Was thinking about the tea flavor wheels out there, and the wine flavor wheels, too. The purpose of such a wheel, as Ann C. Noble, who developed the wine wheel, points out, is to help the taster recognize the different flavor elements in a wine (or tea or coffee or beer or other beverage). The structure of these wheels helps you go from, say, recognizing that a flavor is fruity, to experiencing the fruitiness as citrus, to figuring out that the fruity flavor in question is reminiscent of lemon.
The basic categories in flavor wheels are based in heuristics: in other words we recognize something as having a fruity flavor thanks to our life’s experience with fruit flavors, so fruity becomes a category in the list.
These categories have little to do with receptors. For example, in the standard Wine Aroma Wheel, “burned” (which leads to coffee, burnt toast, and smoky) comes under the category of “woody,” but from a receptor point of view “burned” should belong with the category "spicy" or maybe “pungent” because burnt compounds activate the hot receptor TRPV1. Along the same line, it's interesting that in the tea aroma wheel above, "spicy" includes both "hot" and "cooling."
The purpose of a receptor-based flavor wheel would be to help with pairing rather than with flavor/aroma identification. Am working on it!
My question to you: have you made use of a flavor wheel, and if so, how?
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