I attended the "Rediscovering the Traditions of vodka" led by Steve Olsen and learned a great lesson on how to engage an audience. Throughout the whole TOTC event, Vodka was criticized, belittled, vilified, marginalized and ultimately disrespected. It's like the old Yogi Berra line..."nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."
But with 28% share of the total US spirits market, Steve eloquently made his points that it warrants respect and consideration and can't and shouldn't be ignored. He went on to walk us through a product tasting that was more about sensing the vodka as opposed to tasting it. Darcy O'Neil made the point in the sensory perception session that if you analyze vodka chemically, there aren't any flavor compounds in there... no citrus, no wheat, no potato and certainly no tobacco, peanuts or any other contrived descriptors. What there are however are components that might trigger a flavor memory or association. And that's what we're really sensing, e.g. not citrus per se, but a compound similar to citric acid that sparks an association in your mind.
Steve demonstrated a tasting protocol where you can separate the liquid flavor components from the aromatics. By coating the oral cavity with the vodka, then closing your mouth and breathing out your nose, you can segment the feel of the alcohol from the smell of the volatile compounds. Then breathe in only through your mouth to gauge the quality of the alcohol...it should feel cool like menthol or eucalyptus, not harsh or burning. He went on to demonstrate the difference between a number of brands and show how they not only differed, but had specific characteristics that would make a given vodka the preferable spirit for a given cocktail.
At the end of the session, he had turned a roomful of skeptics into advocates.
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Tuesday, July 22, 2008
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2 comments:
Sounds like it was an interesting session. I'm thinking I need to start paying more attention to how other people taste things and less attention to how I taste. Maybe there is something in this vodka thing after all. . . I don't get it personally, but maybe the people that do seem to get it are influenced by more than just marketing.
Two items of interest re: this thread. 1) We've developed a tasting protocol for vodka that sort of separates some of the magic from the science in tasting. Some key factors in even a well intented tasting session can dramatically influence what and how we taste: shape of glass, head space, temperature, dilution with water, type of water for dilution (tap or distilled, and using watch glass or similar cover to alcohol volatility between samples.
And 2) there was a good article in a recent issue of Scientific American that my wife found that takes Darcy's presentation one step further. I'll post a link on that tomorrow.
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