André Simon Award: Red & White

In the run-up to the 40th André Simon Awards, the drinks business is running an extract from each of the shortlisted books in the drinks category. This time, Oz Clarke turns his attention to the power of smell taken from his new book, ‘Red & White‘.

Some thoughts on wine tasting – everyone can do it

We can do it simply, or we can do it philosophically. Let’s do it simply. Think while you drink. That’s it? That’s it. Think while you drink may be simple, but it is serious. And since we eat and drink several times a day as a necessity, for those of us who are remotely interested in flavour, let’s make a necessity into a pleasure.

I adore flavour. I look for flavour in the dullest bread roll and the freshest plucked sprig of thyme. I taste every mouthful of tap water – I do! – every gulp of milk, as well as every sip of beer or cider, gin or wine. I smell the air. I love to walk out of my front door and smell the seasons changing through the aromas carried on the breeze. I can smell the rowdy uncertainty of October as summer still fights off the looming, lumbering beast of winter.

I can smell January in its fogs, in its brilliant crystal sunlight, in its sludgy snow and wisps of woodsmoke. I can smell spring. I can smell sap rising, leaves unfolding, dark earth stretching and exhaling, the sweat of a long winter slumber adding its moist brown odour to the optimistic pale scents of early flowers. And I can smell summer. I can smell summer all year. In the dark winter I can smell summer. As the sun rises higher, I can smell the dry, raw heat of summer trampling on the dewy freshness of spring, I can smell dust replace earth. I can smell gold replace green, I can smell the exhausted satisfaction of high summer replace the polished green muscles of May.

And everything we taste we smell. Smell is taste. And smell is memory. Smell is emotion and experience. Happiness has a smell. Sadness has a smell. Grief and triumph, disappointment, hunger and fear, they all have smells. All of these are the bank, the repository, on which we draw when we decide to taste. When we taste food we can taste memories and experiences.

But when we taste wine, which has no language of its own, which has no existence in nature before men and women take it in hand and, with greater or lesser sensitivity, begin to mould it; when we taste wine, and search for words to express the wine, search for ways to describe the pleasures, try to understand the unexpected emotions a wine may call up from some distant time, when we really taste, and the wine really matters to us, then we have the whole of our previous life offering reasons and opinions and descriptors to explain, just a little, what the wine is, and what it is doing to us. And here’s me saying I would keep it simple.

Perhaps it would help if I talk about the basics of tasting. But I do mean it when I say think while you drink is a good mantra. You can get pleasure from the simplest food or drink. And, for goodness sake, we are doing it, every day of our lives.

We are eating and drinking. Every single time we take a mouthful of anything our senses of taste and smell are aroused. We owe it to ourselves to at least take note. Even the most banal mouthful should bring some reaction, if only to make us pine for all the better mouthfuls we have known.

So, I’ll try to get down to basics. I am not going to go into the whole palaver of how to store a bottle (nice and cool), how to open it (screwcap? Twist. Cork? Don’t use a lousy corkscrew. Fizz? Don’t aim it at someone’s eye), how to serve it (pour it, not too fast; funnily enough, if you are too careful you are almost guaranteed to spill some – I always do – so relax), and the type of glass (big is better than small, half-full is better than rim-full or bone-empty). That, at least, was fairly simple.

the drinks business and the André Simon Awards will also be offering readers the chance to win a copy of each of the shortlisted books over the coming weeks. Stay tuned to our social media channels on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for further details.