A question of texture

“Grande Cuvée is a paradox of tense freshness, profound maturity and inimitable complexity,” declared Tyson Stelzer in his ‘definitive’ Champagne Guide 2016. “… it sings with a youthful definition of breath-taking lemon and lemon zest, with marvellous layers of strawberries, figs and tangelos. It opens with a fanfare into a maelstrom of molten wax, wisps of smouldering truffle, Christmas spice and kirsch….” Lesser mortals would have given up by this point, but Stelzer soldiers on for another 17 lines!

This overblown tosh is an extreme example of a more common issue in tasting notes that was touched on by the whisky writer Dave Broom in Unfiltered last July: “If you’ve got a dozen whiskies in front of you, and three or four have elements of citrus, you can’t just write ‘citrus’ each time,” he said. And from this comes the temptation to plunge into a fruit salad of aromas and flavours, and perhaps “veer off into fantastical realms”, as Dave put it.

IT'S MORE ABOUT MOUTHFEEL

But ultimately, what does it matter whether a dram has the scent of lemons or limes or even smouldering truffles? “When push comes to shove, the decisive thing is whether you like the whisky or not,” says Olaf Meier, a regular chair of the Society’s Tasting Panel. By focussing so much on the nose, he believes we underplay what the drink actually feels like on the tongue. “I don’t think we put enough emphasis on the texture and mouthfeel,” he says. “We ignore the sense of touch. When you stroke an animal, for example, it is much more of an emotional connection which makes something immediately pleasurable or not.”

“Texture is something that is immediately apparent,” says the whisky writer Charlie MacLean MBE, who likes to encourage people on a Tasting Panel to think about mouthfeel before anything else. “I always put texture before taste, which is essentially just sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami. You can usually say an awful lot more about the aroma and use all these exotic descriptors.”

For Olaf, the trouble with describing aromas is that “you always have to have the mental capacity of comparing them to something else,” he says. Invariably this involves a string of similes and metaphors, unlike describing the drink’s mouthfeel, which “comes automatically” in his view.

WHAT DOES 'SMOOTH' MEAN?

The most common descriptor of almost any whisky, at least among marketing folk, is one that concerns texture – namely ‘smooth’. “The smoothness of a product is a function of a huge number of factors that distillers naturally assess within the space of a sip,” says Matthew Pauley, assistant professor in distilling at the International Centre for Brewing & Distilling at Heriot-Watt University. Among them, he lists the whisky’s levels of alcohol (abv), sugars, fats and oils, and explains that: “The fat content comes from the raw materials and fermentation, and the tannins and sugar come from the oak.

“There is an effect know as ethanol clustering,” he continues, “where, due to the structure of the ethanol molecules and their polarity, you can form clusters of ethanol and water molecules, and these have been known to aid in the perception of smoothness.” It also depends whether the whisky is a standard 40% abv or cask strength because “the abv will influence the ability for these clusters to form,” he says.