Feb. 28–During “Somm,” the 2012 film about four guys working their way through the “hardest exam you’ve never heard of” — that for the rank of master sommelier — the coolest parts were when they spit.
Not wine. Words.
Two or three of them would be gathered to blind taste a bunch of wines, and in turn each would take a good sniff of the wine in question and then rat-a-tat blurt out something like this: “I get pear, apple — green apple, Granny Smith green apple — grapefruit, white melon, cilantro, stone fruit, candied fruit, grass” — and often even more.
Passing the master sommelier exam depended on the guys’ nailing the names, places of origin and even the vintage years of six wines.
That’s an incredibly difficult thing to do, blind taste a wine and then name it. The possibilities are nearly limitless, a combination of dozens of grape-growing regions around the world, hundreds of grape varieties, a few possible harvests and the winemaking practices of thousands of different winemakers.
So, the Court of Master Sommeliers, the body that administers the exam around the globe, offers instruction in how to learn to blind taste wine, plus other sommelier service skills. The original sommeliers were butlers and had to verify the identity of wines, not in labeled bottles as today but in large casks when delivered to their rooms. The court teaches this skill for modern somms.
One such course visited Chicago Feb. 17-18 and was given by four master sommeliers who live and work in Chicago: Joseph Spellman, Fernando Beteta, Serafin Alvarado and Jesse Becker. In their time they’d all done what the fellows in “Somm” had done, and they were there to help the 105 budding somms assembled for the course to do the same.
But you need not want to be a sommelier, master or otherwise, to find the court’s method instructive for you as an amateur taster. What you can obtain from the Court of Master Sommeliers “deductive tasting format” is — let me tell you from doing it myself — way cool.
Basically, what the deductive method does is help you focus on what’s in front of you without the presuppositions of knowing in advance the grape variety, place of origin, vintage and winemaker of a wine. All you have is the basic equipment of a nose and a palate, and a brain and memory to inform them.
What you build over time is a great resource for tasting and appreciating wine, even when you do know much about it ahead of time. You’ll make generous deposits into your aroma and flavor memory bank; you’ll discover benchmark characters for individual wines or grape varieties against which to assess the quality of future examples; and you’ll develop the ability to describe wines adequately, even exhaustively.
So, just like in the movie, you (and, I would suggest, for kick’s sake, a group of like-minded friends) take a wine poured into a thin-rimmed wine glass from a brown-paper-wrapped bottle (that’s the “blind” part) and have a go at it, like this:
Look at the wine in the glass against a white surface, in good light. Its color and depth of hue, its brightness and clarity, all will clue you to the wine’s makeup, by grape variety especially but also to how old or young it is, where its grapes grew (in, say, a cool versus warm climate) and even how it was made, discovering, for example, the intensity or viscosity that the winemaker got out of the grapes.
Get a good snort of the wine in the glass, a fine four-second-long sniff so that you really push those aroma-laden molecules up onto your olfactory globe. Here’s where the rat-a-tat in the movie “Somm” plays for you, by you.
Aroma is the most important part of tasting, in truth; without smell, we actually cannot “taste” wine because nearly all the characteristics of a wine’s taste are unlocked via its aromas. So, identify and describe all of that, referring to aromas and smells with which you are familiar (such as “pear, apple — green apple, Granny Smith green apple — grapefruit” and so on).
Smells are intense or humble, youthful or redolent of age. They’re fruit aromas, nonfruity ones, earthy and mineral smells, aromas of wood and other winemaking practices. They are 10,000 or more, science says; pick ’em out.
A sip and swirl around the mouth and there are more tastes to assess, even so far as a mere confirmation of the already-sniffed aromas. But the wine’s texture now comes into play, too, along with its levels of such things as acidity, alcohol, tannin and heft. More words, more guesses, more what Joe Spellman calls “tells.”
The wine’s talking to you about itself; it’s telling you something. Nail it.
Then spit.
(You may find helpful the forms used by the Court of Master Sommeliers for its “deductive tasting format.” Download them here: mastersommeliers.org/Pages.aspx/Resources).
Bill St. John has been writing and teaching about wine for more than 40 years.
