Wake up and Smell the Coffee, or at least the Mangoes

Teaching wine tasting here in Kenya, albeit on a modest scale, I find that new students are often put off or even intimidated by the flowery language sometimes associated with the wine world. You know the sort of thing I mean when wine tasting gets sent up for all it’s, “hints of mocha-chocolate overlain by cassis and cigar box and perhaps a soupcon of mint”. It is enough to make even the most enthusiastic of wine lovers wince let alone the new wine student. I recently acquired a copy of, ‘Wine Tasting a professional Handbook’ by Ronald S Jackson and its almost 500 pages are to this self-confessed wine geek incredible if not mind boggling. The book to an extent is based on the assumption that it is possible through the adoption of a systematic approach to objectively assess the quality of any given wine. In other words, the preference of the taster whether she or he likes or dislikes the wine has got little if not nothing to do with it.

One of the tools wine tasting has developed in pursuit of assessment of quality are what are called tasting wheels. They vary in their complexity from the highly detailed such as the ones credited to the University of California at Davis to the less complex such as the Keep it Simple Tasting Wheel commonly abbreviated to KIST. These tasting wheels all endevour to provide a template to enable the taster to link the smell and taste of a wine with standardised associations for any given grape variety. For example, the red grape Cabernet Sauvignon is described as possessing a black-currant aroma and the white grape Sauvignon Blanc is often described as having elements of green peppers. So-far-so-good and as one works ones way through the eight or nine classic grape varieties it is possible to build up a lexicon of language to describe smells and tastes.

In Kenya two things spring to mind related to the development of students wine tasting language. The first is common throughout the world, which is that it is always surprising how many new students are quick to claim that they have, “no sense of smell”. When you dig a little deeper what I normally discover is that either they mean they have an undeveloped sense of smell, at least for the purposes of wine tasting, or, more commonly, they simply lack confidence. Once it has been explained that physiologically it is extremely uncommon for any given person to have a complete permanent lack of a sense of smell and that practice, normally a word what wine tasters love to hear, will quickly improve their ability to describe what they smell then progress is quickly made.

The second thing I notice relates to what I think is a cultural difference. There are many countries throughout the world that obviously do not have a culture or history of wine drinking and Kenya is not unusual in this sense. More unusual is that the wine language based upon associations of fruit and vegetables is often a challenge for Kenyan wine students. This is not because the fruit and vegetables used in most wine aromas wheels are not found in Kenya, in fact Kenya is blessed with pretty well growing anything you might care to mention. The difference maybe that for the average Kenyan they simply have seldom come across what may be considered to be everyday fruits and vegetables. Sniffing and tasting of all sorts of things in our Kenyan wine tasting classes has become a highlight and great fun. Do not be surprised next time you happen to be in a Nairobi market to see a huddle of Kenyans comparing the smells and tastes of the many different mango varieties we get here. Oh yes I have had more than one student tell me that the smell of a fruity South African Chenin Blanc is not the apple mango, but the mangoes one gets from the coast.