Same here, Sommelier
la Cité du Vin – Bordeaux’s wine museum
I recently toured a wine museum in Bordeaux, France.
On a long table stretching the length of the room were antique stands covered with glass. Under the glass were various objects representing the scents, visual textures, and even sounds that you would use to describe wine. They held leather gloves, old books, flowers, lemons or licorice. Satin, wood bark, or even two old-fashioned speakers. With the squeeze of a perfume pump you could smell the scent of an item and test your senses. Which fruit do you smell? Which flower?
That evening we attended a fancy dinner with an actual sommelier! I decided to test out my brand new wine expertise with a sniff, a swirl, an inhale, and an interpretation of what I could sense.
A hint of leather perhaps? With notes or rose and a bit of berry???
Of course I wanted to know if I got it right. (I’m aware that this is a whole other issue I may need to unpack at another time.) Regardless, I asked the sommelier to let us know what he sensed from this particular wine. I prepared myself to mentally check off all my correct answers. But…
What he told us shocked me and will forever change how I drink wine, eat food, and perhaps experience life.
He knew this wine. He had personally chosen it for us to go with our meal. It was from his childhood home town of Corsica. He didn’t need to sip or swirl it again to recall every flavor.
“It’s salty,” he said, “like the beaches near where I grew up. Briny like the fish we would catch as the sun would set on a warm summer day. It feels light, like an easy day spent with family, sharing laughter over a meal. It reminds me of where I’m from.”
Wait! What about the notes of leather and vintages? Florals and forward flavors? While the sommelier could easily recite all of that for each wine on the menu, the experience of tasting wine for him was about memories, emotions, sensations – not right or wrong answers and arbitrary senses.
My next sip of wine tasted like swaying on a rope swing under the expanse of sturdy tree branches, lush with summer-green leaves. It sounded like the echo of laughter and the call of a sparrow. It felt like the breeze rushing through my hair. And it was possibly the best wine I have ever tasted.