There is nothing so simple as white vs. red: there are many dozens of varieties of grapes. I would expect a real connoisseur to be able to tell them apart. At the same time, I’m sure there are charlatans who can’t tell Merlot from Sangiovese, or Amontillado from Sherry. They get a personal tour of the catacombs of my palazzo.
Years ago (25 or more) the company I work for did th Parker’s Annual Wine Guide and that thing was a pain in the ass. I hated the pretentious reviews an I didn’t even like wine. A few years ago I worred on a Whiskey buyers’s guide and it was just as bad.
People are buying $100 bottles of booze because of their taste.
You absolutely get different notes based on mash bill, age, alcohol content. I’m not a great taster, but getting bacon notes from a, Islay scotch or overripe banana from a toasted bourbon (Old Forester 1910 is a favorite) is something I’m capable of.
So you disbelieve that anyone drinks these things for any reason other than for intoxication?
Well, for a hard liquor like bourbon, some males would be legally intoxicated at 2 drinks, nearly all by 4 drinks. Women even faster. And drinking them one after another, like in a tasting, would get you drunk faster than a normal evening session.
So I’d guess that for at least the last half of their 10 taste tests, the testers were legally intoxicated. So how accurate could they be?
You realize, of course, that tasters A) take very small sips, B) likely spit the wine/spirit out instead of swallowing, C) pace themselves mightily. I’ve judged home-brew contests where my category had 20+ entries. My judging partner and I both blew sober at the end of the judging.
I guess the definition of ‘taste’ makes a difference at a tasting. And the order. Even where a ‘taste’ is a little sip doesn’t it have some effect on the drinks to follow? I know they’ll drink something to clear the palate in between. I suppose tasters need some level of experience to account for the cumulative effect of both the alcohol and the other flavors.
heh even I can tell the difference between that 5. 00 bottle of bathtub catpissfrom bumwine emporium calling itself vodka and say a bottle of Stoli or absolut or hell even good ol’ Popov
How do you feel about perfumery?
For example,
L’Eau d’Issey Pour Homme by Issey Miyake is a Woody Aquatic fragrance for men. L’Eau d’Issey Pour Homme was launched in 1994. The nose behind this fragrance is Jacques Cavallier. Top notes are Yuzu, Lemon, Bergamot, Lemon Verbena, Mandarin Orange, Cypress, Calone, Coriander, Tarragon and Sage; middle notes are Blue Lotus, Nutmeg, Lily-of-the-Valley, Saffron, Bourbon Geranium, Ceylon Cinnamon and Mignonette; base notes are Tahitian Vetiver, Musk, Cedar, Sandalwood, Tobacco and Amber.
I am willing to believe it smells like that, and moreover that one has to be an experienced “nose” to correctly identify every one of a mixture of that many ingredients. Though I would, personally, just toss it in the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer—that works for bourbon, too!
I am one of those. The more I learned, the more expensive my hobby has become. There are benefits though. My favorite is bottling, a little sip here, a little sip there. Being invited to participate in whiskey blending events are cool too. I currently have 2 barrels aging, one is a bourbon, the other is a rye heavy whiskey. I still have at least 2 years but probably 3 or 4 till they are ready for bottling.
One suspects that the ratio of those who think they possess super-refined palates capable of reproducibly making those distinctions to those who actually can on some basis (mostly professionals) is…large. 
“Large” you say.
I propose large as in “Galactic Group” large.
Billions upon billions of galaxies each equipped with billions of stars with billions of planets, some fraction inhabited with millions of whiskey drinkers. Most of whom, by the present sampling, consider this over-the-top descriptive BS as pure BS purely and simply,
I like what I like, and I have some vocabulary to speak of it. But one can get in over one’s actual head very quickly Which is mostly cringe-worthy, not admirable.
This thread makes me glad I had to quit drinking 20 years ago. Back then, I was a bourbon guy, and bourbon had exactly four notes: hot, smooth, sour, and sweet. If you tasted vanilla pudding, orange zest and a hint of marshmallow, you assumed the glasses hadn’t been rinsed properly and there was still dishwashing liquid in them.
Maybe. But before I’ll give somebody the respect they feel they deserve for their highly refined palate, they have to establish, by means of an objective test, that their highly refined palate actually exists.
But vanilla is a pretty common note of bourbon – one of the more common ones. American oak barrels have a lot of vanillins in them, so this ain’t folks making shit up. Most of the flavors I read hear do actually correspond to certain flavor compounds. American oak and its charring are also known for it’s caramel notes. Scotch whiskeys aged in sherry casks tend to have a dark fruit/prune/raisin-y type of flavor to them (but it depends on the type of sherry cask). These things do have their own flavors, and the tell-tale words describe a certain flavor compound. In beer, “banana” flavors tell me hefeweizen yeasts, Belgian yeasts tend to go more towards clove and bubblegum, though some have banana esters. Butterscotch/buttery flavors are the presence of diacetyl, and are usually unwanted over a certain threshhold, but some beer styles are more tolerant of it (Old Speckled Hen and Samuel Smith’s Pale ale will have it.) Flavors of Band-Aids are associated with many Islay malts (if you ever have one, you’ll get the comparison right away, I think.) Earth and dirt flavors, campfires, too. All those flavors are associated with peat.
The vocabulary looks ridiculous at first, but it does mean something once you delve into it. I started figuring out all these descriptions when I started homebrewing about 15 years ago and began to change up ingredients and see how minor changes affected the flavor of beers with overall the same recipe. How Northwest hops taste and smell overwhelmingly of grapefruit and citrus often (my first time with a certain beer during my neophyte days I had to ask the bartended whether I was drinking a flavored beer, as the hops were SO damn grapefruity) while English hops may be more grassy and spicy.
If I ever meet the person who first bred Citra hops, I’m gonna punch them right in the mouth.
Hey!
I like Citras, but they can be a bit aggressive. The first beer I remember tasting an overwhelming grapefruit flavor in was – I thought – Goose Island Honker’s Ale. And it was in a particularly fresh pour at the bar. I swear it was Amarillo hops, as I had looked it up later, but everything online says they use Styrian Goldings and Super Styrian, so I may be remembering wrong (or they used different hops back then, but I can’t see them changing the recipe.) Actually, that makes sense, as it’s supposed to be a British-style ale. That said, I don’t remember that beer tasting particularly grapefruity since that time I had it, so perhaps they gave me a completely different beer by accident. Goose Island IPA would make sense, but that doesn’t have Amarillo in its hop bill, and I swear whatever it was I had, it was Amarillo hops, as that’s when I first learned of them. But the hop bill of the IPA would make sense with the grapefruit flavor.
I’m a fan of classic Cascades & Centennials for American ales, and Kent Goldings and Fuggles for British. Completely different flavor profiles, so easy to pick out. I’m not as good as picking out one NW hop from another, though. It’s fun when a brewery will put out single hopped editions of their beers to try, though it’s been awhile since I’ve seen that, as well.
Fundamentally, we lack a good vocabulary for flavor. So when people try to describe flavor in detail, it comes out like that.
I have a pretty good palate – not as good as it used to be, when i spat out some pepperidge farm cookies because they’d replace the tropical oils with canola oil – but still good enough to identify that the blob of dark purple preserves on the dessert plate was blueberry after my dining companion told me it was blackberry. All those descriptions make sense to me, and sound like the sort of flavor i expect in a whiskey. Could i reproduce the description? No. I also don’t have a lot of experience tasting whiskeys. But i believe someone else can.
I also enjoy a nice smokey Islay despite hating getting drunk.
One of the things I’ve wondered is if this happens to other people: on certain days, different flavor components may jump out at me. I’ll be eating or drinking the same exact product I have many times before, but one day a background flavor will just leap to the forefront and dominate my experience. It may very well have to do with what I recently ate (many of usknow how toothpaste and orange juice drunk right after affects the taste), maybe what my body is craving, perhaps even time of day and how “cleansed” my palette is. Hell, even time since I last had a certain item.
And, of course, individual sensitivities to flavor vary. Last week I made a burger sauce with just the merest hint of mustard in it; well below my threshhold of detection as a discrete ingredient. My brother, who does not like those brassica flavors for the most part (there are times he will tolerate them), instantly reacted to the unwanted flavor (he wasn’t told beforehand, and I had forgotten about his aversion as it’s not inflexible.) Meanwhile, today we’re eating Chinese green beans, and I’m getting overwhelming notes of dried shrimp or dried fish – something like that – and he’s only detecting a mild seafoodiness to it. So flavor notes across individuals will vary, depending on their sensitivities. But given enough data, you can get some generalizations for what to expect in a new dram of liquor, and what you may or may not like.