Exploring Flavour Biases – what’s your wine type?
When one person loves a wine and another hates it, who is right? Is Marmite heavenly or the finest work of Beelzebub?
According to Robert Joseph and Tim Hanni, that depends on your taste. Hanni has developed a vinotype classification that suggests than different people will like different wines based on their unique, personal combination of sensitivities and values.
A DWCC14 workshop presented attendees with 4 separate flights of wines, tasted blind, with tasters simply asked to choose a number of adjectives from a list and then choose their preferred wine from each flight. The wines in each flight were all similar and comprised still, dry white and red wines.
I tested as “sensitive” on the Vinotype scale, the other three options being Sweet, Hypersensitive, and Tolerant. Basically I am Mr Average, down the middle of the line.
Not surprisingly, there were a few games being played. Flight one contained two glasses of exactly the same wine but the second having had about twice the oxygen in the bottle. I preferred the latter, it felt much smoother and rounder to me, Â and I didn’t spot the wines were identical. About 70% preferred the first wine. Each to their own!
Flight two experimented with sugar levels, most of the room disliking sample 3, the extra residual sugar affects ones interpretation of the other flavours. As the sugar levels rose, I found this doctored red Bordeaux got mustier and staler.
Flight three tested exposure to Brettanomyces – I am one of those that doesn’t mind a bit of Brett.
The final flight injected TCA into a dry white Bordeaux. I left the wines of this flight in the glass and tried them again at the end – wine three was rank. Psychology, knowledge after the event, or the effect of another 30 minutes of air? Who knows.
We are left looking for a conclusion and it inevitably leads towards Tim Hanni’s thesis that wine is an intensely individual affair and you should probably ignore all the techno-babble and drink wines that you like.