The 50 shades of Gris!
…or depending on the wine you fancy, the 50 shades of red, yellow or pink! This article starts off with an inevitable erotic mood, towards wine and the reader!
The meaning of erotic in Ancient Greece, however was slightly different than what we currently describe as such. The great philosopher Plato in his works, describes as erotic, a relationship between someone who seeks knowledge and someone who is willing to offer it! My personal relationship with wine is one of knowledge, of learning, of personal development and of exploring the self. It is an inside job! How? Be patient, as you will soon found out!
For those of you who simply prefer clear & plain information, the subject of this article is about our ability to recognize through our 5 senses, the slightest detail, or the difference that makes the difference!
I am referring of course, to Sensory Acuity or the training and sharpening of the senses, which leads to a state called intuition, a term surrounded by an epic myth with dragon and maidens. In reality, it is a state where our sensory system is so sharpened & in congruence with our brains, as well as, with the great unknown sea of human experience and via each and every imperceptible stimulus, it is able to recover sensory memories buried deeply in our subconscious minds, but also create new memories as well!
But why the senses are of such a great importance for us humans and specifically the wine lover?
So pour some wine in to your always ready glasses and focus with all your senses on me, and while you do so, keep observing yourself, your thoughts and that may pop up, not forgetting to sip from your glass. Now you start to think about the tastes, the aromas and the colours, because after you are done with article, everything will have become clearer and more conscious and maybe you have already begun to recognize even more characteristics of your wine! Impressive isn’t it?
But before we allow ourselves to drift into the magic world of the 5 senses, a few words for me and my journey so far.
My first contact with the world of wine, happened at a very young age. Being fortunate enough to be born in a wine making family, with vineyards at the island of Paros. For a series of generations, we produced wines for our own consumption specializing in an incomparable dessert wine typical, of the island, which I still have it in a special place in my heart.
Since I was a kid, I admired all those wine connoisseurs who, from only a small sip, could identify so much information and the more capable of them, the mystics, could weave great stories, even whole books out of the information they could obtain from just a sip! Pure Magic!
According to principles of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, the senses and the organs related to them, are the only gates which, us humans can gather information for the environment around us through! Based on this sensory information, we create Maps of Reality and use them to navigate in our lives! These maps are unique to each one of us and this is normal! We live in a subjective world, after all!
All the sensory information related to a specific event, are being stored in a specific part of our brains and these are now called pieces of experience or memories. Every time we need to access such a piece, this is happening in the form of an internal image or video, an internal sound, a sensation somewhere in the body and of course a gustatory (taste) or an olfactory (smell) memory!
For example, imagine popping the cork out of a bottle of Strofilia’s Mountain Fish and us seeing, smelling, tasting and feeling the wine. This is going to create a new piece of personal experience and with repetition, this piece will get stronger and richer, so strong and rich that the next time we are going to unexpectedly taste the same wine, automatically, the associated information is going to emerge out of our subconscious minds, in the form of a picture (of the bottle) or a specific sound (maybe a voice talking about that wine) or even its unique taste & aroma profile and we are going to recognize it instantly.
Wine-tasting, ranks among the most effective ways, for achieving sensory acuity and by being more acute someone can dramatically develop his or her responses, time & quality-wise. The magic part, is that by increasing our effectiveness in the wine-related decision-making process, our ability the make decisions in all parts of our life, becomes more effective, too! The way people make decisions is common in all aspects of their lives. An exceptional decision maker, creates exceptional decisions all the time and in all contexts! Save this last statement for later on! We will need it!
Now let’s approach the wine-tasting process, via a story. At this point, I would to ask all wine connoisseurs reading the article, to forgive me if there are any blank spots in the story about the process, as my experience is purely empirical.
Now sit back and relax and while you are relaxing imagine that you are inside your favorite room and your favorite bottle of wine, is patiently resting on a wooden table waiting its redemption via the pulling of the cork. It will have a unique chance to share all the wonderful stuff it has silently achieved through years of evolution in the cellar, with you.
Wines and people who do work on themselves, share common qualities!
Now imagine that you are not alone, but all your favorite people, imaginary or not, are there here you, and all together and each one on their own, have already begun to prepare their senses, for a totally unbiased evaluation. Even before this gathering has taken place here in this room, they began to prepare themselves for it by choosing what to eat, what to drink, what to smell so as to create and a perfect blank, sensory canvas.
Finally, the corkscrew penetrates the cork with a decisive movement crafted by thousands and thousands of repetitions and the Sommelier, pulls it out of the bottle’s neck intact, while the unmistakeable “pop”, sounds more appealing than ever, sends chilling waves of excitement & eagerness, up & down the spines of all the participants! Some people claim that from this sound, someone can guess if the wine has gone bad or not, even if it has matured or aged perfectly. Before we continue, note the difference between these two.
Moving on, premature opinions about the contents of the bottle have already begun to form, not only from a single sound, but also by its combination with the readings of and the writings on the label!
The appearance, as well as, the smell of the cork shall offer valuable information to those who are wise enough, to look for them and if all are as they should be, the valuable liquid, will be reverently poured into the special, for the occasion, glasses with the sound of the wine colliding with the crystal walls, being more vibrant & refreshing than ever before! Collisions are starting points of creation and births of exciting things and maybe we are here doing what we love because of at least one Collision or a series of them!
While the liquid with a spiral motion is filling up the glass, the first aromas, products of this primal collision, have already started to concentrate towards the centre of the glass cavity, led there by the crystal lips where they are going to drive the experience to the new heights from.
By now, the tasting is deeply into the visual state, focusing on the basic colour and its specific qualities and hues. The team is on fire with opinions flying all around:
Red!
Red of a brick wall!
Bordeaux Rouge, says the French!
While the more experienced Englishman has noted on his trusted diary:
“…Crimson Red …with bloody notes that evolve over time and produce dark, almost black spotted areas, typical of the variety…”
Now it’s time for the observation of the viscosity of the liquid or the tears or the legs of the wine, two beautiful metaphors, used in the wine-language to describe a texture related phenomenon, visually.
The hand reaches for the glass’s leg and with careful, but decisive circular movements, sends the content into a spiral dance with the molecules of oxygen, giving life to dormant scents, while the hand leads the glass to the nose or the head leads the nose to the glass. Inhale once or twice and the first few internal representations are starting to form.
Intense fruit,
Red fruits,
Aromas of berries & black ripe cherries,
There is some tomato in there and hints of green bell pepper somewhere in the background, conclude the experienced members of the group.
The most inexperienced ones only smells something vaguely tasty and pompously announces that probably he or she identified aromas of ripe papaya, but he or she is not sure, that there have the words to fully describe the experience.
Some, will bring the glass to their nose one more time, so as to focus on the secondary and tertiary aromas, looking for earthy notes of spices, wood, mushrooms and maybe wet earthy tones. Where they there since the beginning? Where they emerged with time? Have they been planted there by the mind with the assumption of belonging to the scene based, on stored past memories? Who knows? This a puzzle for powerful explorers of the senses!
Then the first sip follows, at last. Moved spirally by the facial muscles and the tongue, inside the cavity of the mouth, the wine passes from all known & unknown taste buds, sending gustatory and kinaesthetic signals to the brain, so as to match them with the right words and draw them to the conscious mind and from there to the mouth cavity and to the world!
Heavy wine!
With a robust structure!
Nay! Medium to full bodied with strong and young tannins,
No! These are not tannins mate, it is the high percentage of alcohol that deceived you, the feel is different! Calmly states the expert!
The most inexperienced member again, looks puzzled. He or she has consumed almost all the content of the glass, blocking the sensory ability as an effect of alcohol.
As the tasting reaches towards its closure, the subjective conclusions of all members, about the experienced experience, are collectively discussed with those varying from the simple “tasty wine”, up to …the exact identification of the contents of the last supper of the vineyard worker who harvested the 13th bucket of grapes, in the secret vineyard at 1852.34 m of altitude …a meal that definitely contained those chillies that gave the wine a shy note of Red Hot Chilli Peppers spiciness…
Serious wine tastings though, they end up in a series of critical decision which, at the highest professional level, might influence the market position and performance of a wine and these are very serious business decisions.
Now it is time to pause and reflect on the process described above. The critical importance of sharp, acute senses should be more than evident by now! In fact, they are all over, they drive the process of decision making! The more acute the senses, the more effective the ability to evaluate anything and hence, the fuller the experience will be.
Do you remember, when a few lines above, I specifically asked you to save a statement?
Now it is time to recall it, as this procedure has tremendous importance , together the phenomenon of transferring of knowledge from one field to another. These two are extremely important to a very different field, that of Leadership and decision-making in the business world! More on the relationship between the two will be presented in another article later on.
A few moments before our guests go home, I will leave to the hospitable table of Strofilia Winery for you, some food-for-thought or since we are in this, with the wine as a common denominator, some dessert wine for the soul, to assist you in digesting all this information:
One of the most helpful piece of advice I was ever given, as an aspiring wine-lover, was to smells all smells and taste all tastes, coming along my path.
Why practicing the above, is so important in fully and truly experiencing a wine according to what you have learned today?
Bottom’sUp!
Or “Aspros Patos”, as we say in Greek! With the final drop of wine still in the air between the bottle and the glass, I am sure everything is clearer now and it will continue to clear as you continue think about it.
Wine is a time capsule that concentrates the collective experience of a 365 days trip around the sun and at the same time the collective experience of the Winery’s Team and even more globally, that of a whole nation.
Their purpose is to offer to him or her, who will choose to pour it into their glasses, a unique chance to travel back at that time, and experience again the same experiences, the winemaking team or the nation has experienced! What a great vehicle of creating, sharing and preserving experience!
And I saved the most important part for the end. All you need is already within you since the day you were born:
All you need are the 5 senses!
Let’s drink to that and celebrate the great gift called life!
