A strange incident happened a week ago when I was doing some wine tasting at Mudgee. A couple of classmates of mine and me were doing lots of tastings that day and we came across two wines which had a mix of us liking it and others hating it. It was only later that our host pointed out to us that the one of the wines were corked (affected by cork taint which affects the aroma and taste) and the other was affected by brettanomyces (a yeast spoilage). This surprised most of us greatly as what some of us thought was really good wine turned out to be spoiled wine. Which raises a curious question on what exactly is good wine. Is it really true that one' garbage can be another man's treasure even when it comes to wine? Are "good" aromas and flavours subjective to the person?
Each person is born with different palates. A person's preference for certain aromas and flavours is shaped by not only the food that one is exposed to in their culture while growing up, but that each of us has a different tongue from one another. Contrary to what we have been taught in school, our taste receptors are located on different parts of the tongue and there is no distinct region which we experience certain tastes. The tastes that we sense with our tongue are sweet, sour, salty, bitter and a fifth one, umami. Umami, translated from Japanese (and discovered by a Japanese as you would have guessed), would mean roughly as meaty or savoury; the type of taste sensation you get form seaweed or MSG. Generally for all wines, you would get to experience all these taste sensations except saltiness which you don't find very common in wine except for maybe sherry.
What about identifying flavours? Most of us wouldn't have any problem remembering how a carrot or a strawberry tastes like. Maybe some of us would have a problem if we were asked to identify ingredients like sage or saffron blindfolded. So it all comes down to familiarity or practice to some. As we taste more of the same flavours, the memory of it gets etched in our head. So the culture in which we are brought up in, which influences the food that is set on our tables everyday as we were growing up, plays a very big part in shaping our preferences for certain aromas or flavours. It also makes us recognize certain flavours and aromas more distinctly than others. For example, I noticed that each time I tasted Sauvignon Blanc, it reminds me of Guava. I ate a lot of guava as a kid. Others would tell me that it would smell of passionfruit. It does all right but it doesn't just come to my mind as instinctively as guava does (which hints to you that I hardly ate much passionfruit in my childhood days).
So back to the question as to how what was considered as spoiled wine could have passed off as something acceptable to the tasters. I suppose that would be equivalent to another question as to how I notice some people can stand eating cabbage that smells pretty gross or cloves of garlic without cringing. If I were to use my deductive reasoning, I would have to say that each of us have different diets and due to years of conditioning, somehow, we are able to reach different levels of tolerance for different aromas or flavours. What passed off noticeably as corked wine to me didn't seem that way for other tasters and so we had different ratings for the wine. In the same way, the aromas that I enjoyed in the "brett" wine were pretty digusting to some of the others. It seems possible that we could enjoy wines that were spoiled as long as nobody told us. So next time you try a bottle of wine and you love it but someone tells you it's spoiled, just remember, one man's meat is another man's poison. Just make sure you don't go home with a tummy ache, which I believe none of us did that day when we tasted those wines. What a relief!
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