Tasting Notes and their Relevance

“The nose knows things that the mind does not understand” – Blaise Pascal

The benevolent reason for tasting notes to exist and be shared is to inform our colleagues/friends/customers about the journey they are about to embark on should they take the time to recreate your experience with a product. If conveyed honestly, I think there is nothing but good intentions behind them. Though I have many colleagues who consider writing tasting notes for others a waste of time and effort. The malevolent side of tasting notes stems from their misuse, especially if they are used to deceive someone into buying a product using false descriptions. Of course, both sides exist and therefore credibility in tasting notes seems to be rather low.

Any time someone disagrees with a tasting note I write for tea, they are not ‘wrong’, because I am not ‘right’ – Everyone perceives things differently, and that is not solely based on ability. There are several factors at play that I would like to review and perhaps have a conversation about if you feel so inclined.

Sample Material Variability:
Despite coming from the same source, one 5g sample of tea will not be the same as the next 5g, though in most cases they should be very similar. As surely every tea drinker has witnessed, tea from the ‘top of the bag/tin’ is different in size from that which finds its way to the bottom. Different sizes will extract at different rates and thus produce a different result.

Secondly, if 1g of the first samples 5g was trichome covered buds, but 2g of the second sample was trichome covered buds, a conscious consumer would expect the sensory experience between the two pots to be different; and this doesn’t even account for differences in water, teaware, etc.

Infusion and Perception Variability:
Our ability to discover an aroma in something (depending on what it is) can be as impressive as 1 part per trillion for the most odorous compounds known. That’s equivalent to a 1mL drop in a lake-sized body of water! This ability stretches and shrinks between different chemical compounds over at least 11 orders of magnitude.

Different volatile chemical compounds in the tea leaf will be released into the water at different lengths of infusion time. Different volatile chemicals in an infused tea will be released into the air at different times. The most volatile compounds are released first and don’t linger. As they fade, the medium volatile compounds begin to appear. As the medium volatile compounds fade, the least volatile compounds come into focus and persist. The perfume industry refers to these stages as the top, heart, and base notes of an aroma.

Therefore despite their best efforts, someone who doesn’t interact with the tea during the first several minutes after it has been brewed will miss several stages of the aroma development; and someone who doesn’t try to appreciate the aroma of the tea may only find its top notes, it stands to reason why opinions can differ so greatly.

The sensitivity of our palates and our ability to transcribe scents to words is another factor. I am surely partially blind or totally blind to certain compounds and hypersensitive to others, and the reverse will be true for the next person. In extreme cases, 2 people could smell the same odor and describe it completely differently. This is perhaps not due to our physical limitations to detect aroma but our lack of fluency in describing what we smell, perhaps both. In the food and fragrance industries, companies will form panels of judges so that their averages can paint a more reliable picture of what people perceive.

I brew and recommend my customers to brew teas with rather specific extraction parameters. The reason is that through my testing, to my taste, and what I can perceive with my abilities and circumstances, I’ve found those parameters will create an infusion that puts the tea in the best possible light. Although things taste differently from person to person, I do not have a panel of people to gather data from, nor do I believe that data would be useful at the scale of which I operate. I believe my parameters to be a wonderful starting point from which the recipient can adjust to suit their tasting ability.

Elemental and Configurable Senses:
An aroma is not just a sum of its chemical parts, and our ability to comprehend an aroma comes down to how we perceive it. If two aromatic compounds are blended, one person may perceive the blend as identifiable compounds A + B while the next person may perceive it as C. The analyzable A + B compound is referred to as an elemental odor, while the C compound is a configural odor. If you put a Caprese salad in front of someone blindfolded and asked them what it is, do you think it’s more likely they say ‘basil, tomato, mozzarella, balsamic’ or ‘Caprese salad’? What about tea? I don’t know about you but I’ve met my fair share of people who don’t smell anything in tea but ‘tea’.

I suppose it’s safe to say our comprehension of aroma is based on life experience. Configural sensing seems to be our default, we live on auto-pilot, and configural sensing saves us a lot of somewhat pointless thinking. Elemental sensing is something that can be learned and is especially useful in the process of ‘reverse engineering’ aromas. Depending on whether you find enjoyment in using your brain as an analytical tool, flipping the ‘Elemental Sensing’ switch to ‘Always On’ can be a very rewarding life choice. It just takes practice, awareness, and energy.

This article is a good primer that flows into another article I’ve written (just days later) about the variables active during tea drinking, and why we all have different experiences with the same leaves. You can read it here: https://www.sommerier.com/?p=2925