Extra Curricular

So one of our tutors is doing a trial on how people identify and scale various flavour and aroma compounds. I signed up and so far we've had two weeks of trials, and I'm finding it really interesting!

 

Our tutor gets a bottle of wine, and then adds a chemical to it, then gets another bottle of the same wine and adds the same chemical to it but in a smaller or larger amount. Our task is to decide which chemical is added and whether its in a high or low concentration. The results are quite varied...

 

I generally do reasonably well in blind tastings, I'm no Robert Parker Jr, but I do okay. After the first two trials I seem to be doing better than I thought I'd be doing. Both times I convince myself that I've done poorly, but my results are usually pretty spot on... so far!

 

And don't worry, the chemicals that we're trying to assess aren't things like Hydrogen Peroxide or other dumb things (although I did accidently drink some H2S - don't do this!), they're chemicals that we normally find in wine anyway (isoamyl acetate - pear/banana flavours, diacetyl - butterscotch etc etc). I think the aim is to eventually give us wines with no added chemicals, so we can assess them for levels of various chemicals. I suspect we are contributing towards research for a certain flavour/aroma company, but it's all good extra curricular stuff.