Volatile Phenolics and Malolactic Conversion

Taste is mainly made up of smell and smell is a mystery. I believe that some of the stretched adjectives used to describe a wine's flavors come from this essential mysterious core. There are really two mysteries here; the mystery of smell itself and the mystery of wine. I am always reminded of Richard Olney's quote from his autobiography, "Reflexions": "Words cannot touch the soul of a wine." It's true, but people continue to try, some humbly some not so humbly. The barrage of the wine lexicon speak can become very annoying and sometimes gets in the way of enjoying the wine in your glass.

"These are descriptions of, respectively, a chocolate, an olive oil, and a perfume, but you couldn’t possibly guess that. I’ve never caught traces of red fruit in a dark chocolate, I don’t even know what neroli is, and, as for underripe bananas in olive oil, I’m more likely to catch the Sundance Kid in Bolivia. That doesn’t mean that the people who can taste these things are bluffing; rather, they have a vocabulary of specific sense references that I haven’t acquired. (To complicate matters, sometimes these people actually are bluffing.)"