hot or particularly cool. So I'm not at extreme, I don't feel like I'm in an extreme climate. So I've also like narrowed that down. I'm kind of like in a certain band of Europe where I'm thinking about this is already gonna make me sound old but my visual is I think of populating the card catalog what could this be and then you're like kind of throw things out like but you got to put the cards in there in the first place yeah so that you don't miss something as you're figuring out what to choose from so what thin -skinned old -world grapes are running through your your mind as you do that process I start with Pino and Gamay from France I go across statistically you could have Pino from like Switzerland for example but like probably not they grow it they do make some wines but like they export like one or two percent of their wines chances are that we have this in the glass today pretty low I would probably go France Italy I would start friends in Italy and like think about what it could be grapewise The thinner skin side, I mean Neveola's thin -skinned. Barbara Dolcetto, Narello is thin -skinned. Definitely missing some. - What about San Givese? Is that a thin -skinned? - San Givese is thin -skinned, yes. But then you see my own bias, where I already had like been like, "I don't feel like this is San Givese." So I just like, it's cross it. Even though it is, formally I have that on the list. It should be on the list. But I will say, I am like notoriously bad at picking out a sensuficy in a lot of... I feel like again there's also some can be lighter but is not like... -Falpolicella? -Yeah, they can be lighter but... -If it's like the regular falpolicello, not the ripasso. -Yeah, the amaroni. Visually, I think that color could be something I've seen in falpolicella. It's interesting, the jewel tones that we use to describe is kind of fun too. -Like I said, both My parents were geologists and I used to like, when I was in engineering, I did a couple of internships in mining. So like, I actually have seen a lot of gems. Like when people said, "Gardic Ruby," I was like, "Yeah, of course." But they're like, "Oh wait, people don't just like, know what that looks like." - Yeah. - So I would say the Acidome, this is medium plus, medium, medium plus. The Tannin is pretty light, which does knock some things off of my list. Let's see. Alcohol, medium, body is medium. It's really not like heavy, a heavy -bodied one. I didn't smell or taste much influence of oak. Like I could see it having a very small amount, like a very small amount of new oak, but it really doesn't taste like new oak to me. Could have used oak, neutral oak. So new oak flavors would be like, usually it's like quite, you get the toasted wood, like the cedarie, baking spices, vanilla bean, vanilla, depending on the type of oak, the American oak, the dill, the vanilla, the coconut, although really only Spain is gonna use American oak. Like if I smell that, I'm already in Spain. - This is where we get into just the nerdy joy that really got me The multi -factorial, you're doing such a multi -factorial deductive analysis. Yes. So it's what kind of barrel from what forest? How toasted, you know, toasted with steams or toasted with fire, you know, God. You have to kind of like reverse engineer the wine in your head. Like how much winemaking went into this, what winemaking, how much winemaking went into this to help you determine where it might have been made. - When people have talked to me about the term retro nasal breathing, or retro nasal, I don't know that anybody broken that down for me, front of the nose. I'd seen that trick done where you kind of suck some air in over the surface of the wind like this. - Yeah, the slurping that you see songs do and stuff. - Oh, that's interesting. That got more of like a bruised plum note. - The plum note comes out more for me and it gets more like tart cherry, black cherry versus, like, it was more, like, dark Luxardo syrupy in the nose for me, like, that heavier, lightened up a bit. -To change the perception of tannin when you do the... -I don't think it would change the perception of tannin to, like, aerate the wine a little bit in the mouth. I feel like the agitation just helps to... Like, you've added energy to it, so you're increasing, like, again, there's a heat in your mouth, but you're also agitating it, which adds energy, which helps volatilize things more. This is only so much energy is to swirl it in the glass. And that does help to, yeah, why do we do that? Why do we swirl the glass? Poetically, we're opening the bouquet. But what that does is to add, you're effectively adding energy to the system, you're adding a bit of energy to the system, and you are volatilizing low levels of usually sulfur compounds, things like hydrogen sulfide actually. Low levels of hydrogen sulfide are gonna mask your ability to smell other things. So when a wine is really closed, that's usually, sometimes it's that. So you need a little energy to help volatilize that, a little agitation to help volatilize that, like this is enough energy typically to do that. - What is volatilization? - Put into a gas state. Oh, Flavor compounds are, they're compounds that are soluble and liquid of the wine, but when you add energy, they will preferentially partition into the gas phase. So when you're talking about a flavor, are you talking about some that can be both smelled and tasted? Usually we're talking about something that you're smelling. Tasting things is like, something tastes sour or it tastes sweet. We don't taste betaine and we smell it. We smell it while we taste other things and that creates raspberry. Like, raspberry also has tartness and it has sweetness and there's other things that we smell as well and all that together creates raspberry. But just putting beta -ionone on the tongue wouldn't create that for you without, if you couldn't smell. Like, beta -ionone has no sweetness. It has no tartness. It's not that. How scared were you of losing your sense of smell with getting COVID? Oh, very. I did one time and I was like, it was terrible. I was like, oh, I was like telling all my friends, I was like, pray for me. Like, what am I gonna do? Like, I spent all this time getting kind of good at this one thing that I can't do right now. One who said, "You don't understand, it's like I was dead." Yeah, you know, but you don't really know how much time you spend just like thinking about smellies, thinking about different smells and like, just like, what am I gonna do with all this knowledge? I can't use it. I'm glad you're back. Yeah, how long did - Did that last for you? - It was out for about six weeks. And just the process of it coming back was like very, very strange, just like having to reacclimate. And even now I feel like I was blind tasting with some friends, we were chatting about this. And I felt like my sense of smell was like, it's there, but it was like, some things were off. Like there were things that people were saying that I was not getting. I feel like I'm less sensitive to Peirazines, actually. - Can you explain peirazines? - Peirazines are like, usually it's like green pepper, green leafy -ish, green pepper is the vein aroma, but things kind of related to that cut green kind of smell. They are varietal aromas in some cases, and then they're also more prevalent in less ripe grapes. - Interesting. So they can give you a hint about the wine making, the wine growing well the wine growing I should tell you about the wine the the wine growing but also the variety the variety I can yeah I can tell you something stylistic about the wine like some wines express that more based on how they're made so like they're you know more stable I think under more reductive winemaking so what are some of the varieties that would contain pyrazines Cabernet Cabernet um Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc particularly I feel like I get a lot of it in Cabernet Frank, I think the Carmagnère also gets the Bordeaux varieties. Although not, not that I've had Malbec that has really pyrazines. I've haven't had a lot of single variety poteveur d 'eau to say, but yeah, the other three. That's so interesting. You know, for some reason, I never thought about all the pyrazine grapes being found in Bordeaux. It must have been like some kind of evolutionary. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe I have no idea. Maybe they share interest rate although that's completely speculative. I know people study this and there is definitely a real answer to that I have no idea. Are you getting anything else as the compounds are volatilized? Oh I love understanding that. Honestly on the nose not much more but I'm trying to see if I can get more on the palate. I wouldn't say it's high alcohol but it's medium in the way It's like 20, 24 medium. 20 to 24 medium could be like 13 and a half percent, right? - When you're talking about the palate and you talk about the, like the structure, what are the aspects of structure? - The acidity, the tannin structure, the body, well, I guess body is kind of a catch -all that includes the alcohol and the sugar. Sometimes was the tannin kind of tannin plays into that as well. It kind of tells you about like the like what has been extracted from the grapes. So a lot of tannin will tell you about both extraction and grape variety. So there are thin skin varieties that have a lot of tannins. So like that's where you combine color and tannin. If you have little color but a lot of tannin that narrows it down to a couple of grape varieties. If you have a lot of color and very little tannin also narrows it down, right? If you're medium, medium, then like you have a bit, you could even be some of those other ones that are made in a weird way. So you have a little bit more work to do. You can adjust acidity and winemaking, but like in general, I find that like properly like integrated wines. It's hard to tell whether something's been adjusted. So like acidity will tell you about like whether the typically whether the place is coming from a cooler region or vintage or a warmer region or vintage as grapes ripen as the plant matures acidity is the source of energy that vines metabolize so acidity is consumed as sugar accumulates so sugar goes up acidity goes down so in hotter places you tend to have higher sugar and lower acidity in the grapes so higher sugar produces higher alcohol wines and then in cooler places where you don't reach as much maturity from like full maturity, you might have higher acidity and lower sugar. So lower alcohol wines with more acidity. So like sometimes I talk to people about like, okay, this year you planted your tomatoes in a sunnier spot and they got ripe or faster. Right? That's interesting. I would have thought of sugar as being the fuel or the energy. Now sugar is the product. Oh, sugar is the byproduct, right? Like sugar is what it produces in the end. - How is this perceived as far as the difference between acid and tannin? What is it like for you in your mouth? - Acid for me is like the mouth watering sensation. So just see what the like saliva production is like when you taste, when the wine's in your mouth. And then for the tannin, it's the drying feeling on the, I check like the top of the mouth, the front of the mouth, like the sides of the with the feeling of like oversteep tea and that like that's usually my reference point for Tannen. I guess I drank a lot of oversteep tea. Extracted. The idea of extraction, like if you leave the tea in there longer, then it's more extracted. It's the same thing here. If you do a lot of punchdowns and pumpovers, you are extracting more of those compounds. So of extracting of Tannen compounds? From, I think we should explain the must. What are you extracting from? Like, what are you pumping over in at least red wine making you are doing a fermentation on the skins of the grapes. So when you have your grapes, you put them in whatever fermentation vessel container that you're going to use. And you might do natural fermentation, you might do an inoculated fermentation, but you start the fermentation and fermentation will generate CO2 and it will naturally cause all of these solids in that mass of crushed grapes and juice and grapes to all the solids will sort of push up to the top and that'll create like a cap over the top and if you want to extract stuff from the skins from all of those solids those need to be mixed up in the liquid so you might pump some liquid over it or you might punch down the cap to integrate it. If you were making a cup of tea you would Try to have the tea bag in the water not just Touching and sitting on the top you want the tea bags submerged in the water You don't want it like barely touching the water that would not be an effective way to make tea so when you were talking about extraction you get kind of these two different types of clues right the variety and what Characteristics it has to start with and then the winemaking that you choose so you could have like a high tan and great But a low extraction process or vice versa. That's a lot of factors to kind of pick from. Yeah, definitely. And again, you can always have these grapes grown in non -traditional places. You can blend, which also throws things off, or you can blend again. Non -testable wines are like non -traditional wines, whatever that means these days. When you're doing these competitions, it's not like any wine possible in the world that can be made these people can check. There's some agreed upon-- - Curriculum, there's a curriculum. For most exams, there's a curriculum of wines. In competitions, it can be a little more random. Like, we had Swiss Sera in a competition. - Oh, okay. - We couldn't place it anywhere else. - Did you get it? - We did. - You got a Swiss Sera? - We did, we got-- - Oh my god, that's amazing. - But to be fair, it was-- - Again, it was-- - You read the book? We have the book and we went to a co -op in Switzerland and like tried a bunch of wines. We were like, it's possible. It could be this. And we just couldn't put it anywhere else. We couldn't confidently put it anywhere else. Any other place we tried to place this or all were like, if it was there, it would be weird. Like no matter where else we put it, it's weird. And again, you're in a competition in Switzerland. It's possible. If anywhere it would be possible, it's here. So you're, you don't have your team today, I'm putting you in the spot in the middle of the summer by surprise. And of course, the journey, the analysis, we already know a lot of things that are true about this wine, but if you're putting them together in that conclusion moment, like what process are you going through and why is it important and what conclusion would you make? When the tannin was not significant, like I'd say medium, minus kind Conor Tannen level, I you know knock out Nebbiolo a knockout Sandra Vezé a knockout Nerello and that's where I start to wonder what it could be because the Tannins don't feel like Velvety enough to be Pino for me, but depends on where the Pino's from I don't know Nothing jumps out to me, although, like, that black cherry Luxardo feel to me that, like, that type of cherry always makes me think of Italian wines, and so I feel like I might be in the north of Italy. I also feel that I might be mixing up Barbera and Dolcetto, and I am trying to remember which one is which. One of them is higher tannin than the other, and I want the other one, and I can't remember which is the shadow is going to be higher tannin, redder fruit and Barbara darker fruit, lower tannin. Okay. Barbara is on my shortlist then. So if I had three guesses, I guess. Barbara, the Valpolecella, and then a Pino, but do you find any herbs in here? I don't get the herbs on the nose, but maybe a little bit more on the, maybe a little bit on the palette, which could push it more like granache oriented. - Oh my God, there's so many things to pick from. - Could be granache, could be a granache blend. But it doesn't feel super hot, which yeah, I feel like I would want it to have more alcohol, but also again, could be like, I feel like it should be on the list. I actually would rather put granache than Pinot on that list. I had a vaceras the other day that vibed very Pino. That might make sense. I guess I'm deciding if I think it's French or Italian. Despite getting cherry, I don't get much of like a sense of almond, which I usually get for Italian. I often get some almond -y note of some kind. There's no reason that I would get that for all wines, but I also feel like one of my friends is a head And she says like one of her instructors on one taste was like, if you were not sure and you can't put it anywhere, like call it coat drone. Fair, fair. And I kind of feel like that's where I am where I'm like, I don't feel confident that it's Barbera. It's just it could be Italian, it could be light, but it feels like it's not the like once you like run through your process and you don't land somewhere you're like, I guess vibes now. Do you want to decide or do you want me to-- - I think I'll go coach around. - Coach around. - Okay. - I'm gonna go coach around. - Coach around. - All right, it has been more than Italy. - You were right. - You were right, you were right. - It has some grippiness that I'm trying to figure out what that is. - Okay, so let me give you this. Your sense of the region was totally right and the factor that you got stuck on was your clue. The thing that you were trying to figure out that that didn't make sense. The structural factor. - Oh, the tannin versus-- - That thing that you was tripping you up was the sticking point. - The tannin versus the weight of the tannin felt like it should be different to me. - Yeah. - Is it that I'm not perceiving tannin and I should be, or is it-- - Like at the end when you're like, "There's this grippiness, there's this grippiness." - It's like the tannin does accumulate from the pannin. - But I get all the tannin at the front of the mouth, which I'm not super used to. - What is the tannin at the front of the mouth? - What's hard about this for me is there's some really like specific flavor indicators that I will often get, with this grape that I'm not getting quite as much. I have to hunt for them and I didn't find them until like 10 minutes. Like there's a floral characteristic, but it's pretty subtle. There's some kind of sweetment in the mouth, but we've been talking about 20 minutes before I could find it. I could find a little mushroom in there in the nose or maybe that potting soil thing that was first jumping out at you, but I didn't get that earthiness for like a while until it had opened up. And I think the fact that you were feeling the dark fruits kind of initially put you in a box that would have kicked you away from this grave. Oh, interesting. Right. I don't just agree with that analysis. It is more dark fruits. I find some raspberry, but I would expect to find more like kind of a tart cherry pomegranate, not like-- - I started to get it on the palate, but in the glass, it was very dark for me. And like the dark fruit initially made me want to be a little bit in nebbiolo, but then I was like, from the palate, it's not. - Do you have any guesses as to vintage? I mean, I guess you kind of got to know the grape. - Do you have to know the grape to guess the vintage? - Okay, it helps. - It helps to have an idea. - Yeah, so like put it together. - Like from color and stuff, three to five. Yeah. Yeah. I would say three to five. It doesn't feel older than that from the nose. It doesn't feel older than that. All right. It is a Nebiolo. Yes. Yeah. But it's a long game Nebiolo. It's a 2022. You know, I think the hardest thing about Nebiolo right now is the amazing advances that people have made. And you would know way more about this than me about how to actually explain it. But from what I understand, the ripeness levels and picking the grapes at the perfect time and managing a high tanning grape. That science just gone, boom. Some of my favorite Barbaresco and Barolo producers have these labs and they're like really scientific about it. So what's really classically known about Nebiolo is that it's this tan and monster that needs all of these years to develop, but that has transformed so much. So we're here getting a, you know, a 2022, you know, Longing and Ebliollo, the larger region is going to be different from like a Barolo or a Barbarresco, which are going to have maybe really big, like if I'd given you like a Barolo, I think you would have gotten it, you know, I think from the the extraction on a Barolo Barbarresco would be like significantly bigger. I can see how it is this, but it's also like, like you said, everything that like, I guess we're classically taught about styles is changing. and that's like part of, I don't know, the fun of doing this. Learn more about Dr. Allison's work at rachelbeallison .com. What is a corked wine anyway? At that moment when the waiter pours a taste of wine for you and you're supposed to say whether it's okay, are you intimidated or do you know exactly what to do. Dr. Rachel Allison is going to answer all your questions about wine flaws in part two of this interview next week. Thank you so much for listening. Wherever you go and whatever you like to drink, always remember to enjoy your life and to never stop learning. Support us on Patreon. Grab the newsletter at MotorDBerry .com and subscribe to the YouTube channel at MotorDBerry to The Travel Show, Motody Berry TV. Music for the show was composed by Arcilia Prosperi for the band O. Purchase their music at the link in the notes.