Introduction
You love to eat, but do you know how to taste? What is a bliss point when it comes to food or tasting? What makes our most memorable meals and wines delicious? How can you make sure to bring home the best experiences from a wine trip?
In this episode of the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast, I’m chatting with author Mandy Naglich who has just published How to Taste: A Guide to Discovering Flavor and Savoring Life.
You can find the wines we discussed here.
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Giveaway
Two of you are going to win a personally signed copy of Mandy’s new book, How to Taste: A Guide to Discovering Flavor and Savoring Life.
How to Win
To qualify, all you have to do is email me at [email protected] and let me know that you’ve posted a review of the podcast.
It takes less than 30 seconds: On your phone, scroll to the bottom here, where the reviews are, and click on “Tap to Rate.”
After that, scroll down a tiny bit more and click on “Write a Review.” That’s it!
I’ll choose three people randomly from those who contact me.
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Highlights
- What did Mandy learn about hospitality through your first wine-pairing experience at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Belgium?
- Why did Mandy write about Rick Bayless’ blind tasting experience in her book?
- What made San Diego wine country so memorable for Mandy?
- How can you make sure to bring home the best experiences from a wine trip?
- Why did Mandy decide to write How to Taste: A Guide to Discovering Flavor and Savoring Life?
- What was the most unusual insight Mandy gained while writing her book?
- Which feedback surprised Mandy the most from readers of her book?
- How can we judge the acidity of anything from a cup of tea and wine to a square of dark chocolate?
- Why does salt make foods taste less bitter?
- How do our tastebuds respond to food temperature?
- What might surprise you about your mouth’s sensitivity to texture?
- What is a bliss point when it comes to food or tasting?
- How can you distinguish between pomme fruit and stone fruit?
- What are the hallmarks of different categories of aromas?
- Why would you not want to open an expensive bottle of wine while playing loud music?
Key Takeaways
- I found Mandy’s explanation of the difference between eating and tasting fascinating, as well as her discussion about the bliss point and how individual it is.
- Her tips on how to make the most of your experiences in wine country were helpful.
- I agree with her that your environment really affects your enjoyment of whatever you’re drinking. It’s the 360 degrees of flavour and contributes to our most memorable meals. It was interesting how losing your sense of sight can obscure what you’re tasting.
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About Mandy Naglich
Mandy Naglich is one of fewer than 100 Advanced Cicerones in the world, one of the highest certifications in beer expertise. She’s also a Certified Cider Professional and has her WSET in spirits. Mandy’s writing has been published in Vice, Taste of Home, Vine Pair, and Wine Enthusiast. She started her career in journalism at the Schieffer College of Communication at Texas Christian University.
Resources
- Connect with Mandy Naglich
- Diary of a Book Launch: An Insider Peek from Idea to Publication
- Wine Witch on Fire Free Companion Guide for Book Clubs
- My Books:
- Unreserved Wine Talk | Episode 217: Flavour versus Taste Plus Uruguay Wines with Nell McShane Wulfhart
- My new class The 5 Wine & Food Pairing Mistakes That Can Ruin Your Dinner And How To Fix Them Forever
Tag Me on Social
Tag me on social media if you enjoyed the episode:
- @nataliemaclean and @natdecants on Facebook
- @nataliemaclean on Twitter
- @nataliemacleanwine on Instagram
- @nataliemaclean on LinkedIn
- Email Me at [email protected]
Thirsty for more?
- Sign up for my free online wine video class where I’ll walk you through The 5 Wine & Food Pairing Mistakes That Can Ruin Your Dinner (and how to fix them forever!)
- You’ll find my books here, including Unquenchable: A Tipsy Quest for the World’s Best Bargain Wines and Red, White and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass.
- The new audio edition of Red, White and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass is now available on Amazon.ca, Amazon.com and other country-specific Amazon sites; iTunes.ca, iTunes.com and other country-specific iTunes sites; Audible.ca and Audible.com.
Transcript
Natalie MacLean (00:00):
When we talk about food or wine, what is a bliss point?
Mandy Naglich (00:03):
So people who, when you say on the scale of one to 100, one being so much pain that you’ve broken a bone or something, and 100 being the happiest moment of your life, where would you place food on that scale? People who are super tasters tend to place that over a rating of an 80 people, more average will place it in the seventies somewhere. The happiest moment of their life is like a wedding or being with family or reuniting with someone, and then they’ll place food lower. Each of us have our own capacity for bliss when it comes to food and tasting. Just knowing yourself, knowing how you feel about tasting changes, how you relate to a wine compared to someone else who might have a higher or lower blist points in their experience with food.
Natalie MacLean (00:51):
Do you have a thirst to learn about wine? Do you love stories about wonderfully obsessive people, hauntingly beautiful places and amusingly awkward social situations? Well, that’s the blend here on the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast. I’m your host, Natalie MacLean, and each week I share with you unfiltered conversations with celebrities in the wine world, as well as confessions from my own tipsy journey as I write my third book on this subject. I’m so glad you’re here. Now pass me that bottle please and let’s get started.
(01:33):
Welcome to episode 263. Love to eat, but do you know how to taste? What is the bliss point when it comes to food or tasting or wine? What makes our most memorable meals and wines delicious? And how can you make sure to bring home the best experiences from a trip to wine country? In today’s episode, you’ll hear the stories and tips that answer those questions in our chat with Mandy Naglich, who has just published How to Taste: A Guide to Discovering Flavor and Savoring Life. Two of you are going to win a copy of this beautiful hardcover book that retails for $27. All you need to do is email me and tell me you’d like to win one. I’ll choose two people randomly from those who contact me at [email protected]. I also wanted to mention some recent winners of the books that we’ve been giving away on the podcast, as well as some other books that you still have a chance to win.
(02:34):
Susan Berkowitz in New York City won the beautiful hardcover edition of How to Drink Australian, an essential modern wine book by Jane Lopes. I still have Jane’s book Vignette: Stories of Life and Wine in 100 bottles to give away, and I also have three copies of Vintage Crime: a Short History of Wine Fraud by Master of Wine Rebecca Gibb. So let me know if you’d like to win either one or both. Lisa Baku from Nelson, British Columbia and Leah Morrow from Victoria have both won a copy of Luke Whittall’s The 50 Must Try Wines of BC.
(03:16):
Before we dive into our chat with Mandy, I’m excited to let you know that my own book Wine Witch on Fire: Rising from the Ashes of Divorce, Defamation, and Drinking Too Much has been shortlisted for the Gorman International Awards in the wine writing category. The other books on the shortlist are from top-notch writers I respect so much from the US, the UK, France, Belgium, and Sweden. The winner will be announced in early 2024. Fingers crossed. If you’ve read the book or are reading it, I’d love to hear from you at [email protected]. If you haven’t got your copy yet and would like to support it and this podcast that I do on a volunteer basis, please order it from any online book retailer no matter where you live. Every little bit helps spread the message in this book of hope, justice, and resilience. It makes for a wonderful stocking stuffer or holiday gift book. And I’ll send you beautiful personally signed book plates for every copy that you purchase, just email me at [email protected]. I’ll put a link in the show notes to all the retailers worldwide at nataliemclean.com/263. Okay, on with the show.
Mandy Naglich is one of fewer than 100 Advanced Cicerone’s in the world, one of the highest certifications you can achieve in beer expertise. She’s also a Certified Cider Professional and has her WSET in spirits. Mandy’s writing has been published in Vice, Taste of Home, Vine Pair, and the Wine Enthusiast. She started her career in journalism at Schiffer College of Communication at Texas Christian University. And she joins us now from her home in New York City. Welcome, Mandy. We’re so glad to have you here.
Mandy Naglich (05:04):
Yeah, I’m so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Natalie MacLean (05:06):
Alright, well congrats on the new book. And before we dive into your wine career, maybe tell us about your first wine tasting experience at a Michelin star restaurant in Belgium.
Mandy Naglich (05:18):
Yes, so as you were talking about in my bio, definitely a lot of my credentials come from the beer world and Belgium is the home of really some of the greatest beers in the world made by monks and things like that. So my husband and I took a trip to Belgium. And I thought I’m going to take my first real Euro trip out of the country, we should have a really great dining experience. So it was my first time at a Michelin Star restaurant having a wine pairing and like I said I was just out of college, not super familiar with all of the hospitality of somewhere that’s Michelin star and we didn’t realize every time you empty your glass, they will refill it until the course is complete for each pairing. So they would come fill our glasses, we’d wait for the course, and we thought we were being polite by drinking the wine, but they kept refilling it and refilling it. I was talking to my husband, I was like we’re not even going to remember our third course. What are we supposed to do about this? And I think that was just a real learning experience to me about hospitality, how to enjoy wine pairing. And I mean, it’s really the whole philosophy of the book. I’m all about you should be tasting everything, experiencing it, enjoying it, not just throwing them back. But our very first experience, we didn’t really know what was going on.
Natalie MacLean (06:26):
Oh, that’s cute. And then you had a blind tasting experience at Rick Bayless’ restaurants.
Mandy Naglich (06:32):
Oh, so for the book I talked to Rick Bayless. And he was on that reality show, Top Chef Masters where it’s all Michelin star chefs and James Beard Award-winning chefs and things like that. And they blindfolded them and had them just taste random ingredients and he was even shocked. Things like hoison sauce, people were calling ketchup or barbecue sauce. They couldn’t identify mangoes with the blindfold. And it really changed his perspective about how sight and taste are tied together. And so now in his restaurants, he has all of his staff taste white or red wine with their eyes closed and they just have to say, do they know if it’s white or red? And it’s very hard to identify. I don’t know if you’ve ever done that before.
Natalie MacLean (07:13):
Oh, I’ve tried and I’ve made mistakes for sure. Absolutely.
Mandy Naglich (07:15):
Yeah, I’ve had those black wine glasses. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried those that make everything blind. They’re the most fun party trick. No matter what you’re tasting, they really obscure and it’s amazing when you lose your sense of sight how hard it is to taste notes in wines that we feel like we love and know so well.
Natalie MacLean (07:31):
Yeah. Oh, that’s fascinating. So many little tidbits of this. This comes up in your book and we’re going to dive into them in a moment, but you also have a memorable moment in San Diego wine country.
Mandy Naglich (07:42):
Yeah, I think San Diego, I don’t know if a lot of people think of it as a wine region. I certainly didn’t before I was there, and their wines are definitely it’s an up and coming wine region. A lot of the winemakers are figuring out what’s going on, but really what I remember about being there is just how beautiful the scenery was and taking it all in and adding the story into on top of the flavour of the wine that really makes the moment feel really special, even if it’s not the high-end wines that you would be getting in Europe, other places in California. And it was the first place that I really remember appreciating like oh wow this is really cool. We’re so close to the beach. They’re making wines here. There’s really cute winery dogs and things like that. And it kind of adds beyond your sensory experience of what’s in the glass. What you can add from the environment around you to really ups your enjoyment of whatever you’re drinking. It doesn’t always have to be a Michelin star tasting experience to really enjoy something and make it really memorable.
Natalie MacLean (08:35):
Absolutely. I’m also fascinated with what goes on around the glass as much as what’s in it. So it really is the total experience.
Mandy Naglich (08:42):
Definitely. It’s like 360 a flavour.
Natalie MacLean (08:45):
Yeah, I love that expression 360 flavour. You also have a story about sour beer with your dog sitter.
Mandy Naglich (08:52):
Yeah. That kind of ties back to just our expectations. The more I got into studying flavour, both in food and then as the science of what we taste, there’s so much behind what we expect and what we taste. So coming back from Belgium, a different Belgium trip, but there’s really rare sour beer that’s made in the Zenne Valley. It’s called Lambic. There’s only one small place in the whole world you can get this beer. But because it’s so special, they bottle it in wine bottles. It has a cork. It looks just like it would be a wine. And my dog sitter came and I said oh anything in the fridge, go for it. She was spending the weekend at my house and she wrote on her note, she always writes a note like oh chewy was so great. And she said, just so you know, I think that wine in your fridge is off. She totally thought it was wine and it’s just like, yeah, she opened it. She thought it would be wine. She had a couple glasses and was like, oh, this is just bad wine. She had no idea that it was this really special sour beer. So it’s just funny when you don’t have the expectations or the context. Everything has its correct context and then some places where it’s a little out of balance.
Natalie MacLean (09:53):
Absolutely.
Mandy Naglich (09:54):
We were dying laughing about that. We were like, you just have a really special rare beer. And she’s like, oh I think your wine’s off.
Natalie MacLean (09:59):
And if you know it’s beer, it’s great. If you think it’s wine, it’s off. I was just interviewing Terry Theise, the importer in the US, and he said he tries to arrive at the rim of the glass without expectation or anticipation even, because then that allows room for surprise and delight.
Mandy Naglich (10:18):
And it’s such a hard thing to do, too. I always say when you travel somewhere, say you go to Italy and have the best wine of your life, instead of bringing that wine home with you bring something else from the same winery that you didn’t get to try because then when you’re trying it at home, you’re just excited to relive your vacation rather than having that expectation of having that exact same experience you had on the Italian hillside. To your point, you’ll just meet with disappointment not in Italy anymore, but if it’s something new and you don’t have an expectation, you can just really love it.
Natalie MacLean (10:48):
Absolutely. Yeah. Trying to recapture those moments. Sometimes it’s better to create new ones.
Mandy Naglich (10:53):
Exactly.
Natalie MacLean (10:54):
Let’s talk about your terrific new book How to Taste: a Guide to Discovering Flavour and Savouring Life. I love that. What drew you to this particular story and angle in the first place?
Mandy Naglich (11:06):
So before the pandemic, I was teaching a lot of blind tasting classes and pairing classes and just kind of bar staff trainings where we were just kind of getting into flavour. I think the most important part when educating someone is that they can come away and learn to taste for themselves. It’s not just tasting the beers or wines or whiskeys in their class. It’s teaching them how to taste so they can go on in the world and be able to taste any menu and explain it to consumers. Then obviously all of those live in-person classes shut down during 2020 and I was thinking how can I turn what I teach and what I learn into something people don’t need to interact with me in person. And the idea was a book and I went on to interview over a hundred tasting professionals and scientists to really give feedback on what I teach just to sure it works for everyone. If it’s going to be printed in a book and I’m not there to explain it, I want to make sure there’s truth backed up with science and with how people use it in the industry. So it ended up being just over 110 people that contributed that I got to speak to for the book, and really it came out to be what I was talking about, that flavour 360, not just, oh what are we tasting in glasses, but cheese professionals, olive oil, honey, I talked to a mustard sommelier. Oh, didn’t know there was such a thing.
Natalie MacLean (12:19):
Wow. Mustard sommelier.
Mandy Naglich (12:21):
I know, but I know people do definitely throw that word around. But his training was extensive. It was like six months in Dijon, and you can identify mustard seeds just by looking at them. He’ll know how they’ll taste and things like that. So it was really cool to talk to all of those people and get a full perspective on flavour rather than just my specialty. It’s really get all of their input for the book.
Natalie MacLean (12:42):
That is great. Really backed up by science and expertise and you’re teaching people, it’s the same purpose as an education. You learn how to learn not just learn this specific wine or beer but how to taste anything. That’s amazing. So what was the most surprising insight you discovered while writing the book?
Mandy Naglich (13:02):
The more I got into it, it really changed my philosophy on taste because speaking to all these scientists, you really start to learn how individual each of our taste worlds are. Not only is it our experiences that kind of lead us to what we taste. So if you grew up around raspberry bushes and that was your childhood, you’re always eating raspberry. A raspberry note is going to jump out of the glass to you much faster than something that’s like a hay note. But if you grew up on a farm, you’re going to think hay is that top note just because of your experiences. And even beyond that, it’s also our genes. There’s some flavour compounds that are just tied to a single gene, and if you have that gene, you can taste it. And if you don’t have that gene, you can’t taste it or smell it. So as you kind of unwrap each of our individual lives between our culture, our memories, and our literal genes, everything that we’re tasting is so different. We never know what that glass of wine the person next to us is drinking tastes like to them. So it really changed my philosophy about teaching and telling people what they taste versus letting them discover what they taste and kind of trying to guide them in that direction.
Natalie MacLean (14:02):
That is fascinating. Yeah. And was it Julia Child who had some sort of gene for cilantro? She didn’t like it. People either have that gene or they don’t and cilantro tastes like soap. If you have the gene, I may be off on this one, but I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that.
Mandy Naglich (14:18):
Yeah, I don’t know if Julia Child had that gene, but it’s definitely a gene. So if you get your 23 and Me, it will show whether you have it or not. And that’s the same thing as super tasting. Super tasting is also a gene, so that shows up on your 23 and Me as well.
Natalie MacLean (14:33):
Fantastic. Yeah, I’ve been analyzed for that and by Tim Hanni down in California to identify that. Do you know if you are a super taster?
Mandy Naglich (14:43):
I am, which is why I was very picky growing up because I actually got to talk to the woman who coined the term super taster for the book and she wishes she called it something else because she thinks life is a little rough for the super tasters. Everything’s super intense. Bitterness can be almost painful, whereas non tasters are very adventurous eaters. They don’t have that really strong reaction to things they don’t like or that are very bitter. She’s actually a non taster. She coin the word super taster and that’s Doctor
Natalie MacLean (15:10):
Linda Bartoschuk
Mandy Naglich (15:12):
Bartoshuk, yes
Natalie MacLean (15:13):
Yes, from Yale.
Mandy Naglich (15:15):
And yeah, I have some super taster tests that I take to my book events and stuff if they’re small enough.
Natalie MacLean (15:20):
That’s great.
Mandy Naglich (15:20):
It’s always fun to let people know.
Natalie MacLean (15:22):
Absolutely. Always curious to learn about ourselves through what we read and so on. What’s the most interesting thing someone has said about your book?
Mandy Naglich (15:31):
Yeah, it’s been amazing. So I just got off my first leg of my book tour, which was I think 20 something events. It was crazy, but it was really fun and it’s amazing what people pick out is what they find the most interesting.
Natalie MacLean
Yes.
Mandy Naglich
And I write about the four different ways we chew and how that changes what we taste, just what kind of chewer you are. And so many people pulled that out and were like, oh I never realized I was a tonguer, which is people who use their tongues to move things to the back of their throat and tend to taste things more deeply. Whereas people who are really big into chewing, it’s not hitting as much of your palette. And so many people have pulled that out and they’re like, oh, I ask everyone how they chew now. To me, that was just I think it’s one page of the book, very passing, and it’s amazing what people grab onto as their most interesting part.
Natalie MacLean (16:12):
And what are the other two types? There’s tongue and teethers [laughter].
Mandy Naglich (16:16):
I was just like, shoot. Yeah, I would have to look it up. Honestly, I don’t even remember.
Natalie MacLean (16:21):
That’s worth the price of admission alone. That’s fascinating. I’m going to remember that when I’m at a restaurant next.
Mandy Naglich (16:28):
Yeah, definitely. There’s so many little studies that people have done. People who have a gene for cinnamon and really love cinnamon flavoured things also tend to red wines that are aged in barrels with cinnamanaldehyde. And when you ask them do you love cinnamons, you love red wine? People are usually like, absolutely, cabs are my favourite. Things like that. So yeah, the more you unravel, like I said, our individual experiences and I talk about it a tonne in the book, people get really excited. They’re like, oh I identified with that right away. I knew that I was like that and things like that.
Natalie MacLean (16:57):
Wow. You said we can judge the acidity of anything from a cup of tea to wine to a square of dark chocolate. Is there a trick to doing that? Is there a little test or something?
Mandy Naglich (17:07):
So once you just start thinking about it, I think people pay way more attention to it. It’s really interesting. Some of my book events where we couldn’t serve a lot of food, we just do chocolate and do something like a Hershey’s and then an artisan chocolate. And you actually can taste that difference of acidity in those two mediums, even though people don’t think of chocolate as acidic. But the trick is, I’m sure you might’ve learned this actually in your wine tasting experience, anytime there’s acid coming into our mouth, our body’s natural buffering solution is our saliva. So you’ll start to feel it forming in the back of your cheeks. Even just talking about a lemon, you can start to feel saliva forming and basically you can just kind of tip forward and feel how much saliva is pooling there. It’s really delicious things to talk about, but your body can gauge the acidity and it will start producing the amount of saliva it needs to tamp down to buffer that acidity before you swallow. So you can just see immediately. If you wanted to try at home a Hershey’s and then a really dark, dark chocolate, you will totally notice the difference in how much natural buffering solution is produced.
Natalie MacLean (18:06):
So I assume the dark chocolate has a lot more acidity?
Mandy Naglich
Yes, yes, definitely.
Natalie MacLean
Okay, interesting. And what does salt bind to in bitter foods that makes them taste less bitter?
Mandy Naglich (18:16):
So it’s actually the salt is binding to our tongues. It’s kind of blocking where. If you thought of runways on your palate or something and a bitter plane could only land on one runway, salt will block that off so it can’t land. So you’re not actually tasting it, you just swallow it without tasting the bitterness. So something like a margarita, when you’re adding that salt, it’s like why would salt be there? But it actually tamps down on some of the bitterness of the lime and the tequila. It makes overall your margarita tastes sweeter just by adding that little bit of salt.
Natalie MacLean (18:44):
And I think it was Tim Hanni again who said, if you want to adjust your food because you want to keep the same wine, add salt or seasoning that it was – I don’t know which combination he was going after – if it was just adding more salt to your steak so that you could have that red wine or what ever it was. But yeah, he was talking about those kinds of adjustments as well.
Mandy Naglich (19:05):
And it’s been really cool in the last couple of years. In cocktail culture, you’ll see people with droppers of just salt water. Just add a couple drops to almost every cocktail they make because it just does that. It rounds things out a little. Tamps down on the bitterness a little bit and it will elevate sweetness too, just the way those compounds react with our palate.
Natalie MacLean (19:22):
And how do our taste buds respond to food temperature?
Mandy Naglich (19:25):
So as things get further away from our body temperature, we’re naturally less sensitive to them. So things that are very cold, for example, ice cream is going to taste less sweet or ice coffee will taste less bitter. If you let ice cream melt to room temperature, it will be so sweet it will be sickening. That’s because they have to why over sweeten it so it tastes sweet at all when it’s cold. And then same thing on the opposite end of the spectrum, things like black coffee. If you can handle some bitterness when it’s very, very hot, you’re not going to taste that bitterness. But then when it comes to temperature, I always think it tastes like just bitter dirt. Honestly, it’s not good coffee when it’s at rooms temperature.
Natalie MacLean (20:01):
That’s because you’re super taster [laughter].
Mandy Naglich (20:03):
Yeah, exactly. So when we start thinking about things getting far away from our body temperature, why you might keep vodka in the freezer but not whiskey. You want to experience all the things that the barrel master was blending those barrels, getting all those vanillas and caramel notes in there. If that was frozen, you wouldn’t be able to taste them as much. Whereas a vodka, which is just supposed to be as neutral as possible, go ahead and throw it freezer. We don’t want to taste those ethanol notes anyway.
Natalie MacLean (20:30):
Right. Well, that’s also what I advise for low budget weddings. If you’re going to serve crappy wine, chill the heck out of it [laughter].
Mandy Naglich (20:36):
Yeah. Something that was really funny, one of the scientists I talked to for the book said as you become more of an expert, you start to be able to categorize things mentally. So you know a very low end wine; what your favourite one is of that middle range; what you could pick up at the gas station. And so I started asking everyone, all the somms and things, what would their favourite box wine be? And many of them said, Franzia Blush chilled. Very, very, very cold. And I couldn’t believe they were all had the same answer. I was like, wow, it must really be that good.
Natalie MacLean
I guess so.
Mandy Naglich
To add on to your tips, I guess. That’s the thing to serve at your wedding
Natalie MacLean (21:09):
In a pinch. Yes [laughter]. Just be sure to decant it first though. Don’t let it warm up. Make it look fancy, but keep it cold. So when it comes to mouthfeel or the texture of food, how small a particle size can we actually detect in our mouths?
Mandy Naglich (21:25):
Yeah, it’s amazing. That’s why I think using the term mouth feels, sometimes people think it’s a little jargony and over scientific, but it’s different than consistency. If you look at the consistency of something, you can see grit or something like that, but our palates can actually sense a grit the size of a 10th of a grain of sand. So it’s something you couldn’t see with your eye. So that’s really your mouth feeling out those different grits or just the weight on our palate. When you think of a full-bodied wine versus something that’s a little lighter, when you swirl them in your glass, they look the same. The texture’s the same to your eye. The consistency is the same. But the actual feeling in your mouth, you can feel that weightiness. It’s a very, very fine balanced scale on our palate. So we can really taste a lot or feel a lot with our mouth.
Natalie MacLean (22:07):
Yeah, wow. And when we talk about food or wine, what is a bliss point?
Mandy Naglich (22:12):
Good question.
Natalie MacLean (22:13):
I love the term.
Mandy Naglich (22:14):
Yeah, I think that kind of goes along with the super taster. I believe it is what we’re talking about in the book. So people who, when you say on the scale of one to 100, one being so much pain that you’ve broken a bone or something and 100 being the happiest moment of your life, where would you place food on that scale? And people who are super tasters tend to place that over a rating of 80. People more average will place it in the 70’s somewhere and the happiest moment of their life is a wedding or being with family or reuniting with someone and then they’ll place food lower. So I think it’s just each of us have our own capacity for bliss when it comes to food and tasting, and we’ll all rate that a little bit differently. So again, just knowing yourself, knowing how you feel about tasting changes how you relate to a wine compared to someone else who might have a higher or lower bliss points in their experience.
Natalie MacLean (23:05):
That is really interesting that super tasters would rate the food and wine higher, especially when they’re so sensitive to so many things. Actually, I guess when they achieve that experience that they like, it’s really beyond anything else.
Mandy Naglich (23:17):
And it’s just that number. They have more taste buds naturally. And so every taste bud is surrounded by our touch receptors, like a little basket of touch receptors. So things like heat, cold, menthol, capsaicin, they also experience really intensely. So I think it’s that intensity of the feeling when you have something really, really great, you’re also feeling that way more intensely.
Natalie MacLean (23:38):
Wow. It’s like you completed a master’s degree in science for this book or something. I mean, I know you talked to so many experts. These are all things I’ve never heard before and I’ve talked about a lot of people in the industry. So kudos to you for digging up all of this really fascinating stuff.
Mandy Naglich (23:54):
You should see all the. I have boxes and boxes of all the studies and everything, and then I wanted to talk to the scientists to make sure I understood the study correctly…
Natalie MacLean
Good job
Mandy Naglich
… interpreted in the way they thought.
Natalie MacLean (24:05):
That’s fantastic.
Mandy Naglich (24:05):
Lots of research.
Natalie MacLean (24:07):
In the description for the book, there’s a mention that there is a flavour distinction between palm fruit and stone fruit. Can you tell us what that is? And first of all, what palm fruit? Is that just all apple based fruit? Palm fruit and stone fruit?
Mandy Naglich (24:20):
Yeah. So palm fruits are apples and pears mostly is what you think of them. And they’re a certain collection of esters. So that result of fermentation, things like ethyl decadienoate are going to be very palm fruits based. Whereas your stone fruits – I mean peaches, nectarines, things like that, apricots – they’re going to come from a different collection of scents. So when I’m teaching people, I think people are really nervous to say something like, this tastes like apple to me. But when I say, does this smell more like apple and pear or peach and apricot, they’re more able to say, oh yeah, this does smell more apple or pear. It’s like less of a declaration or something. So people feel more comfortable making those distinctions back and forth. And I think people would have a hard time if you said, does this smell like apricot? They’re like, I don’t know, I’m not really sure. But they can say it smells more like an apricot than it does like a palm fruit.
Natalie MacLean (25:12):
And that’s why side-by-side tasting helps so much, especially for beginners. Tasting one wine in isolation, it’s hard. But when you can contrast and compare two different wines, that’s when the differences sort of jump out. So that’s very helpful. And for those who may not know, are you referring to aromas?
Mandy Naglich (25:31):
Yeah. So when you ferment something – so grapes for wine, malt for beer, rice for things like sake – the yeast is going to react with those base ingredients to create new compounds. So esters are things that are more on the fruity side of the spectrum. If they’re very, very strong, they can smell a little medicinal bandaid, but hopefully we’re not doing that. And then there’s other compounds from fermentation like phenols, organic acids that also have aromas. So basically ester’s just one category of aroma. Things like sulfur compounds are another category that you might not want as much. Phenols have those spicier very clove forward. Anytime you’re getting that clove, baking spice aroma that’s probably coming from phenols in fermentation. So just yeah, different chemical words.
Natalie MacLean (26:21):
Yeah, yeah. It’s good to dig into them to understand. So our olfactory bulb sits beside the nose and, I found this fascinating, smell travels through the inner ear. I didn’t realize that. I knew smell is that powerful sense that connects most directly to brain, emotion, memory than the other senses. So what’s happening? The actual smells are going up through our inner ear before it gets to the brain and interpreted?
Mandy Naglich (26:45):
So it’s actually our taste from our palate.
Natalie MacLean (26:47):
Okay. Taste.
Mandy Naglich (26:48):
There’s a nerve called the chorda tympani that connects your tongue through the inner ear and then into your brain. And that’s why things like music or very, very loud noise of any kind really, it’s not just affecting what you taste because you feel like it’s harder to tell what’s going on. Your chorda tympani is literally being jostled by things like a loud baseline or loud conversation and jostling those taste signals before they reach your brain to be interpreted. So I always say if you go somewhere, even if it’s a very nice wine bar, and you want to order a really expensive bottle of wine, if it’s super loud, it might not be the place you’re going to enjoy that flavour the most because you’re getting jostled all over the place by all those sound waves.
Natalie MacLean (27:27):
And it’s diminishing your senses of taste.
Mandy Naglich (27:29):
Right, right. It just kind of morphs it in a way, too. So there’s really cool studies about playing, for example, jazz music in the background versus hip hop. And it’s not that hip hop makes things taste worse, it’s just a little bit of a…. it makes them feel unfamiliar and you’re not feeling as comforted by them. Whereas jazz is very comforting and people tend to really relate to the flavours when they’re tasting it in that presence.
Natalie MacLean (27:52):
Would that be cultural? If you grew up with hip hop, would then your perception of the wine be the reverse? If you weren’t used to jazz and you were used to hip hop, would it have the opposite effect?
Mandy Naglich (28:03):
That’s a good question. I know they did the studies with foods they were used to then novel foods. I don’t know that if they looked at their backgrounds as far as music as what they were testing for. They were testing novel foods and then familiar foods. But there’s also studies about music that quote unquote tastes sour, like very pitchy music. I can’t think of the name of the dance, like the South American dance music like marimba kind of stuff. But people said it tastes sour, so it makes whatever they’re drinking tastes more sour. So there’s a ton of study about just how those signals are kind of interacting with your taste as it’s going into your brain and shifting it just a little bit.
Natalie MacLean (28:40):
So on another cross-modal note, what happened when was it you or somebody else who had participants in a class paint the colours that they tasted in chocolate?
Mandy Naglich (28:49):
Oh, so this is Hazel Lee and she has just a fascinating background as a chocolate expert, chocolate maker, chocolate judge. She started a company called Taste with Colour, where it’s basically a colour map, almost like you can think of a flavour wheel. We see the circle that has all the different tasting notes on it, but she feels very strongly that colours are tied to different flavours. So on the map it is a big map of colour that’s shifting through the rainbow. And your reds, you have your raspberries, your strawberries, your pomegranates, things like that. Greens obviously is like your grassiness, green pears, green apples. And what she had everyone do is they taste and then just try to paint the colours that they’re tasting instead of trying to tie it to words directly. Just how when they’re tasting the chocolate, how would it paint as colour.
And in one of her classes, she had everyone tends to use similar colours. They’re all tasting together, getting notes. But what was really interesting is everyone held up their little paintings and it was very, very similar to the label of the chocolate. And they had never seen the label. They had no idea what they were tasting. And she was saying obviously the chocolate maker also was seeing those colours when they were branding this chocolate. And everyone’s were very, very similar. It was really cool. She lives in the UK, so we had to do the interviews over Zoom, but she pulled out the big frames thing to show me. And it was really interesting that, even without understanding that we’re all tasting the same thing, this way of describing it through colour really shows how similar it is when we’re tasting together.
Natalie MacLean (30:16):
And now you were studying for your Advanced Cicerone certificate and you’re finding it difficult to identify a certain compound in beer. So what helped you remember that cross modally?
Mandy Naglich (30:27):
Yeah, so to get your Advanced Cicerone – and I was actually also studying for Master Cicerone, which I haven’t done yet – you have to be able to identify 113 beer styles blindly. And then I think it’s 36 compounds. I should be able to remember that. But as spikes. And one thing I was doing was trying to, because there’s so many beer styles, I would try to put a colour when I was tasting them. So all of my Belgian beers, I would have blue and look at blue when I was tasting them and try to make sure I could pick up those Belgian yeast notes. And German was green and British was red, and things like that because you can kind of trick your brain into tying aromas to what you’re seeing and feeling at the same time. So we’re very tied our memory to our sense of taste and smell, so trying to force those creations is something that I was doing when I was studying.
Natalie MacLean (31:16):
Yeah, it reminds me of other study tricks like chunking, like compressing a big chunk of knowledge down into a few words so that you can unfold it again in the exam if it’s a question. But just tricks of memory. But I found that fascinating that you’re staring at the colour blue to remember a particular compound or beer style. I’m going to try that for other things.
Natalie MacLean
Well, there you have it. I hope you enjoyed our chat with Mandy. Here are my takeaways. Number one, I found Mandy’s explanation of the difference between eating and tasting fascinating, as well as her discussion about the Bliss Point and how individual it is. Two, her tips on how to make the most of your experiences in wine country were very helpful. And three, I agree with her that your environment really affects your enjoyment of whatever you’re drinking or eating. It’s the 360 degrees of flavour that contributes to our most memorable meals. It was also interesting how losing your sense of sight can obscure what you’re tasting.
In the show notes, you’ll find the full transcript of my conversation with Mandy, links to her website and books, the video versions of these conversations on Facebook and YouTube live, and where you can order my book online now no matter where you live. You’ll also find a link to my free online food and wine pairing class that you can take with me. It’s called The Five Wine and Food Pairing Mistakes That Can Ruin Your Dinner and How to Fix Them forever at nataliemaclean.com/class. That link and all the rest are all in the show notes at nataliemaclean.com/263. Email me if you have a sip, tip, question or if you’ve read my book or are in the process of reading it at natalienataliemaclean.com. I would love to hear from you.
If you’ve missed episode 217, go back and take a listen. I talk about the difference between flavour and taste plus Uruguay wines with New York Times writer Nell McShane Wulfhart. I’ll share a short clip with you now to whet your appetite.
Nell McShane Wulfhart (33:28):
What we hear can change the flavour of what we’re eating. There was a great experiment by Charles Spence. He called, I think the Sonic Chip. He gave a bunch of people in a lab some Pringles out of the can and he put headphones on them. And for some of the people eating the Pringles, he turned up the volume of their own crunching, and those people perceived those chips as being fresher than the ones who just heard it at the regular volume. In general, smell is definitely the most powerful one, especially when it comes to things like wine. And it’s that flavour, it’s a smell plus the taste plus the other senses that creates flavour. Flavour’s really created more in your mind than it is on your tongue.
Natalie MacLean (34:11):
If you like this episode, please email or tell one friend about it this week, especially someone who’d be interested in the wines tips and stories we shared. It’s easy to find my podcast. Just tell them to search for Natalie MacLean Wine on their favourite podcast app. You won’t want to miss next week when we continue our chat with Mandy. Thank you for taking the time to join me here. I hope something great is in your glass this week, perhaps a wine that you enjoy with all five senses, and that gives you 360 degrees of flavour and pleasure.
You don’t want to miss one juicy episode of this podcast, especially The Secret full-bodied bonus episodes that I don’t announce on social media. So subscribe for free now at nataliemaclean.com/subscribe. Meet me here next week. Cheers.
