Drinking and tasting whisky are not always exactly the same thing. Drinking’s the main event, and of course doesn’t exclude taste, but just as you might enjoy driving a lovely car, it’s the overall effect of the experience that matters, not the whys and wherefores, the details, the analysis of the experience. You like the whisky because you like the whisky, period. In which case, there’s no good or bad whisky – at least not that we can agree on.
However and hold on: this isn’t how things are. Just as you might have taken advice when buying that same lovely car, so you might look to reviews on certain whiskies – as a means of getting some perspective on what’s good and what’s not. See what you’ve done? Welcome to the world of the critic, of the tasting note, of criteria, hierarchy and value, an aesthetic of taste, one that, agree or not, appears to champion objective truth over subjective whim.
FACT OR FANTASY
In wine and spirits, flavour is aroma and taste combined. While it is fairly easy to speak objectively of the primary flavours of the mouth, the immediate taste sensations of bitter, salty, sour, sweet and savoury, and of the various irritating, warming, drying and pungent-like effects of the spirit on the mouth and nasal passages, the aromas smelt both before and during actual tasting are another thing altogether. Numerous and invisible objects, often nameless, and more instantly reminiscent of moments in our past, of a time when we tasted or smelt something just like them, aromas are vehicles into a private world of half-forgotten memories, which when described convey more a poetry of the imagining subject than a language designed to measure and communicate the merits of their source: the whisky itself.
Certainly, this would seem to be the view of Richard E Quandt, economist and author of the cat-among-the-pigeons piece On Wine Bullshit: Some New Software?. Quandt takes umbrage with wine tasting on two fronts: the almost universal practice of ranking a wine by a numerical score (usually out of 100, sometimes 10); and the language used to describe its appearance, nose, taste, body, finish and overall balance. The first he describes as being a false measure, a ‘bullshit-o-metrics’. The second he calls a ‘vocabulary of bullshit’, a given set of tasting notes so subjective as to be no more useful than a randomly selected list of descriptors – as generated by a piece of software. What exactly, he asks, is ultra-silky tannin?
While Quandt’s sights are set on the world of wine, Chuck Cowdery gives scoring whiskies similar short thrift in his analysis Why Ratings are Bull. Publications are forced, he says, to numerically rate whiskies, ‘producers and their advertisers’ being much fonder of the impression of immutable quality as presumed by a number than they are of the editorial vagaries of written review. By its nature a group of individuals, a given panel of judges, is rarely fixed or consistent. Personnel change, as do tastes, and so a review is what it is: the subjective opinion of an individual. Besides, unless a consumer’s aware of the publication’s guidelines, scores of 79 plus will always feel high. It’s not really out of 100. It’s a competiton between good, better and best.
Speaking of subjectivity, it would seem that we are biologically determined to create a private tasting language. As Adam Rogers says in Proof, the majority of us can identify up to four aromas – say chocolate, smoke, cheese and sulphur – with reasonable consistency, especially after some training. Complicate things much more, however, throw in two or more flavour compounds, combine them in different ways, and our ability to spot that which we confidently identified only seconds ago is reduced to nothing. ‘After four different smells, the human basically chunks them all together’, forming a ‘gestalt aroma’ that ‘becomes the identifying aroma for that object’. In other words, we invent our own personal aromas.
It gets worse: as well as invent, we are also hoodwinked – by sight, no less. Again, much of the work on this has been done in wine, where famously it has been shown how a few drops of flavourless red dye can fool a master of wine into tasting flavours typical of a red in what in fact is a white. The nose is bushwhacked by a mirage. This is taste analysis at the bottom of a large hole.
TOWARDS A SCIENCE OF TASTING
For the likes of Quandt, an objective sensory analysis of whisky is nearly impossible. If we’re going to say anything, he says, then keep it simple, and make sure it’s something we all agree on: that is, colour plus indisputable basic flavour descriptors (bitter, sweet etc.) plus that which is truly measurable (length of finish, for example). That way, we keep the bullshit to the absolute minimum.
I like a lot of what Quandt has to say, though perhaps not for exactly the same reasons. Certainly, opinion masquerading as fact is wrong. It makes gatekeepers and impenetrable rituals out of something that ought to be open to all: the joys of taste, the pleasurable effects of ethanol.
However, while it’s interesting – and something of a relief – to note that even a master of wine is fallible, it doesn’t necessarily follow that everything he or she has ever said is without merit. Given the right conditions, it’s possible to trick or break almost anyone. It seems that the colour red acts as a cue for sweetness, thereby influencing sense of taste before the act of actually tasting. We see red: we taste the properties of red. As a synaesthete might say, nothing’s guaranteed.
Truth is, and notwithstanding the private and hallucinatory world of sensual perception, there’s no substitute when it comes to knowledge and experience. While no one’s clear about everything, there are objectively identifiable reasons for the existence of certain aromas. It’s not so much that they do not exist, but rather how to recognise – and so speak about - them. The onus, then, is on producers, tasters and critics to communicate what they know using an established set of rules, and to keep to what they can taste. Do so and we allow, as we shall see, for both the subjective and the objective. Thus, while it’s perfectly possible to make use of descriptors lifted from everyday speech, or use memory, simile or metaphor in order to give voice to the otherwise private, the nuts and bolts of what is said can be shown to have a proper scientific basis.
Based on a history of odour classification, and especially on the beer and wine flavour wheels of Morten Meilgaard and Ann Noble, whisky has made use of a variety of sophisticated flavour guides. Some are industry facing, their function a tool for professional tasters, whose job it is to evaluate batches of newly matured whisky against previous same-brand releases. Others have evolved as blending aids. Many function as consumer-friendly infographs. The best speak a language designed to communicate real knowledge.
As an example, one of the most detailed flavour whisky infographs is Scotch Whisky Research Institute’s revised wheel, which divides aroma and ‘flavour by mouth’ into 14 primary descriptors, each of which is further divided into a set of secondary descriptors. Thus, ‘primary taste’ breaks down into sweet, sour, salty and bitter. ‘Phenolic’, meanwhile, divides into medicinal, peaty and kippery; ‘mouthfeel effects’, mouth coating, astringent and mouth warming; ‘feints’, leathery, tobacco, sweat and stale fish – and so on. While not universal (‘kipper’ is nothing to someone who has no idea what a kipper is), and always evolving, these are real words, and serve as a means of sharing the invisible.
FROM BULLSHIT TO HYPOTHESIS
So, when nosing a whisky, and you find yourself, Proustian-like, catapulted back to the sight of your mother’s nails, the smell of glue in the air, be at peace. No need to book an appointment with your therapist. You may think or note, ‘mum’s nails, dressing table, gown, the house on Hanover Square’, which is fine and fun and enough to drive Quandt wild. If pressed, however, you may define the memory as meaning a note of nail polish remover, which in turn might indicate that certain acetates – methyl and ethyl – formed during fermentation have been allowed to survive the effects of distillation and of maturation. If more than a note, then it might even mean that fusel alcohols created during fermentation have so dominated the beer’s amino acids as to result in a solvent-heavy wash, an imbalance possibly exacerbated by a too early first cut, and then underlined or consolidated when laid down in poor wood, and for not long enough. Conclusion: it’s a tainted whisky – perhaps. There’s a method to the bullshit.