The language power: Do you taste what you say you taste?

1. Do you taste what you say you taste?

How do you describe the flavor of a wine? You may hear or use words like ‘honey’, ‘blackberry’, or ‘straw’. But have you ever stopped to ask why those particular words come to mind?

At a typical wine tasting, the host usually offers at least a brief description of the aromas and flavors in the glass. Yet how meaningful that information to you depends not only on whether you have prior exposure to similar chemical stimuli, but also on whether those descriptive terms make sense within your cultural framework. The world does not present itself in the same way to everyone.

This became especially clear during my first sensory evaluation of mead in the US, when my perceptual framework was dominated by an Asian cultural context.

As one of the participants, we were asked to blind taste a range of mead samples and generate as many descriptive flavor terms as possible. Over the following few weeks, we were trained on a set of reference aromas derived from those descriptors in preparation for later sensory evaluations, during which we were asked to judge whether those aromas were present in the wine samples at what intensity. I found many of these references were difficult to use, partly because I had never consciously trained myself to describe flavor, but also because some of the categories did not feel culturally intuitive to me.

As a later bilingual, learning a new language often begins with an intuitive alignment of new concepts with existing ones, what we simply call ‘translation.’ Yet grasping the perspectives embedded in those concepts requires gradual immersion in richer contexts.

“Herbal” notes, as presented here, were among the more difficult ones for me. First, the aroma aligned with my prior experience of traditional Chinese medicine, which carried unpleasant associations of sickness and bitterness. As that prior experience had already framed the aroma negatively, I found myself resistant to reframing “herbal” here as the light, fresh, and culinary connotation it often carries even in other cultural contexts.

A similar difficulty arose with stone fruit descriptors. Having grown up in a tropical environment, quite different from the Mediterranean climate of California, I was less familiar with fruits such as plums and apricots; my primary reference was dried stone fruit rather than the fresh ones presented here.

For me, the session was not simply an evaluation; it was a perceptual calibration to a new framework for perceiving and interpreting flavor.

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🔓 Full story coming soon……