A Mouthful of Wine

Adaptation 2: An Experiment

Your skin adapts to the touch of your clothing. Your sense of smell adapts to persisting odors that your brain accepts as harmless. In the same way, your sense of taste adapts to sensations that repeat, the better to register new tastes that may signal danger for you (such as spoilage or poison). This caveman trick of the body provides us with much of the joy of eating, too, as it allows us to perceive each new, pleasurable flavor as long as that flavor is sufficiently distinct from the one preceding it.

This is one reason successful chefs offer a harmonious interplay of flavors in their dishes. As each taste—sweet, salty, sour, bitter, umami—expresses itself, it refreshes the palate from the previous taste, and you taste more in every bite. (Add the effects of texture and temperature to taste, and your total experience becomes even more layered.)

But it’s not quite that simple. Food rarely exhibits only one taste—most foods have different levels of various tastes. An apple is sweet (from natural sugars) and sour (from acidity). Miso is sweet, salty, and umami. So, when ingredients are combined, adaptation may suppress one taste and cause another to become artificially heightened. Chefs work to use this side effect to their advantage and to avoid being snared by its downside.

To experience it, try this experiment. You’ll need commercial toothpaste and orange juice. First put a dab of toothpaste on your tongue, taste, and swallow. Note the sweetness. Now take a sip of orange juice. Not as sweet as it should be, is it? The OJ tastes bitter because the taste receptors in your mouth have adapted to the greater sweetness of the toothpaste. This “cancels out” the lesser sweetness of the juice, making its bitter component stand out more. 

Adaptation can work for or against you in food and wine pairing. An upcoming post will include a few tricks to remember.

 

Pairing: Green Pea-Parmesan Ravioli and Greco di Tufo

I was trying to capitalize on the umami element of Parmesan in the ravioli (click for the recipe), which I figured would balance the umami of the yeasty lees in Terredora Dipaolo’s Greco di Tufo ($19). It’s a pleasant match and an easy recipe, but try cutting back the black pepper, which dominates the wine. Another (untested) option: browned butter instead of simply melted, for drizzling on the finished dish. If you try it, let the rest of us know what you think.

 

Adaptation: How Your Body Avoids Sensory Overload

Imagine for a moment what it would be like if every nerve ending in your skin were registering what you’re wearing right now—if you could really feel your clothing on every body surface it touches. Every area of your body would be sending sensory readings to your brain right now: “Scratchy—oh, friction!—soft cashmere there—watch band, left wrist—whoa! sock elastic—touching—touching again!—not touching—rubbing now.” Every second of the day. In fact, you probably can’t feel your watch band at all, unless you move your hand and think about it. And does the skin of your ankles feel your socks at this moment?

The human senses evolved as a system of protection for the body. If your nerve endings were busy all day long registering every sensation of your clothing on your skin, the truly dangerous or irritating, like sunburn, that scratchy label in your t-shirt, or a blister forming on your heel, would have to fight to make themselves known.

The body adapts to the banal in its surroundings in order to give priority to the novel, uncomfortable, painful, and poisonous. Adaptation occurs in the senses of hearing, smell, and taste, as well as touch: You may be overcome by the smell of a roast in the oven upon arriving at a friend’s house, but once you’ve been there a few minutes, you can’t smell it nearly as strongly. Your subconscious brain says, “Okay, I still get roast—still roast—still roast—Okay, forget about the roast, did someone just unwrap a Taleggio?” Thus, your sense of smell adapts to the roast and allows you to discover a stinky cheese.

With the sense of taste, adaptation can be more complicated, but it has great impact on how chefs construct their dishes, the order in which wines should be served, and which food and wine pairings are most successful. In future posts, I’ll write more about how adaptation affects successful gourmandizing.

 

Umami: The Mysterious Fifth Taste

You’re familiar with the four tastes that register on the tongue: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. But a little-known fifth taste deserves some attention. Umami (oo-mom-ee) is not a new invention—we’ve been tasting it at least since ancient times, but weren’t able to scientifically identify it. We have only known, across the centuries, that a certain condiment or seaweed or mushroom had a pleasing brothy savor.

The word umami is Japanese, but doesn’t have a direct translation to English. The closest we have come is “delicious”—not very specific! And the concept has not been fully studied; in fact, it was only in 1990 that umami was internationally accepted as a fifth taste, perceived only on the tongue, like sweet, sour, salty, and bitter.

Still, chefs know how to add “deliciousness” to a dish: Foods high in umami include miso broth, parmesan cheese, asparagus, many seaweeds, scallops, dried mushrooms, and soy sauce. MSG, developed in the early 1900s in Japan, became known as an “instant” umami, and is still used in many foods to simulate flavor cheaply. If you put MSG, which looks like elongated sugar crystals, on your tongue, the sensation is of a slightly salty chicken broth, without an actual poultry flavor. But true umami is much more complex than this, and exists in many hundreds of foods.

 

Dried mushrooms and many seaweeds are among the foods highest in umami.

Is umami detectable in wine? Absolutely. You can taste it in many Champagnes and sparkling wines, and in some chardonnays, as a result of their contact with yeast cells after fermentation. The umami taste may correspond with a brioche or yeast aroma in these wines. In red wines, yeast can impart umami during a long, cool fermentation.

For more information on umami, check out the Umami Information Center.

Mastic: For the Aroma Library

Living on the Greek island of Astoria, one finds many strange things during shopping trips. A dried plant sap called mastic—the original chewing gum—is a flavoring beloved of the Greeks (and Turks, Lebanese, and Egyptians), and frequently used in baking. Mastic is collected from a bush related to the pistachio, whose stems are sliced to allow the sap to seep out. It hardens, but immediately softens into a gum when chewed—as it has been since ancient Greek times to freshen the breath.

The taste may be an acquired one, but the acquisition is easy—it has a delicate perfume, a leafy, plantlike combination of eucalyptus, pine, and mint. A vanilla note smoothes the edges. It is easy to imagine this aroma in a Greek or Italian red wine.

What's an aroma library?

 

The Tasting Note Goes Mainstream

Have you always felt that the tasting notes provided for wine—in food or wine magazines, at the wine shop, or on restaurant menus—had nothing to do with you? Many people are uncomfortable with the idea of “a nose of acacia flower, ripe Bosc pear, fresh tangerine, and toasted hazelnut” in wine, and don’t get how they’re supposed to smell this. They may even feel it’s pretentious.

At the same time, many food and scent corporations seem to be hoping consumers are beginning to feel more comfortable with their senses. Starbucks regularly uses “tasting notes” on its coffee bags and signage. I spotted a tasting note on my Haagen Dazs container that mixes the languages of the fragrance and wine industries (top notes, finish) to engage the reader’s senses.

And a Lindt chocolate advertisement in a magazine encourages readers to use all five senses (four shown) in enjoying their chocolate. Lindt’s web site even shows how to set up your own chocolate tasting.

Surely we’re not being encouraged to engage in esoteric chatter about everything we consume. But perhaps we might pause every so often and unself-consciously notice the texture, aroma, or taste of the foods and wines we particularly enjoy.