QotD: Wine Tasting

I don't like the rug pulled out from under me, and wine is a master of this trick. I fight back by taking detailed tasting notes so I can accurately recall a wine whether I tasted it in moonlight with the winemaker holding it to my lips and whispering sweet sales pitches in my ear, or in the neon light of a physics lab with a nerd whispering sweet chemical formulas.

But even the best notes can be foiled by your own, personal chemistry. In sickness and in health, medicated or stone cold sober, sweating or shivering, sleepy or buzzed — all of these states and more can totally change your perception. Immune to my obsessive note-taking, a white might scour like Brillo one week, and go down like lemonade on a hot summer's day the next. Velvety, generous reds can go tarry and bitter, only to resume the seduction a few weeks, months, or flu seasons later.

When it happens in your own mouth, it's easy to grasp how profoundly different wine might taste to someone else. Debating "red" with your spouse might be as relevant as arguing "green" with the color-blind.

Jennifer "Chotzi" Rosen, "And You Can't Make Me!", Rocky Mountain News, 2005-12-27