I received an interesting question by e-mail the other day that prompted some interesting thoughts, and with the permission of the person who sent it to me, I’m going to reprint it here, and do my best to answer it, as well as hope that my readers may have additional things to say.

Subject: An Asian palate?

Hi Alder,

I am a sommelier and work as a wine educator in Italy. I am European and usually have American or European guests for my wine tastings. I do know a thing or two about the differences in the palates of these two very different groups and since I have lived in the States for some time, I can really relate to and help my guests in almost every situation, and with almost any aroma. A couple of days ago, for the first time, I had 2 Malaysian guests. And for the first time, I couldn’t communicate with them at all. Their not so good English was definitely part of the problem, but underlying was the complete difference of palates and knowledge/socialization of/with aromas (fruits, vegetables etc as we know it didn’t ring a bell with them). These two became the first guests who left my tastings with some more theoretical knowledge but no tasting insight whatsoever.

Till that evening I was not aware of any possible problem in this direction. Since then I have been searching for any kind of information about the Asian palate and wine tasting experiences with them. With meek results. I thought I could ask you, as you have such expanse knowledge and experience. I am surely not awaiting any in-depth information from you, but maybe some pointers as to where I might go looking for such information. I would be very grateful if anything comes to your mind.

Thank you so much for time,

Hande Leimer

Your question immediately made me think about a notion that I have carried with me in my head ever since someone (and I’m sad to say, I’ve forgotten who it was by now) mentioned to me that we might each have our own personal terroir — a sense of taste produced by the sum total of our experiences. The idea that we each taste things a little differently both as a product of our genetics but also because of factors in our upbringing (ethnic foods or ingredients, local fruits, family dishes, even the pH and mineral content of the water in our hometowns) seems unavoidably true at some level. Just how detailed and influential these differences are I have no idea.

Certainly such differences are obvious in the context of completely different ethnic and geographical cuisines. To use a crude example, the first taste of a hamburger will be very different for an American teen who grew up in Nebraska, one who grew up in a small village in Indonesia, and one who grew up in Somalia, because its flavor will be interpreted in the context of that person’s experience. And whether that burger tastes “good” or not will be based as much on the habitual sensitization to flavors that the individuals culture has produced as it will be on the “actual flavors” of the burger.

This seems to be part of what you were facing with these Malaysian guests. I don’t know that this means that there is an “Asian palate” — Asia is a huge place after all, and the staggering culinary diversity across the continent would seem to suggest that, for instance, a Bengali, a Cambodian, and a Japanese person might have very different palates based on their local cuisine and ingredients.

Most certainly anyone who has never tasted a raspberry would certainly not identify, or understand when told it is present, the raspberry aroma in a particular Pinot Noir. That isn’t to say they aren’t tasting that particular flavor, however… or is it?

Your question cuts deep into the notion of perception. Without rehashing arguments about perception, consciousness, and reality that have swirled here at Vinography before, suffice it to say that I believe that we interpret the world, and indeed experience the world through language. That which we do not have language for, we are not capable of consciously perceiving (though clearly there are things that we perceive below the level of conscious thought).

So someone who has never tasted a raspberry will not only fail to “taste” the raspberry in Pinot Noir, they will also not understand you when you suggest that is what they might be tasting, which is what I gather occurred with your two Malaysian guests. You and these guests had no shared language for describing the flavor and aroma sensations of wine, and therefore couldn’t really communicate all that well.

As an aside, your experience clearly points out how the world of wine is centered around a Western European sensibility and vocabulary. Of course, the reason for this is no deeper than the fact that this region has been the dominant wine growing region of the world for the majority of the modern era (at least in terms of volume and renown). As wine continues to expand in appeal globally, the Westernized discourse on wine will either be adopted or adapted or some mixture of both. What sense does it make to describe the flavors of Pinot Noir in terms of raspberries for a billion people who never have eaten one in their life?

The answer is: none at all, mostly because Pinot Noir doesn’t really taste like raspberries. It tastes like some combination of molecules that fit into several chemical receptors in our mouths and nasal cavities that also happened to be triggered by those cute little fuzzy red things that you and I call raspberries. The only reason we think Pinot Noir tastes like raspberries is because that’s the closest approximation we have in our experience, and more importantly, in language to describe that flavor.

But, it may be that Pinot Noir really tastes more like goji berries (super delicious little things that I only had my first taste of recently) than raspberries, and the only reason that we don’t know that is because no one who ever wrote authoritatively on the sensory evaluation of wine had ever tasted one!

So where does that leave you? Certainly not with any definitive answers. But here’s what I would say. To a Malay that has never tasted raspberries or cherries or sniffed a pine tree or cold cream or any of the other Western flavors and aromas that we use to describe wine, the wine you poured most certainly will not taste like them.

But it does taste of something to them. And in your position, I would almost certainly suggest turning the tables and learning from them! Of course, they may have come to your restaurant hoping to learn about wine from you, and you can certainly teach them about specific wine producers and an individual wine. But when it comes to how the wine tastes, they’re the authority, because they have it in their mouths. I’d look at such experiences as opportunities to hear what their interpretations are of flavor. Maybe they’ll tell you that the Malvasia you just poured them smells exactly like a flower that is commonly used in bridal wreaths in their country. How cool would that be? And maybe they’ll tell you that while they don’t savvy raspberry, that Pinot Noir tastes a bit like over-ripe dragonfruit.

Of course, learning to put words to flavors and aromas is difficult, and takes practice. For months when we first started dating, all my wife would say when asked to describe the aromas of wine was “white grapes” or “red grapes.” But now she’s got a killer palate.

So your guests, Asian or not, and especially if they are wine novices, may be somewhat tongue tied (independent of any basic language barriers). So the best you may be able to do is to encourage them to keep trying to describe for themselves what they are tasting and smelling, to not worry about “getting it right,” and above all explore until they find things that they think taste good to them. Which is really the best possible job description for a sommelier that I can think of.

Good luck.

Oh, and one final thought. As a wine professional I recommend that you personally be always expanding your personal understanding of flavor and aroma by tasting and eating everything under the sun. If you can’t make it to Asia, then get to your closest Chinatown or other Asian neighborhood and visit some markets to buy all the strange fruits that you’ve never had and taste them! It’s fun and educational and might give you some taste vocabulary to try out the next time you’re tasting with folks who are more likely to have had a papaya than a pear.

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Very young for a Reserva and still quite “primary,” it will reward years of cellar time. Still, it’s enjoyable now.

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We’re looking at the wines of Rioja - primarily the region’s trademark reds but also its less-familiar whites, in this month’s Wine Focus.

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There are a lot of things that I would like to change about wine in America. I’d love to lower the prices, reduce the influence of scores on buying patterns, increase consumption, broaden the varietal mix, and on and on. I’ve got a long list the next time any omnipotent being comes along and asks my opinion on the situation.

But if I had to choose one thing, above all else, that really needs changing when it comes to America and wine, I would choose to destroy the association between wine and the upper class. The fact that wine continues to be thought of as the beverage of the elite does more damage to the future of the industry in this country than any other phenomenon, in my opinion.

America, it must be said, did not get off on the right foot when it comes to wine. The religious zealots that founded this country were notorious teetotalers, of course. But those who followed the Puritans were Europeans of all stripes and colors, and most had a common familiarity with and appreciation for wine. Indeed, on the face of things, America could very easily have inherited their cultural predisposition for wine on the dinner table.

But it didn’t for one primary reason. No one could get the damn grapes to grow right. Attempts were made for years with both imported vines as well as the many various native vines that got the early colonists so excited when they arrived. For a while, America was thought to have the potential to build a wine industry that would flourish by exporting wine back to continental Europe.

But even with the help of the many Huguenots and other wine savvy folks who arrived on American shores with no shortage of expertise in viticulture, very little progress was made. The climate was just all wrong.

Which meant that any real quantity of wine had to be imported, and that meant money, and therefore ensured that for the most part, the upper classes had the means to drink wine, and the masses made do with the products of the bountiful grains and apples that flourished here. In short, most everyone drank a lot of beer, cider, bourbon, and whisky, while the Thomas Jeffersons, Ben Franklins, and other early statesmen of America nursed their imported collections and did their best to encourage local efforts to make wine, but to no avail.

And so, if you’ll forgive me squeezing and reducing a lot of complex history into a few sound bites, after about 200 years of this sort of social division, it’s no wonder that, for the most part things just stayed that way. The industrial revolution widened the gap between rich and poor, engineering an even greater difference between the consumption habits of the upper classes and the lower classes. There were upswings of interest in wine, especially when people actually started to figure out how and where to grow grapes properly, but by then it was too late. Prohibition (and the rapid recovery of beer and whisky production upon repeal) put the nail in the coffin, and set the stage for people like Robert Mondavi to come along and make the valiant effort to remind everyday Americans that wine belongs on the dinner table every day. And they’re still trying.

Meanwhile, wine to many people represents the intimidating, elitist, and snobbish rich. Sarah Palin’s quips during the recent campaign about the wine and cocktail drinking elite perfectly illustrate the way that many people think about wine. So too do the many comments on a recent New York Times blog about the words that are used to describe wine. I can’t tell you how sad it makes me to see how many people think that attempting to describe the flavors and aromas of wine is an exercise in pretension and snobbery.

But it gets even worse. It’s bad enough that the average beer loving American (whoever that is) at best thinks that wine is really just for special occasions, and at worst believes that the people who drink it are rich, stuck-up, pedants. But unfortunately, a lot of wine lovers actually act that way.

In many ways the culture of wine appreciation in America encourages this sense that wine is a luxury for the knowledgeable few. We have the specialized stores. The pomp, ceremony, and mystery that surround wine in conjunction with fine dining. The astronomical prices of top wines in the market. And of course, we have the Big Boys. You know the ones I’m talking about, right? The wine assholes.

Men who feel like they own the province of wine are just the start of our problems. Worse are the ones who also like to reel off the great wines of the world they have drunk with the same gusto as they might bedroom conquests. These are the ones that recoil in horror at the thought of sharing a bottle of 1989 Lafite with their “know-nothing cousins from Des Moines” and instead prefer to save their best bottles for wine dinners that attempt to be the oenological equivalents of an evening with Annabel Chong.

But as much as I sometimes want to punch some of these people in the mouth, I don’t see the wine snob as a clear perpetrator of the problem. They’re just as much another symptom of the basic travesty — that somehow we’ve gotten to the point where wine is far too special. And just as with anything that has cachet, wine in America has become something that many Americans think is only for certain kinds of people. Those wine people.

Of course, this rant of mine paints a rather stark, divided world, which belies the true reality of the marketplace. America is not just a collection of beer drinkers vs. wine drinkers any more than it is a collection of red states vs. blue states. And the country is slowly coming around to wine, thanks to many different factors, not the least of which are the backlash against carbohydrates and the media hype about resveratrol.

But we’ve got a long way to go to get to an American wine scene that I’ll be satisfied with. There are a lot of myths to shatter, a lot of attitudes to adjust, and a lot of evil distribution monopolies to crush before Americans get used to having good wine on their tables every day. But perhaps most importantly, there’s a lot of wine that needs to be shared among friends — a lot of wine that needs to be enjoyed without the trappings of ceremony or status, but instead with the simple appreciation for the fact that we are all so very lucky for what we have.

Go forth and drink without fear, and spread the wine love.

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When people often ask me how I “got into wine” I have a sense that they are expecting me to relate some story of a revelatory mouthful — that one wine which struck me like a lightning bolt and sent me down the path to become the wine fanatic that I am today. Strangely, I possess no story like that about wine. I remember merely a pastiche of many special and prosaic moments with wine that have gradually led to me to the depths of my current passion.

I do, however, have a story like that about how I fell in love with sake.

It was the year 2000, and I was a Director of User Experience at Sapient Corporation, and I was asked whether I would be interested in going to Japan to help the company open an office there. Single at the time, with no pets or other obligations, I excitedly said that I would at least go on the initial exploratory trip, and would make my decision based on that experience.

The company planned to make its introduction to the market with the help of a partner firm, a relatively upstart organization that happened to be headed by several of the former top executives of BCG Japan. Our second night in the country, they took us out to what, at the time, was the best sushi I had ever eaten in my life in a private sushi club in Tokyo’s Roppongi district. I knew that my job description that evening was going to involve the consumption of a lot of alcohol, but I didn’t much care for beer. So when it was offered, I asked politely if I might drink sake instead. The CEO of our partner firm barked at the chef behind the sushi counter, and that’s when it happened.

In my memory, the lights dim a little bit around the restaurant so that the sushi chef is bathed in the sole splash of bright light. He places a beautiful small wineglass on the counter, its bowl foggy with the chill of the freezer he has just taken it from. Then he turns slowly and reaches down below the counter to emerge with a huge brown bottle in his arms, its striking handmade paper label brushed with a stroke that resembles a huge number “2.” My glass is poured and placed in front of me, shimmering and cool. And my first sip is like drinking a pristine glacial lake under a full moon.

I had the presence of mind to keep my initial outburst to something along the lines of “Wow, this is really good.” But what I really meant was “Holy fucking shit, THIS IS SAKE?!?”

In that moment, I knew that I wanted to drink fine chilled sake for the rest of my life. I wanted to try as much as possible, as many different kinds as possible, and as often as I possibly could.

And that was my introduction to the sake known as Kubota Manju.

To put this in terms that might make more sense to wine lovers, here’s an analogy: until that point I had been drinking sparkling wine from a box (heated up in the microwave, I might add) and then someone poured me my first glass of properly chilled Krug Champagne.

Kubota Manju is produced by a brewery known as Asahi Shuzo in the Niigata prefecture of western Japan, and it may well be the most well known fine sake in the world. Asahi Shuzo was founded in 1830 and is the largest producer in Niigata prefecture, and therefore one of the largest producers in all of Japan. Just as the massive Champagne houses who manage to strike a fine balance between making huge quantities of product at a very high quality, elevated further by a globally recognized brand, so too has Asahi Shuzo managed to turn Kubota into the Cristal of sake. The brand of the drink has eclipsed the people who have made it.

Kubota is a trade name — one of the very first successful “brands” of fine sake on the market. The sake was originally named Asahiyama, and was finally branded Kubota in 1985, taking the nickname that the brewery had enjoyed. The Kubota line of sakes, and Kubota Manju in particular, gained massive popularity in the 1980s as Japan rekindled (some would say created) its appreciation for fine sake, partially due to simply good timing and savvy marketing, but also no doubt because of its extremely high quality and taste.

Asahi Shuzo was one of the pioneers of the fine sake movement (which has only really been around for about 50 years, and successful for 30), and in particular was one of the first to use stainless steel tanks for making sake. The use of steel in sake making has a similar effect to the use of steel in winemaking. It is more hygienic, leading to lower numbers of outside or unwanted bacteria during the fermentation process, and tends to accentuate the fruit. Or in the case of sake, the floral qualities of the rice.

Kubota Manju is an unusual sake in several respects, independent of its popularity or quality. It carries no formal designation of its level of quality, which is why I’ve had to note the fact that it is actually a junmai daiginjo sake parenthetically above. For those of you who aren’t familiar with sake designations, this means that it is made from rice that has been polished down to at least 50% of its former mass, and includes no added alcohol in the brewing process. Not content to stop just past the 50% mark, Kubota Manju is usually made from rice polished down to about 33% of its former mass.

Instead of such quality designations, the Kubota line of sakes are simply given numbers, if you will to correspond to their quality. The “ju” in the name roughly translates to “celebrations” or “congratulations” (though some snidely suggest it might mean “ostentatious”) and the other character is a number. Kubota Manju means roughly “10,000 celebrations.” The two lower grades of Kubota are known as Senju (1000) and Hyakuju (100), respectively. There are also two or three other, even higher, grades of sake made with the Kubota name every year, as well.

There is a reason that this is the most popular and most well known fine sake in all of Japan. It is the same reason that I couldn’t have asked for a better introduction into the world of fine, chilled sake. It is delicate, refined, and incredibly high class, in addition to being a textbook example of top class sake from an organoleptic standpoint, and definitely one of the world’s top sakes.

While in the past nine years I have discovered sakes that I like better than Kubota Manju, it will always remain one of my favorites, both for nostalgic reasons, and because it really is damn good. I buy a bottle or two to bring back with me from Japan every time I visit, which isn’t nearly often enough.

Tasting Notes:
Colorless in the glass, this sake has a nose of cedar trees and fresh rainwater, with hints of dried orange peel aromas. In the mouth it is smooth and silky, with a beautiful weight on the tongue and a perfect dry balance that allows flavors of tuberose and orange blossom to mingle with hints of cedar and wet stone that leave the palate feeling alive and refreshed. Outstanding.

Food Pairing:
I love drinking this sake with sushi and sashimi of all kinds, but in particular with the creamy goodness of raw scallops.

Overall Score: around 9.5

How Much?: $75

This sake is available for purchase on the Internet.

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Here’s my annual New Year’s report on the best - and the best values - of the wines I’ve reviewed during the past 12 months.

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