Beaune Viticultural School: Learning to Taste Wine
Episode 2 in a series about how future winemakers are trained in Burgundy.
This is the second article of a series. The first, which concerns pruning, can be found here.
“People are so absorbed by aesthetics, by the nose and the palate. We don’t go into the foundations of wine, because we’re dazzled by aesthetics.” - Champagne vigneron Bertrand Gautherot, of Vouette & Sorbée
Practical Works
In the distance-learning BPREA program of the Beaune Viticultural School, training in vineyard pruning is wedged into the same week as an introductory wine tasting course, under the rubric of Travaux Pratiques, or “practical works.” The title may have been someone’s idea of irony. Whatever the cause, I found myself spending fully half my first week at the Beaune Viticultural School engaged in remedial wine tasting exercises of the sort I associate with package holidays and office team-building events.
It was, technically, a new experience for me. (I was never drawn towards formal education in wine tasting.) But the content of the course was not unfamiliar. If you have read basic books on wine tasting, or even browsed Wikipedia at length, you’ve heard of aroma kits: boxes full of little vials purporting to represent aromas commonly found in wine. I had just never experienced firsthand quite how lame and fallacious these devices are.
Along with fourteen other BPREA candidates that week, I spent the better part of a morning and early afternoon in a Wine Tasting Laboratory twiddling about with an aroma kit. It was administered by an unctuous young sommelier with a reedy voice who supplemented his income working for the tasting room of a conventional Burgundy estate by selling his services as a guest lecturer to the Beaune Viticultural School.
Why, I wondered, had the school arranged for future winemakers to learn how to taste wine from a sommelier? Wasn’t that sort of like arranging for architects to learn their craft from a real estate agent?
Monsieur Le Sommelier had us all sniff the vials one by one and note our impressions of the contents. It was snowing, so we couldn’t open the windows. In accordance with COVID containment guidelines, the sommelier swabbed every vial with an antibacterial baby wipe in between each use, which the result that all the vials smelled strongly of antibacterial baby wipe.
At the end of the exercise - when we’d all gone through something like 20-30 different vials - the sommelier polled each student before pronouncing the “correct” answer of the aroma contained within each vial.
Rarely did the aroma I perceived (beyond baby wipe) correspond with what the vial was meant to evoke. My only comfort was that every other student was almost as incorrect as I was. Vial number 35, say, would be guessed, by successive students, to contain the aroma of chocolate, truffle, raspberry, peach, and asparagus. Only once was an aroma identified as what it was meant to be by anything approaching a majority of the class: lemon scent.
This seems notable because it highlights the key fallacy underpinning aroma kits. Their vials do not contain actual lemon, actual chocolate, or actual rose. They contain synthesized scent compounds intended to evoke those things. If we are less apt at correctly identifying vials intended to evoke asparagus, it is because who on earth encounters artificial asparagus scents in real life? Whereas artificial lemon creeps into everyone’s life, in air-fresheners, soaps, and, yes, baby wipes. The simulacrum of lemon is widely recognized. I suspect long experience with aroma kits would endow a users with a consensus on the simulacra of various aromas.
Wine, too, offers only the simulacra of aromas. But the simulacra of aromas found in wine are specific to their medium: wine. Not even grossly confected conventional wines ever smell like roses in the way shampoo can smell like roses. If we say a wine smells like roses, we are eliding a suffix: the wine actually smells like roses-as-they-are-perceived-in-wine. I’d go so far as to say that real wines should never, ever smell like anything found in an aroma kit.
A morning well-spent, then. I returned to my apartment during lunch break to eat a small quiche lorraine. I noticed, as I ate, that the walk through the snow had done nothing to dispel the artificial, mixed-aromatic funk that had impregnated my clothes during the enclosed session with the aroma kit.
Primary School
The afternoon’s lesson began with the young sommelier offering definitions of primary, secondary, and tertiary aromas. These terms, it turns out, have evolved since mid-century. I spent a lot of time with them in the course of translating the Beaujolais wine scientist Jules Chauvet’s essay collection The Aesthetics of Wine. Chauvet, in his 1950 address “The Aromas of Fine Wine,” defines primary aromas as those of fermentation; secondary aromas as those of élevage; and tertiary aromas as those of extended bottle aging.
Monsieur Le Sommelier offered the contemporary conceptions of these terms, under which primary aromas are thought to be specific to the unfermented grape itself; secondary aromas to be those of fermentation; and tertiary aromas to be those associated with all aging, whether in cellar or in bottle.
I don’t know how to explain the evolution of these terms, except as a gross simplification of wine knowledge for the sake of its mass commodification.
The contemporary conception of primary aromas, for example, is almost nonsense, for the varietal character of most grapes is expressed in only the most limited, negligible ways before fermentation. (I would very much like to witness a roomful of sommeliers try to determine the varietal primary aromas of a series of grape bunches.) Fermentation aromas, by contrast, are indeed as common and as broad as Chauvet indicates when he terms them primary.
It didn’t seem worth confronting this slightly nebulous lexicographical issue in class that day. I kept quiet, preferring to keep the counsel of Chauvet over that of contemporary sommellerie when it comes to the aromas of wine.
Coconuts
Unfortunately, it soon became clear that, outside the question-answer format of his aroma kit, the young sommelier leading the lesson was on very shaky ground. He started saying truly strange, risible things. I would have felt complicit had I just sat there in silence letting pseudo-knowledge wash over us.
“The concept of umami,” he declared, in the course of a discussion of flavors, “is mostly used in talking about sushi. When we talk about umami we’re almost always talking about sushi.”
I raised my hand and countered that this was not at all true. In fact, it was a really weird statement. Not all Japanese cuisine is sushi. Sushi is in fact quite unrepresentative of what Japanese people eat on a daily basis. Umami, meanwhile, appears often in Japanese cuisine, and far beyond, in preparations involving anchovy, for example… The sommelier backtracked, but insisted that, for the purposes of wine tasting, umami was mainly related to sushi.
“You know how to tell the difference between American oak and French oak?” he later challenged us, brimming with confidence, about to drop some science on our heads. “Coconut. If you’re tasting a wine and you don’t know where it’s from, if you taste coconut, it must be an American wine.”
This was news to me. (Incidentally, I’d recently had a far more useful conversation about coconut flavors with Christian Knott, winemaker at Domaine Chandon de Briailles and Domaine Dandelion, who identified such flavors with older Burgundy barrels of middling provenance. It’s often striking in Prieuré Roch’s Ladoix.)
“Can anyone name any wine faults?” the sommelier later asked the class.
“Acetates,” suggested a student from Savoie.
“Uh, I’m not sure about that term,” the sommelier replied, temporizing until another student volunteered a fault he had heard of.
The Languedoc
Later, during a discussion of brettanomyces, the sommelier gave the class, as an example, the wines of the Languedoc.
“For a long time, the wines of the Languedoc had brett,” he pronounced. “But they’re doing better now.”
“All the wines of the Languedoc,” I said. “Can you really say that?”
“Yes, in the 1970s and 1980s, absolutely.”
“How many 1970s and 1980s Languedoc wines have you tasted?” I asked him, aware that in that era the region produced very few wines that would have been aged until such a time as a twenty-something sommelier in today’s Burgundy might have tasted them. (Olivier Jullien of Mas Jullien, for example, widely considered a pioneer of vin de garde winemaking in the Languedoc, only began making wine in 1985.)
“I’m not as young as you think,” the sommelier huffed.
“No but seriously, which bretty Languedoc wines of the 1970s and 1980s have you tasted?”
He cited the name of an estate I’d never heard of. Intrigued, I asked him where in the Languedoc the estate was located.
“I don’t know where exactly,” he said, leading me to believe he may have simply invented the name of his supposedly historic Languedoc estate. “But it had brett!”
The class had grown uncomfortable during this exchange. It was getting on towards 3pm. A good time, said the sommelier, for a break and a breath of fresh air.
Instead of returning to the class after the break, I popped in to see the director of the BPREA program to offer her some choice quotes from the sommelier she’d hired to lead the wine tasting lesson.
“Oh la la,” she said. “It’s a good thing there were no students from the Languedoc in the class!”
Gross-Out
Day two of the Beaune Viticultural School’s course in wine tasting was administered by an older, more experienced sommelier. He had the unenviable task of teaching wine faults, not with actual flawed wines, which would have been instructive, but with suspicious preparations served from recycled bottles of mineral water and cider vinegar. It felt a little like one of those Halloween gross-out dinner parties one hears about now and then.
The preparations were intended to demonstrate flaws including oxidation, volatile acidity, excessive acidification, excessive tanninization, and excessive sulfitage. (It’s interesting to note that the practices of acidification and tanninization are normalized in this context.) The exercise suffered from the same logical flaw as aroma kits, in that it failed to illustrate how these flaws are encountered in the medium of wine. It felt marginally less pointless, though.
It helped that the older sommelier didn’t try to wow students with questionable wine knowledge. He was caught flat-footed only once, when the student from Savoie asked him about mousiness. It turned out he’d never heard of it. In his defense, this could say as much about the voguish nature of this flaw (which is far too often employed as a sort of umbrella flaw encompassing many potential traits of natural wine) as it does about the older sommelier’s familiarity with contemporary wine discourse.
The Exam
There was an exam at the end of all this, asking students to repeat back, in writing, the bits about primary, tertiary, and secondary flavors, and a few other elementary concepts. It also involved the tasting of one wine, in which students were asked to identify the flaw.
I found myself flummoxed by this, because, to my tastes, the wine possessed multiple flaws. It was over-sulfited, filtered, and had a touch of volatility. It was also overcropped and thin. Some of my fellow students suggested after the exam that it had also been corked. A mystery, for now, since the results of the exam were not returned to us with the results of the pruning exam we’d taken the same morning. It seems possible the wine tasting exam won’t ever be graded, making it a very appropriate exercise in superfluity.
The Heart of Burgundy
It’s not quite fair of me to say that my wine tasting course at the CFA Viticole de Beaune involved tasting just one wine, riddled with flaws. I had, after all, abandoned the final quarter of the first day’s lesson, during which, I’m told, the other students tasted two, no doubt splendid Bordeaux wines brought for the occasion by the young sommelier. It still feels valid to say that the wine tasting lessons were a galling waste of time.
To a room full of mostly middle-aged students sufficiently devoted to wine to have decided to embrace wine production as a second career, the CFA Viticole de Beaune offers amateur perfumery kits and preparations of cider vinegar. This occurs in the heart of Burgundy, where cellars full of actual wine overseen by actual knowledgeable vignerons are accessible within five minutes’ walk. My question for any sommelier strolling into such circumstance with a lesson plan is what on earth are you doing here?
By the end of the week, I was asking myself the same thing.
Coming soon: Learning Wine Accounting and French Rural Land Law