Good Grape Wine Company

June 20 2010

Field Notes from a Wine Life – Perfect Palate Edition

… Odds and ends from a life lived through the prism of the wine glass …

Keeping the Knife Sharp, so to Speak

To perform at their peak, an athlete treats his/her body with respect, like a finely tuned instrument coaxed to peak performance.  Likewise, a guitarist gives a similar type of respect to the sweet wood, the tool of their trade, tuning it and according it special treatment.  The list goes on and on regarding a professional taking care of their moneymaker.

In the realm of serious wine enthusiasm and professional wine acumen, the tool of the trade is the palate.  Just the mention of it sounds like a disembodied body part, a possession—“My Palate.”  The list of no-no’s for palate acuity is short – don’t smoke.  Yet, what isn’t mentioned is, “Avoid seasonal allergies at all costs.”  I should know. 

Specifically, “My Palate” has been suffering from a long, miserable allergy season. 

According to experts, 2010 is one of the worst allergy seasons ever recorded.

Tell me about it.  Waking up in the morning with allergies is a daily exercise in feeling hung-over without the fun memories from the previous night; natch it’s all the bad and none of the good.

And, I almost feel naughty admitting it, like I’m a musical artist lip synching in concert, so unspoken is the fallibility of somebody’s palate amongst hardcore wine enthusiasts.

Fortunately, I only do wine reviews for very a slight fraction of what I taste, but given that roughly 1 in 6 Americans suffer from seasonal allergies, I know that a good number of other professional and online wine writers are also affected by a dulling of senses that comes with scratchy, watering eyes, sneezing, and general fatigue brought on by environmental factors.

I’m not a doctor, so I won’t get into the homeopathic, prescriptive, and over-the-counter ways of countering allergies, but I’ve tried them all and have found a combination that works for me.

More importantly, however, beyond the neti pot, when it comes to wine tasting, I’ve found a combination that helps me achieve Zen-like clarity for wine tasting – this I can opine on…

First, I’ll assume that by the point in the day when it’s time for your Gary Vee-like, “Sniffy-Sniff” that whatever could move in your sniffer is stationary or removed as an obstruction.  Ahem.

Now, here’s the first part of the two-part simple secret. Coffee beans.  Have you been to the cologne or perfume counter at a department store and they had coffee beans in a bowl or a glass spice shaker to clear your olfactory senses between smelling perfumes?

The same thing works for wine.  Taking a deep whiff of coffee beans is the same for your nose as wiping out freshman year of college is for your brain; it’s a restorative clean slate, almost like picking up 5 IQ points.

So, pick up a bag of whole bean coffee, put a few tablespoons (unground) into a Parmesan shaker, give a deep whiff and you’re through part one.

The second part is more traditional – SanTasti, a palate cleansing beverage.

I’m the worst kind of contradiction – I’m an Alpha Consumer, but deeply skeptical.  I assume the worst and hope for the best, at least when it comes to proactively trying new consumer goods and seeking results.  So it was for SanTasti, the palate cleansing beverage that purports to cleanse your palate for wine tasting.

Yet, son of a gun, it works like crazy.  I first tried it after a piece of cheesecake for dessert, my mouth coated with the sweet finale to the meal, but an unfinished glass of Pinot begged for the respectful conclusion.

Out came the SanTasti for a swish, gargle and swallow.

I try not to get too bullish about wine gadgets and such, but SanTasti is like the Magic Eraser for your mouth – it refreshes, enlivens and wipes clean your mouth allowing for a refreshed wine drinking experience.

Oyster crackers in baskets at tasting rooms across the country should be nervous. 

Without too much hyperbole, SanTasti is the most exciting wine accessory I’ve seen in the last decade, and that includes all of the aeration, decanting and associated schwag that has come out.

SanTasti is the single best wine accessory on the market today next to the corkscrew, all because it wipes the detritus that is aftertaste from your mouth.  Brilliant.

Regardless of your allergy levels, give coffee beans and a swig of SanTasti a try before you take notes on your next wine.

Foraging?

Food & Wine magazine mentions wild food foraging several times in the current issue of the magazine.  F&W is usually on point and very trend forward, so I expect that wild, foraged food will start showing up on white table cloth restaurant menus with regularity over the course of the next year (perhaps joining natural wine in a campfire mash-up of Kumbaya and a rendition of ‘American Pie’).

Aside from my Depression-era grandparents and chokecherry pie, I first came across the notion of cattails, dandelion greens and wild comestibles in a homesteading book a couple of years ago – it’s the very far left of the current green movement. 

Do me a favor, if you get into wild food foraging, there are a bunch of books on the subject, go old school with Euell Gibbons.  Every generation wants to think they invented this stuff, even if Red Rover has been around since Methuselah was a young lad.  Gibbons wrote the book (several, actually) on wild foraging.  His work is worth seeking out as the forefather of the movement (before it was cool) some 40 years ago. Just saying …

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