Evoking Taste With Words

It is a slow day and I am ruminating.

I have mentioned my nearly four decades of working career in the wine trade. It was good to me, and, with my honey’s significant contribution has allowed us to do what we are doing.

But this is about wine descriptions. I just emailed our daughter about it and that made me think to put some thoughts here.

Taste is not something we can recall. Smell the same. Both are powerful evokers, however. Have not we all encountered a taste or smell and immediately been thrown back in memory to a time when it was encountered?  “Gracie, that smells just like Aunt Rose’s Taylor Pork Roll Casserole!”, or, “I remember that taste from my childhood Thanksgivings”.

It is the stuff wine marketers and wine reviewers attempt when they try to describe their impression of a wine. I made up fluff  like this for years. You see phrases as these on wine bottle back labels, often on little tags hanging from the shelf in a retail shop, occasionally on restaurant wine lists and reviews in print somewhere:

 "I was impressed by the aroma of strawberries and pomegranate. The flavors were diabolically opposed in their deep richness and reminiscence of dark dried fruit..." 

“Like a sunset over Lake Tahoe, a heavy and fulfilling bowl of ruby colored berries”

“Tasting this remarkably concentrated wine I felt as if I was walking over a freshly tarred roof above the city of Rome in my stocking feet”

Appetizing, no?  So, be inspired, send us a similar description of the taste or aroma of something you ate or drank today! travlbug@napanet.net

To our granddaughters…we’d love to hear from you too! Like for breakfast..."The bananas were soft in feel yet had a firm, chewy and yummy sugary taste"