05/16/06 Tastebuds

Welcome to Vine to Wine this is your host Linda Moran and today we are continuing our series of explaining how we taste wine and accurately using terms to describe it. Scientists tell us that we recognize four basic tastes; sweet, sour, bitter and salt. The surface of our tongue is covered with about 50,000 of these tiny little sensors that we call taste buds. The taste buds are specialized so that some of them are sensitive to sugar others salt or bitter or sour. Some say, their sensitivities are also localized, rather than being evenly spread out across the tongue and mixed up with each other. It is maintained that they are grouped together according to what they react to. For example, the taste buds that react to sugar are on the tip of the tongue and the ones for bitter are in the way back and you usually recognize them as you are swallowing. So it's important to develop a technique of moving the wine across the surface of your tongue so that you experience all of the flavors. If you experience only a bitter aftertaste it just might be because you didn't move the wine around at the front of your mouth. Now just one important note  please don't confuse the puckering astringent feeling in your mouth for taste  it's not taste - it's a tactile sensation mostly in red wine in which the tannins of the wine cause a drying sensation in your mouth. So that's the reason you might want to consider moving their wine around all over your mouth and getting a better idea if that wine is really bitter or acidic or sweet. Remember to send your wine questions to Linda at vine to wine dot net and thanks for joining me on today's Vine to Wine.