I remember picking up my first few glasses of wine with heavy arms and a light head. I had just started working in a restaurant in Manhattan that was far above my level of experience in the industry (none), but desperate for employees. I was enthusiastic, hard-working, and had a tiny hint of a southern accent that just tickles New Yorkers to death. I knew enough about food to hold my own in menu meetings, but when they brought out the new wines to be served by the glass, my throat would close up and I would begin to sweat as though having an allergic reaction.
In menu meetings, all the servers were poured an ounce or so of a new wine, told to give it a taste by our wine director. “Take a nice sip of it and just tell me how it speaks to you.” I plucked the glass up like everyone else – by the top half of the stem, my fingers perched at its throat. I remember pleading in my head to the precarious-looking liquid as it lolled around the glass: “Please, please talk to me, say something coherent, pretty, pretty please.” I would take a small sip, let it lounge in my mouth for the standard two seconds, while it shouted gibberish in my mind like “purple,” “hamsters,” or “hotel breakfast.” I would have rolled my eyes at myself if I hadn’t been so terrified of losing my job. Discharged due to flamboyant taste buds. It wouldn’t be the first time I was told such a thing.
I have a very clear memory from when I was five of my mother standing hunched at the kitchen counter, making cucumber sandwiches for the pool later, as I ate my breakfast. I remember her voice, patiently frustrated as only a mother can be, finally shooting at me, “You, my dear, have some freakishly imaginative taste buds.”
I had, I’m sure, just made a comment about how the milk tasted that day, or the butter, if I was eating toast, because I considered myself an expert on the matter. It was probably along the lines of, “Hey Mom, the milk tastes like Crayons today,” or, “Hey Mom, the butter tastes like Grandma’s carpet.” I wasn’t joking, nor was I criticizing, nor emitting symptoms of Tourette’s. I tasted those things. I could taste when the milk was going bad two days before anyone else in my family, and I could also taste when we had gotten an especially fresh gallon. Day to day, I gave my mom an update on how the milk was doing, what stage it was in, and made a prediction about what it would taste like the next day. Breakfast was my favorite game, and it seemed I was the only one in my family that could play.
I was adamant about the proper storage of our dairy products – always on the top shelf, cap fixed on tightly, and never ever near fresh produce or leftovers, lest my Rice Krispies taste like green pepper or pot roast the next morning. My family thought I was joking, probably because I tasted more objects or environments than actual flavors. (“Hey Mom, the Kraft singles taste like the dentist’s office!”) They wanted me to relax and eat quietly. I wanted to go on tour. Introducing the incredible, the amazing, the extraordinary TASTE-BUD GIRL! She’ll tell you what brand your milk is, whether your tap water comes from the mountains or the valley, how much MSG is in your Chinese food, how long your ice cream has been in the freezer, and MUCH MUCH MORE!! Gather ‘round! Give the child’s palate a challenge!
Once old enough to write, draw, organize, and grasp the concept of authority, I decided to put my skills to the only use I could think of: concocting a “proper refrigerator storage” chart and accompanying seminar to prevent any more mishaps like the loosely-wrapped-onion-next-to-the-apple-pie incident of 1995. This was when my keen tongue was revealed as a true annoyance to the rest of the family. I soon had to learn to ignore it, or at least to suppress my inclination to warn everyone that the chili Mom made tastes like pennies. The problem was that no one else could taste it.
Now I was the one that couldn’t taste things correctly. The wine always “spoke” to me, but more in the form of slam poetry rather than elegant descriptions. I listened to other people’s descriptions of the wine – I taste plum, cherry, and oak notes – and strained to find such flavors in my glass. I could usually see what they were saying, but, though I didn’t dare say it, I never thought they were quite right, never quite did the flavor justice. I spent those meetings silent. I swallowed the nonsensical verses that I tasted and reflected on my childhood, trying to find a wrong turn somewhere. What had I done to turn my greatest gift into such a curse?
After four solemn meetings, I set up a lesson with one of the managers, Victoria, so that she could help me learn about wine. I wanted desperately to understand it, or at least to not look like an idiot when asked about it. I had been having dreams lately where I was on a game show, the edge of a cliff, in the middle of a cafeteria, being asked questions concerning body, finish, and tannins.
Of course, on our first lesson, Victoria announced that she wanted to get a feel for where I stood palate-wise, or how well I could discern the flavors that composed a wine. As she poured me a small glass from a bottle in her bag, keeping the label concealed, I began digging through my brain for words that I had heard being used to describe wine, thinking I would just throw out the ones that sounded the most like what I tasted. I stared at the glass for a bit, before swinging it up to my face a bit too quickly. I performed the pre-sip ceremony that I had seen our customers do, and tipped a bit into my mouth. I waited, swallowed, then offered, “It tastes robust, complex, and has a brilliant bouquet.”
Victoria blinked and then gave me a noncommittal look from her perfect posture. “Uh huh. Taste it again,” she responded.
I did, then tried, “It’s fortified, luscious, and has a nice finish?” I couldn’t help my voice going up in the end.
Victoria gave a patient sigh and slouched for a moment before sitting up straight again. She spoke very clearly and slowly for me, this time.
“No. Try the wine one more time, and describe to me exactly what you taste, as you taste it. Don’t make it sound pretty, don’t make it sound like anything. Just say whatever comes to your mind.”
I rolled my eyes unnecessarily, took a large, frustrated sip from the glass, let it roll around my tongue, and swallowed. I crossed my arms across my chest forcibly and, determined to show my caring manager that her attempts were useless, I did tell her exactly what came to my mind. “It tastes like elephants! It tastes like Africa, and elephants, and sausages, and a really, really stale Hershey’s kiss.”
I could feel my eyes start to burn and my nose itch as Victoria stared at the top of my bowed, defeated head. “Really?” she asked. I nodded, mortified at the seemingly mocking grin on her angelic face.
“Huh,” she said, pulling out the bottle again and staring at the back of it. “In a way, I think that’s right.”
She looked up at me again with a triumph in her eyes, as I felt my face stop tingling abruptly.
“Can you elaborate? How does it taste like elephants, sausages, and old Hershey’s kisses?”
Stunned, I took another sip, this time with a much more open mind. No one had ever asked me to elaborate before. “Well, for Africa and elephants I think I just mean it tastes musty, kind of dirty, dry, and gray. And it tastes like sausages because it reminds me of those Lil’ Smokies that go in pigs in a blanket. As for the Hershey’s kiss, I mean, it tastes like chocolate, but kind of mealy or bitter, like the kind you find in your room and eat before realizing it’s from three Halloweens ago.”
Victoria’s lips curled up into a warm smile as she handed me the bottle. It was a pinotage from South Africa. I rotated the label in my suddenly limp arms and read the description. A versatile, medium-bodied red from South Africa, this wine sports top-notes of smoked berries, with hints of must and a bitter-chocolate finish.
I felt suddenly alert and full of adrenaline. My taste-buds were dancing on my tongue, I felt them buzzing, doing back-flips, practicing their trapeze stunts, victorious, I told you so, I told you so, I told you so! Give us more, put us back to work, LOOK WHAT WE CAN DO! Their merriment was making my head swim, but Victoria was talking again, so I struggled to ignore my epiphany and hear what she was telling me.
“…problem is converting what you taste into simpler images that guests can relate to.” She handed me a wine book with a page of vocabulary dog-eared, like a grandmother would hand her granddaughter a crumbling photo album. This contains my life and all of its passions. Read it, respect it, and use its knowledge wisely.
She gave me homework. I had to take home an ounce or two of four of our wines-by-the-glass to taste and describe in my own words, and then try to convert my descriptions into winespeak, via the book.
That night, and through subsequent lessons with Victoria, I was able to deconstruct my palate’s involuntary free-associations. I learned that when I thought I tasted gerbils, what I really tasted was the cedar barrels the wine was aged in, or, the cedar wood chips that we put in our gerbil’s cage when I was a kid. “Purple flowers and Christmas” became “hints of lavender, pine, clove, and cinnamon,” while “hotel breakfast” revealed itself as “a chardonnay with toasty notes, prevalent apricot flavor, and a buttery finish” – the Days Inn English muffins that I used to covet on vacations. I realized that when a wine made me picture a car-ride home from a restaurant with my family, I was tasting the peppermint that I always grabbed at the cashier station. When I tasted quarters, it meant the wine was aged in steel instead of wood. A Nero D’Avola that tasted like “mushroom pizza with raisins,” became “an earthy wine, with essence of stewed tomatoes and cooked fruit,” while in my memories, the phrase “freakishly imaginative tongue,” became “acute sense of taste.”
Once able to distinguish flavors with ease, the rest of the learning process was simple. I soon learned to pick out what I tasted from what I smelled, and added a few more fancy words to my repertoire, like “effervescent” for “slightly bubbly” and “quince” for “apple.” I began to pick up glasses of wine with more confidence, with a tighter grip on its collar, and give the clear, silent demand as I swirled it: “SPEAK!” And it does speak now, in actual sentences, and now that I’ve gotten to know its language, in a very attractive voice. Every glass of wine whispers sweet nothings in my ears, telling me it’s type, region, aging process, what the weather was like just before it was picked, and what other plants it neighbored. The process is uncanny, sometimes creepily accurate, and was an illicitly premature gift that collected clicks of the tongue among strictly law-abiding citizens before I turned twenty-one.
But being reunited with my taste buds is comforting and liberating. In college I’ve had to learn to when and how to subdue them (a little scalding hot tea before Buffalo Mash night usually does the trick) but I’ve found a use for my precocious little papillae here, too — “That one’s Natty, that one’s Coors, that one’s PBR, and that one’s Budweiser. Pay up!”
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