ScotchTalk Vol. 4: "Taste"

Taste is a strange sense, and perhaps the most subjective.

Most people can agree on the scent of an apple, or perfume, or the ocean when they encounter it blindfolded. Most people can differentiate touch between soft and hard, knobby and smooth, etc., to a very surprisingly minute degree. Most people can detect almost infinitely small gradients of color, and generally agree what is pleasing to observe and what isn't (within reasonable limits). 


But few things divide people more rapidly than what tastes good. Durian - that laudable emperor of fruit - is reviled by many for its pungent corpse-like scent that infiltrates the sweet melon-like flesh, yet beloved by others for the selfsame trait. Some cannot stand sweet things, others live and die for chocolate. Even within one small section people diverge wildly - some cannot stand dark chocolate, others can only abide milk chocolate of the creamiest sort. Some hate milk, others hate beer, still others detest (dare I say it...?) Scotch. 

Part of this seems to be biology - each individual has a different proportion of taste buds, each cordoned off into sweet, sour, bitter, sweet, "umami" (aged cheese, meat broth, according to this site). And taste buds aren't limited to the tongue - they exist throughout your mouth and throat. Although it seems like the theory of discrete "regions" of your tongue, as they taught when I was in grade school, has been pretty much exploded. 

It's also true that your taste buds evolve as you age. Some sites I read suggested this was due to brain chemistry, others said it was because your taste buds regenerated more slowly as you get older. Maybe it's both together. Additionally, the second link there states that genetics play a part - some people are simply born with more taste buds and therefore taste more flavors within any given food or drink. This has led to people being described alternately as supertasters or subtasters. 

I repeat all of this while considering the strange arcane art of tasting Scotch. I have never, never seen such difference of opinion as in websites where people do Scotch tastings and try to delineate the individual flavors (like I myself do on this blog). 

A single whisky, from the same batch, can seemingly inspire both "lightly smoky, caramel, banana, apple" and "smoke really builds here, some fragrant tandoori chicken, roasted cherry pits." Some people detect glue where others detect peaches. Some people taste sherry fruit where others get none. The taste constellation is enormous, and no alcohol has a wider flavor profile than single malt Scotch - sweet, smoky, bitter, fruity, acrid, meaty, mossy, briny, mineral, salty, thick, thin, cinnamon, cereal, all are possible in every conceivable combination. 

That makes writing a whisky blog a particularly dicey proposition. One man's finely aged sherried peated dram is another's swillish drain cleaner, fit only for stripping paint from the walls. 

On the flip side, it's therefore also intriguing when everybody more or less agrees on a flavor profile - when there aren't significant disputes, despite so many mouths coming to the same table. Usually the bolder, peatier whiskies are this way - few people if any would call Laphroaig "mild" or "moderate" in the way it assails the palate. The dimensions of Ardbeg 10 Year are fairly uniform and commonly agreed upon, et al. It's the lighter, more subtle whiskies that generate a lot more dissent.

To conclude, I sample from the tasting notes on Balvenie's 14 Year Caribbean Cask at whiskybase.com, where we hear of the following distinct and disparate flavors: 

"coconut milk" 
"honey" 
"apple and summer rain" 
"milk chocolate" 
"candle wax" 
"butterscotch" 
"touch of orange" 
"passionfruit and kiwi" 
"nutmeg and tobacco" 
"banana, cherries, pineapple" 
"rum cake" 
"caramel" 
"maple syrup" 
"lightly roasted nuts" 
"spicy"

Whether all of these are present I cannot know, since every palate is clearly a universe unto itself, especially in the realm of Scotch whisky - where creativity and powers of expression appear to be as important as the number of your taste buds when it comes to your ability to distinguish peach pits from cherry pits, smoked palm fronds from toasted coconut husks, Orkney peat from Skye peat from Islay peat and so on. 

In this spirit I hereby invite any reader - every reader! - to happily submit their own tastings for any whisky I've reviewed, or submit a guest review for any bottle that I've yet to crack open. Help me widen the rich, flavorful world of Scotch, one adjective at a time.