Box Wine As Baseline

Interesting post on Mollishka blog about a wine tasting class:

The bulk of the class was dedicated to "component tasting." Did you ever do that thing in elementary school where you have to make a map of your tongue based on dipping cuetips into sugar water and salt water and bitter water and swabbing it in your mouth? It was like that, but with wine and no little kids going, ewwwwww. We were given a simple base wine (Almaden Mountain Chablis, a white box wine) which had been enhanced with six different flavors. The components were acidity (citric acid), sugar (sucrose), sweetness (glycerine), tannin (... grape tannin), oak (soaked oak chips in the wine), and simulated oxidation (adding dry Fino sherry). Most of the tastes were fairly subtle, but the tannin and the oak were quite strong. Apparently, by the way, if a wine smells like sherry (and thus not like "wine"), it is probably due to an overabundance of acetaldehyde, and means the wine has "gone bad."

{mollishka's title goes here}: AstroVino #1: Intro and Component Tasting

So the Chablis was the starting point for training the nose to identify the six "tweaks". I've heard about this, but have never done it. Fascinating; I'd like to find a class like that!

technorati tags: box+wine, boxed+wine, wine+tasting, Almaden+Chablis