WHISKY LANGUAGE
Expressing the inexpressable
Making sense of flavour has been a challenge that the Society’s Tasting Panel has been grappling with since 1983, when it started to write tasting notes unlike anything that had been seen in the whisky world at that point. Tasting Panel chair Kami Newton reflects on describing the indescribable – and letting the imagination run wild
“It’s like wearing a balaclava…but inside your head,” remarked one Society member after a protracted period of deliberation. Out of context of course, it would appear to be a somewhat abstract and laughable statement. However, it quite succinctly tackles the challenge that I grapple with as a Tasting Panel chair on a regular basis. The challenge is how to convey the complex and personal experience of a dram in a short arrangement of commonly agreed-upon language.
The very thought of wearing a balaclava inside the skull is a clear stretch for the imagination. It’s something I can vaguely picture as a surreal mental image, but there’s no possible way of ever experiencing it. Yet I could instantly identify with the point being made. The whisky brought a deep sense of cosiness, warmth and satisfaction that went beyond the senses and reached into the very essence of the being. It went beyond words. The point is that when it comes to expressing the experience of tasting a dram, a succession of dilemmas begins to appear.
Sensations in their pure form are physical processes. When we hear, see, touch, taste and smell, physical signals are sent to the brain for processing. However, somewhere along those pathways occasionally people have blind spots, called anosmia, or a reduced sensitivity called hyposmia. For example, some people simply cannot detect sulphur aromas or coconut. Some people, on the other hand, may experience exaggerated sensitivity to certain aromas.
Once the signals reach the brain the old grey matter does a diligent job of making sense of it all, by pairing the information with memories. What do bananas smell like if you’ve never encountered one before? Therefore it’s our bank of past experiences that allows us to make sense of flavour in the present moment. This is where things become interesting. The brain has a delightful ability to be particularly selective when it constructs an image of the world around us, and it can be easily tricked.
For example, it is now well known how colours, shapes and sounds influence how we interpret aroma and taste. The interesting implication is that flavour is merely a mirage because our sensory experience is being manipulated on a subconscious level. Want to increase the perceived quality of the food at your next dinner party? Simple… just invest in heavier cutlery, because we associate weight with quality.
The cerebral subterfuge doesn’t stop there though. The mind is an adept expert at editing our memories. It can change the contrast, brightness and even crop our experiences based on the emotions that are associated with them. This is how we can arrive at a disparity between actual flavours and our memory of flavours, and sometimes things do not taste as good as we remember them tasting. This is why that wine you tried on holiday never tastes quite the same back home. However, this deep connection between sensory perception, emotions and memories presents complications in yet another way.
ABOVE: a Tasting Panel session in progress
Because we all have unique libraries of memories to call upon, we often have different ways of describing the same things. For example, a specific aroma may be expressed as green apples by one person, as cut grass by another, and green tea by a third person.
No answer is ‘wrong’ but it does shine a light on how our life experiences deeply shape our interpretation of our experiences right here, right now. Hence it is entirely understandable why a safe zone can be found in ambiguity.
Ambiguity comes in the form of words like ‘smooth’, ‘rich’ and ‘fruity’, which while being selectively seductive, in fact tell us very little about how something will taste.
The word ‘fruity’ itself will have a different meaning for different people, based their lifelong exposure to various fruits.
But what happens when we remove the safety net of ambiguity and we attempt to grasp not just the flavour but also the emotions that go with it?
This is where emotions play such a crucial role. Emotions, as complex as they are, are far more universally recognised and consistent than individual tastes. Our appreciation of various flavours will change throughout our lives, however the feeling of laughter is consistent and relatable regardless of ethnicity, culture or background.
By embracing a place, a time or an occasion, no matter how surreal the image may be, we can follow a less reductionist path that conveys greater meaning. This is why at the Society this month in the UK you will find Cask No. 41.66: Like a hot knife through oak, Cask No. 18.55: Lost in coffee canyon and Cask No. 9.280: Butterscotch-encrusted carnations - and variations on the theme elsewhere in the world.
This is why wearing a balaclava inside your head says more about the experience of a whisky than an entire essay of adjectives.
This is why we take our own maverick approach to describing the indescribable, defining the indefinable and expressing the inexpressible.