I might be a little late for New Years, but I would like to make the resolution to whip that flabby palate of mine into shape. As well as the de rigueur health kick I’m on this year, I’m going to be performing an exercise regime for my palate as well as my cardiovascular system in the coming year. And I’d like to invite my readers to join me. Thanks to a myriad of clinical studies released in the last decade, we now know that these two endeavors can be very mutually inclusive, and we can rejoice.

My trail to a more precise palate will end, I hope, with CWE certification later this year. While I taste many different wines every week which I think gives me a pretty astute palate, I don’t feel I’ve ever had to submit myself to palate boot camp. For you, fair reader, a more buff palate is quite simply a pleasure-enhancer. Simply being able to articulate what about a wine is alluring will open doors to literally thousands of wines like it. While the intensity level of these exercises may differ between you and I, the basic technique is the same.

Your palate is simply a muscle

All these fitness metaphors I’m using are for a specific purpose. As with many aspects of the wine world, things can seem overly convoluted from an outsider’s point of view. Given a little bravery and a slightly deeper look, we see that oftentimes this is not so. A refined palate is definitely one of those things. When we strip away the artifice, we see that a palate is not unlike any muscle in your body. A little exercise goes a long way. As with physical exercise, you need only bring a small amount of thought to the subject and a great deal more dedication. The real “thinking” or intellectual growth happens deep in the less deliberate parts of the mind. If you stay dedicated and try to exert your descriptive and sensual faculties, you’ll find your vocabulary automatically richer and your sense automatically deepened.

 Looking in from outside, I can see how people are intimidated by notebook carrying wine snobs that seem to over-analyze every component of even the simplest of wines. What people fail to see is the sheer joy such exercises can provide—truly a melding of sense and intellect.

First, let’s drop the snobbery

I’ve written quite a bit on snobs and snobbery on this site. I stress this now because among the uninitiated there’s often a sort of inverse snobbery where people see the more sophisticated surrounded with the common trappings of a healthy wine enthusiasm and automatically think “snob”.  As with body image, it’s important to keep in mind that we’re not doing this for anyone else. We’re not trying to prove ourselves to the fit, nor distance ourselves from the unfit. What we’re doing here is trying to deepen the experience, to make our interactions with wine more deeply hedonistic. So when you approach these exercises, try to do so with a mind unclouded by the swirling world of wine around you. When you sit down to your first glass of the night, do so with a singular mind. Your sole goal is finding another avenue of pleasure—both sensual and intellectual—in life. As with many things, your mindset going in will dictate the tone of the exercise.

The tools

Again, a proper mindset is the most important, but there are a scant few things necessary.

1. A notebook. This can take many forms: a pocket notebook, a spiral ringed binder, one of those almost iconic marble-textured composition books (which is what I use), anything will do. The only real criteria that such a book must meet are a certain degree of usability or portability and a lack of value. That’s right, it should be cheap. For now, simply the exercise of writing is most important. We want something that will encourage writing freely and, surely at first, badly. A leather-bound blank diary with a brass clasp will only work if you are already a great wine writer and I somehow doubt any of you are (nor myself). We don’t want the notebook to show us up or intimidate us into writing above our level.
2. A tongue and a nose. While it’s a bit obvious to list these as tools, it’s important to note that you’re going to be paying attention to these organs a lot more than you usually do. You should think of these as tools of the trade and add them to your mental checklist before embarking on any of these exercises.
3. An open mind. You may be carrying your mind around, but it may not necessarily be open. As you approach new experiences, be open to thing that you have never liked or learned to like. There are very few palate attributes that are objectively “bad”. The act of recording what we do and paying it close attention is NOT an act of critique. You are not a wine critic, you are a wine enthusiast. Start thinking like one. One of my most positive wine education experiences came from learning how to sell wine. Being forced to sell a broad set of wines, I was forced to see the positive in all wines—and almost all wines have positives—so that I could match up tastes to those positives, even if they weren’t positives for me. Think like a wine salesman. You may not like it, but isn’t there something about it that someone would like? If so, what are those positive attributes?
4. Friends (optional, but encouraged). These are exercises that one can undertake alone, to be sure, but a group of likeminded others with open minds are bound to be sounding-boards to each other and magnify the discovery experience tenfold. While it’s important to avoid grafting a friend’s opinion as yours, it may be more important to help jumpstart your imagination and richen your vocabulary. It may also seem disruptive to be whipping out a notebook in a social drinking setting, but if everyone is in on the game, then your experience is made all the more useful. Even if your friends aren’t taking notes as you should be, you can start a conversation about the wine. This need not be academic in nature. Casual, creative conversation is encouraged.

Proper posture

There are certainly many guides around the internet that can guide you on how to properly taste wine. Most are at least acceptable, though they almost always smack of dogma. There are many valid ways to approach the actual technique of tasting. Eventually you will find the one that suits you best. The most important thing you can take away from any of these guides is that we’re trying to pay our undivided attention to what we’re drinking, at least initially. Paying attention and “listening” to your total palate is one of those things that will help put the rest of the ducks in a row. If you taste on a regular basis and if you think about your senses as you do so, I think you’ll find things like proper tasting technique, wine vocabulary and astuteness of palate take care of themselves over time.

Many fitness experts will tell you that what you’re doing when you aren’t exercising is as important if not more so than what you’re doing when you are. Things like proper posture, proper diet, and choosing the less-lazy way of doing something are stressed. Likewise, before we get to the many exercises both fun and erudite we can undertake I’m going to take a moment to stress proper posture. It’s primarily most important to bring an analytic view to already existing drinking habits. As you take that evening glass of wine, or even as you are in a restaurant trying something new, pull out that little scratchpad and write your thoughts on the wine. I think that most, when starting to write their thoughts on specific wines that they’re drinking, often feel inadequate and inexpressive. Remember that you have to learn how to walk before you can run. Also remember that we’re keeping a junky little pad because we’re exercising, not necessarily for posterity, although that may be useful at some point.

Why writing is strongly tied to palate strength

As stretching is tied to muscle conditioning, so too writing is tied to palate acuity. How you write is somewhat unimportant at this point. The simple act of writing will force you to focus on your senses and stretch to find vocabulary that fits. This will never be perfect. The reason we’re drinking and tasting wine at all is because whipping out a postcard and writing a quick note at a dinner table will never have the same charm as popping a special bottle. The experience retains its charm almost because of its ineffability.

Almost every wine writer and critic calls on a reserve of likes—like-tasting and like-smelling objects—as a reference point. You’ve all seen it and perhaps even scratched your head at it. “Aromas of freshly laid asphalt,” is one that can especially confound laypeople. But by understanding why such a description and many other odd-sounding ones is legitimate and even learning how to employ such a phrase ourselves, we become empowered laypeople and can read the critics with our own critical eye. Not merely an exercise in flagrancy, using sometimes far out terms to describe what’s really rotten fruit juice has a purpose deeper than the hype and the glossy magazines. We are forced to use descriptive parallels that are oftentimes conspicuously not in the fruit category because wine is so astonishing as to mimic almost everything under the sun. The real miracle of viticulture and the real blessing of wine enthusiasm is observing the almost perfect microcosm in a glass that starts from the humble dusty grape on the vine and somehow parallels so much of what we know in life. It is to more properly be a witness to this miracle that we climb the altar of Bacchus. Only there are a whole lotta stairs up there, so lets hit the Stairmaster first.

Part 2