Ep. 1497 The Blind Guy's Guide To Blind Tasting | wine2wine Business Forum 2022

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Don't forget to tune in every Thursday at two PM central European time or visit point to wine dot net for more information. Good afternoon to everyone. My name is Lominga Cortrella. I want to thank you TV to invite me to this particular meeting to this particular testing. I want to leave the theater, the protagonist is our guest, but I want you to share with you my personal opinion about this particular special testing. Hubbie is not only a wine educator. It's not only a person who loves wine, who has sensibility for wines, but I think, Abby, you are a great model for everyone. To understand not only work, not only jobs, not only in our professional life, but in our life, how we can transform a problem, a difficulty in a good solution. To transform something that is not positive in a positive perspective. So I think today will be for every one of us a great opportunity. We have the opportunity we have the chance to talk with young people. Yesterday, we had a lot of young people, a lot of students here, they love wine, they want to know, they want to study. But sometime in front of a problem, they are scared. They are afraid of, you know, to face towards some problems. I think fear is a natural attitude. Fear is a reaction, but courage has to be stimulated. Today is a real example, how we can stimulate it, how we can give a chance to everything we have the fortune to live in our life. So thank you so much. Thank you so much, Abi. And we are so excited to start the testing with you. And let us know, let me know when I I can ask you because we have a lot of question to do too, but I want to give you, you know, the the testing. Thank you so much, Abi. Thank you. Thank you, Amina. Okay. That's that's a very kind and flattering introduction. And, It's a real honor to be here with you all. So a couple of things, couple of housekeeping things before we get started. Number one is that, there's a reason for the blindfold that you don't have to look at me and my bad looks standing up here. You get to just sit and enjoy wine. And number two, we serve wine because, well, the more you, the more you indulge in wine, the better I sound as a speaker. So I wanna just say a few things before the blindfold goes on. And first and foremost, I wanna just share with you A lot of times this might seem like just an interesting sensory experience. Just something that, you know, is kinda fun is a good sensory sort of experience to really involve all five of our senses in whatever activity we're doing but it's so to me, it's so much more than that. And thank you for allowing me to make the business case quickly after all we are at wine to wine business. And one of the things that I think is so impactful about this experience from a business sense is it really helps brands stand out. Okay. It really helps brands go from one item in a catalog. Item three forty seven in a catalog and a distributor catalog. To an experience that is front and center that people personally connect with, that they talk about, that they can get really involved with, and we that experience that these are, you know, once people do them, they talk about them, they think about them, and they remember the most important part of this, right, is to be able to sell more wine and think about how we talk about wine using a particular brand as a lens. And the experience allows people to keep that brand in the front of mind because it's so different than anything they've done before. So that's the business case for it. And with that, I want us to go ahead. I would recommend if you don't mind just keeping a gentle hand on your glassware throughout the whole experience just so that you know where it is and so that it doesn't tip over. I don't usually have people put a hand on the glassware, but here with such a small tray before you, I think it's a good idea so that we don't necessarily knock anything off and you don't have to hold on to the glasses for dear life or anything like that. Just place your hand gently on top of the bases of the glasses. And without further ado, let's go ahead and gently lift our blindfolds up. And strap them behind. They'll they'll go right around the back of your head, and they will temporarily remove the light. Now let's take a minute. Just sit back in our seats. How does the chair feel beneath you? How does the room smell? What sounds do you hear? What information are we taking in from our surroundings that we couldn't and wouldn't necessarily be able to take in if we were distracted by our eyesight. I believe, and I preach a concept called sensory literacy. What do I mean by that? To me, the concept is quite straightforward and simple. I think we should be able to take information in from all five of our senses, process that information in our mind, and make logical conclusions based on the information we take in. Right? We're all visually literate. I know that people know what colors are when they're children. I held a red pen up to my four year old nephew a few weeks ago to test this theory and I said, read what color is this pen. He said, well, it's red. It was like the most one of the most obvious questions I could have asked him. So we're visually literate. Right? We have the ability to look at something and take in what we're looking at quite quickly and make a deduction based on it. If we see a red fence, we know we're looking at of something that's red first of all. And we've seen enough fences in our day that we know exactly what the purpose of that fence is. It's to really, you know, separate two plots of land. Right? I think we could become more literate in our non visual senses. And I've been very surprised by the number of people I've worked with even in the wine industry or wine experts who have a hard time really delving in and understanding their non visual senses. I'll tell you a little story. I was out hiking a couple of months ago with a group of industry professionals. And we walked up on a on an area that had recently had a couple of trees removed, cut down, and the shavings were spread or the wood chips were spread on the ground. And this unmistakable miss smell of pencil shavings dominated what we could smell and what we experienced and I knew quickly that they were pencil shavings because I used my other senses to obtain a hundred percent of what I take in from the world because I've been blind since birth. But these people, all they could say was, okay, this reminds me of elementary school. This reminds me of studying This reminds me of being in a building, but it wasn't the fact that it was pencil shavings that came right to their mind simply because I don't think we're as literate in our sense of smell as we are in our sense of eyesight. And I truly believe there's a hierarchy of the five senses with an inverse relationship between vulnerability of a sense and how much we're using. So our eyesight, not very vulnerable. Right? We can look up at the sky on a clear night and see the moon and stars that are thousands of light years away. The next most least vulnerable sense is a sense of hearing. You have to be close enough to something to hear it, but sometimes you can hear traffic from across town or a jet flying overhead. You don't have to be right next to something. The third least vulnerable sense is sense of touch. I have to be I have to trust something a lot to walk up close enough to it that I can set my hand down on it and touch it. And the sense is the two most vulnerable senses that I truly believe we use to take in the least amount of information our sense of smell and our sense of taste. Because these senses require us literally to make whatever we're smelling or tasting a part of us. So this is just a little bit of a deep dive into wine when we're not extracted by our eyesight, and we can really focus in on our non visual senses. Now before we get tasting, I'll just share with you that wine is an art. I know that we all know that. And we all appreciate that. I think it's so important to step back and think about the amount of work that goes in to making the glasses of wine before you right now. The work is done both by nature and by people. Right? From grapes growing in a vineyard with a multitude of factors affecting how those grapes will taste once they're harvested including anyone wanna shout out anything that we think would affect a grapevine in the vineyard? Soil, water, temperature. Something we're battling in California right now wildfires. Smoke, taint, all these things impact, whether it's positive or negative, depends, the quality of the overall wine that we will eventually get. When vineyard managers feel that it's time to harvest fruit, harvest the fruit and they bring it to the winery. Right? Now their work is done, the work of the vineyard manager is done, and now it's the work of the winemaker. And this is where the process just gets started. The grapes are crushed and de stemmed They're then for yeast is pitched and the fruit is fermented. As the wine is fermenting, the winemaker needs to be tasting it every day to see where it is in its progress. Then once it's finished fermenting, we either age the wines in steel or in oak. And once the wines are to a point that we consider satisfactory, that might be a period of as little as two or three months. If the wine is on steel or as many as a couple of years, if the wine is on oak, The warning maker decides when it's time to bottle the wine. And then before releasing the bottles, they hold on to them and taste them every couple of weeks to see when they're gonna be ready to release to the public. And only when they feel that the wines are where they want them to be do they release them for all of us to taste and try and experiment with? And just like true art, I feel that wine is one of these things where the harder we work on it. The more energy we put into it, the more sort of easily it's consumed. Right? So some of these beautiful paintings that we know that are very famous like the Mona Lisa, let's consider that. The Mona Lisa is beautiful because DaVinci put so much time into making it look beautiful and almost able to give us the opportunity to consume it rather effortlessly, right, to think about what that painting looks like and just consume it as a very easily consumable image. The same thing is true with books that we might read. The more work that was put into writing it eloquently the less work we have to do to really understand it and absorb it and read it. I really think the same thing is true with wine. And today we've selected two wines for you that I think are so easy to drink. Right? But that doesn't mean that they were easy to make. Okay? So that premise I think is really important that wine is an art. The other thing that I often share with folks is how nervous and and I think we all know this pretty well. Consumers get really nervous about wine. They don't necessarily know what to try when. They're concerned about what to pair with what. And they, you know, Maybe they get a bottle of wine that doesn't pair as perfectly as they would like with a meal, because upset by this. It worries them. It they they feel like it's their fault. When in actuality, perhaps, the bottom line might be that they didn't necessarily understand that they didn't like that wine. So I think it's our job in this industry to make wine easy for consumers. The only way we're gonna sell more wine is if we make it easy for consumers to absorb, to think about, and ultimately to enjoy. Right? And that takes some education, but it also takes some disarming and some reassuring. You know, where therapists of wine is how I think of our work and industry. Right? So just making wine consumable and exciting and approachable. One of the ways that I like to do this for people is I I ask them, well, what food do you like? You know, then that's what you should pair with the wine of choice because it's ultimately up to you how you, as a consumer, hair, wine, and food. So I think if we can use this tasting as a springboard to try to make wine more digestible and easier for consumers to think about. That's that's when we're being the most powerful. And that is when I think we're doing our best work. Finally, before we get into tasting, I just wanna say that you don't need to see to enjoy life. I am have been totally blind since birth. I've never enjoyed wine in the light, but I quite enjoyed in the dark. And life is not all about what you see. Sometimes it's about what you feel, what you sense, how how you move through life. Right? And sometimes taking away that distraction of our eyesight allows us to appreciate what we have even more and gives us an opportunity to taste something like wine and pay even closer attention to it. Than we were to pay before. And I think it makes wine even more enjoyable. Are you enjoying this podcast? There's so much more high quality wine content available for mama jumbo shrimp. Check out our new wine study maps. Our books on Italian wine, including Italian wine unplugged, the jumbo shrimp guide to Italian wine, Sanjay Lambrusco, and other stories, and much, much more. On our website, mama jumbo shrimp dot com. Now back to the show. What I've done for you is you've you could see when you came into the room, into the auditorium. There were two small plastic cups. Those cups have aroma samples in them. And we're going to use these aromas to really think about how the wines smell. And I designed these aromas with the particular wines that we're tasting in mind so that we could use them to really warm up and stimulate our aromatic vocabularies. Now for most of you, the leftmost cup should be, not very rattly. You go ahead and pick up your leftmost cup and shake it with the lid on. And now what you're doing by shaking it is you're concentrating the head space, the gases in that container with the lid closed, that when you smell it, you've got a nice strong aroma. Now on the count of three, we're gonna go ahead and pop the tops off those cups and smell. One, two, three. Tell me what you smell. Citris, apple, lemon. Very good. Very, very good. This is a blend of grapefruit zest and slightly browned apple. I cut Fuji apples up at about eight AM this morning, and they've been browning for about six and a half hours. And that to me is the apple smell that I often get in white wines. Let's move on to our second cup. These are more fun to shake. They're a little more rattly. Yep. Shake them around. This is kinda fun, right? And on the count of three, You know what to do? Open them and smell one, two, three. What do you smell there? Cinnamon spices? This is anise seed and cardamom pods. And I think it really represents the spice component, which we'll experience particularly in the second wine. So you brought your wines in, and you should remember which one was the white wine. Let's go ahead and grab our flasks. You can feel that it's a little bit more chilled than the other one. That's another indicator for you, but please don't take your blindfold off. But what I want you to do is I don't want you to smell the wine yet. I want you just to hold it out in front of you. Keep a hand on your next glass so that we don't knock it over. I want you to just swirl the wine in the air. And as you're doing this, don't breathe in through the glass, but just take a few breaths through your nose of the ambient air. At least that air. I know you thought you were going to a wine tasting. It's really a yoga meditation. Be then again. Excellent. And now lift the glass up to your nose and smell. I know a lot of you are really good and know your wine varietals. So without shouting out what the varietal is. Can you tell me what you smell here? Rosemary. Okay. I get a lot of apple component. Pineapple. Absolutely. Really nice tropical. Sitris? Yep. White peach. Absolutely like and that's very good like an under ripe white peach, like a crunchy peach that you might pour right out of the refrigerator to taste and take a big bite out of. Right? Sage. Yeah. Exactly. There's an herbal note to this. I'm going to show you a little trick that I like to do which is to hold the glass in the hand that you feel most comfortable swirling with. It's usually the same hand that you write with. And then take your other hand and cover the glass and then swirl, swirl, swirl with your hand over the top. What we're doing now is, again, we're concentrating the aroma in the glass between the liquid level in the glass and the palm of your hand. And when you smell it, should notice that aroma much more concentrated. Let's lift our hand off and smell. Yeah. It's amazing how concentrated that aroma becomes when we, put our hand over the top and swirl. To me, that's one of the tricks that I use very often when experiencing wines for the first time and really trying to get to know a wine if I'm studying for a tasting exam or that sort of thing because it really allows me to taste it and understand it much more fluently. What do you smell when you cover it with your hand? I get really concentrated tropical fruit, guava, pineapple, passion fruit, Definitely, again, the apple component, and I really like the sage comment. I really like that. Let's taste this one. Really coat your palate with it, feel. How does that mouth feel? If you were to describe it, what would you say? Viscus? Yep. Tell you what, if you smell the glass now after you've taken a sip, a little thin layer of the wine has now been allowed to oxidize on the glass surface. And what I smell here is Petrocort, which is wet earth wet rock, wet pavement. This wine was grown in some sort of marine soils. So, a lot of that that minerality is coming out. And that to me is that nice viscosity that we feel on our palette. Take another sip and really let it sit on your palate for a few seconds. This is how it just sort of coats every part of your palate. I can really taste that white peach. A little bit more, of the citrus comes back for me on the very end. I really like to divide my palate up into three regions when I'm tasting. That's the front palate. Right. When the wine first hits your teeth, your mid palate, if you put your tongue to the roof of your mouth, right where your hard and soft palate come together, And then finally back to the what's called the back pallet or just before the point of no return, right as you're about to swallow the wine. Anyone have an idea what color this is? You already saw it. It's a white. Any idea about varietal, and I'll give you a hint, think local. He guesses. Allen brave? Just take delicious wine right from this area, and we're gonna show you some slides when the blindfolds come off. It show exactly what these wines are. This to me is an absolutely wonderful representation of lugana. It's fresh. It coats your palate and it's just a very refreshing flavor. To me, this could pair with anything but really nice soft cheeses, very mild cured meats. I think this would even go well with, you know, a fruit spread and cheese. Lots of stuff you can do. Anyway, that's just a a a really nice representation of this area. And lugana in general. Okay. And we're gonna go through the same tricks that we went through with the last one. So we're gonna swirl it in the air. Just breathe some air through your nose. One more time. Lift the glass up to your nose and take a nice smell of the wine. Don't mind revisiting your spice aroma. It's on the should be on the table on the right side. Get the lid off and I really get these spices coming through in this wine. And one of the things that I don't think we allow ourselves often enough is the ability to smell things that we pick out of a wine in the wine itself when we're tasting it. And that's why I often will open my my spice cabinet or my kitchen cabinets and find ingredients that I smell when I'm tasting wine. And by the way, aromatic literacy, like we talked about earlier, is nothing more than having a vocabulary of aromas that you remember, I truly believe there's a language of aroma, flavor, and texture in food and beverage that we don't often give ourselves the opportunity and the autonomy to sort of think about But if we master that language, we then not only have the spoken languages that we speak and the vocabulary words of those languages, but we know specific aromas by definition. Right? And we have the definitions of what they smell like in our mind and we can retrieve that information. So with that said, smell a lot of anise seed in this wine. A lot of the cardamom that we smelled. And a lot of tea, like a sort of black tea leaf Maybe a little bit of dried tobacco, dried cigarette tobacco. Let's do our party trick and cover the glass with our hand and swirl with your hand over the top. What you'll notice I think when you remove your hand here in about ten seconds, is the fruit bouquet that might have been a little bit hard to identify before you really covered the wine and concentrated those aromas underneath your hand above the liquid level. Now smell the wine, lift your hand off and smell. See, that's where the fruit really explodes for me. Blackberries, sour cherry, raspberry, current black currant, over ripe berry, almost a cooked berry compote. It's a really delightful aroma and kind of bramble y berries of all kinds and maybe a little bit of stone fruit like overripe plum. It's not harsh though, and I wanna be very careful with our descriptors because it's not a a wine that makes you think, oh, wow. Deep. Rich. I mean, it's a rich wine for sure, but it's very mild and well tempered and we have to let it shine as itself. Really, really interesting aroma. A little bit of maybe lilac. A little bit of violet coming through here? Maybe this was a little bit on the on the white one and that I forgot to mention a little bit of honeysuckle, more of that, sort of night blooming flower. And here, there's less of that sort of really big floral aroma and more sort of dried flowers or something a little more reserved like lilac or violet, even little wisteria. When you take a taste of this wine, I want you to do something you maybe have never done before. Swish it around your palate, really coat your palate with it. And before you swallow it, tip your chin up and chew on the line a little bit. Oftentimes, I don't think we let ourselves chew on wine as much as we should in particular red wine. I think chewing was something that we do, you know, genetically. We've evolved to do for two reasons. Number one, to help our bodies digest, of course. But number two, to really move things around our palate so we can begin to taste them and understand their flavor in the, you know, when we were being created, I think it was more or less to, make sure that we weren't eating anything that's spoiled. But now it's, a really good technique to taste wine. So whenever I'm tasting a new wine, I will chew on it and really coat my palate with that flavor. Usually, this experience is almost an hour. So we, are fitting right in with the time schedule because I don't wanna get the hook. But what I'll tell you guys is these blindfolds are yours to keep. I, don't wanna know what you do with them beyond this point, but they're yours to keep for sure. And it's a little bit, handy because my business card is your blindfold. So right on that blindfold, you can get a hold of me on that website that's listed there on that URL. Do not be strangers. Reach out anytime. I can't wait to collaborate with each and every one of you and I hope that the business sense of this experience in the business case was made clear. Let's go ahead and take the blindfolds off and I will, take the rest of the time for questions. Thank you all. Oh, jeez. That would help. If I told you what the second line was, that's a good question. That is a, balboa gelic classic oak. Delightful wine, really crisp No oak, all steel. I think it's a really special one, and I think it's a really good representation of what Valipo is from this area. So Abby, thank you so much. I, you know, has been a great experience you have to, concentrate during a wine tasting without considering the sense of sight. Yeah. I think it's, has been I don't know your opinion, but I think it has been a great, a great experience. And I'm so convinced that, you know, in life, there are two kind of people. People who are just spectators of their life and people who are the main protagonists of their life. Today, we have a great protagonist in his life. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you all. Listen to the Italian wine podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We're on SoundCloud Apple Podcast spotify, email ifm, and more. Don't forget to subscribe and rate the show. If you enjoy listening, please consider donating through Italian wine podcast dot com. Any amount helps cover equipment, production, and publication costs. Until next time.