sensory evaluation is the sum of the actions taken to understand a food or beverage in all its organoleptic complexity. While chemical analyses such as gas chromatography can generate a great deal of data about a specific spirit, sensory evaluation still provides a great deal of information otherwise unobtainable, particularly about how a spirit may be received by its consumers—about its quality, in other words. “Tasting” is a shortened description of this activity, but more than mere tasting is involved.
A thorough sensory evaluation includes distinct phases. Sight, smell, and taste are the primary senses used for a full sensory evaluation, but the proprioceptors required for texture analysis as well as hot and cold receptors on the lips and in the mouth and throat come into play. Touch is used even if it is less obviously deployed. Highly sensitive individuals describe the sounds of some foods as painful, irritating, or enjoyable.
hue/color. These can be clues to the spirit’s maturity as well as to the presence of added ingredients such as sugar, caramel, or glycerin.Next, evaluators smell the spirit. There is no single aroma for any spirit, no matter how simple it might be. Alcohol beverages contain hundreds, sometimes thousands, of aromatic compounds. A thoughtful evaluation requires useful glassware (shapes and sizes vary according to the taster’s preference and often according to the spirit itself) and a patient evaluator. Aromas can seem to change (or differing aromas present themselves) as the evaluator moves his or her nose around the top and opening of the glass. See aroma.
Third, tasting a spirit allows for an evaluation of many aspects of the spirit: again, texture is potentially separate from the accepted primary flavors of sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and umami. Each of these has its own specific receptors in the mouth, throat, and even the stomach (some believe that there are in fact intestinal receptors as well).
Temperature receptors indicate heat or cold, but compounds such as capsaicin can mimic heat, while menthol and even mint can stimulate cold receptors. See texture and mouthfeel.
Humans are primarily “retro-nasal” smellers (that is, we collect aromatic compounds most readily in the backs of our mouths, throats, and nasal passages) rather than ortho-nasal smellers (as are dogs). Most, therefore, “taste” a great deal more flavors in the mouth than they are able to sense merely by sniffing the spirit in the glass. But like all such matters, everyone is different.
A proper sensory evaluation requires patience throughout, particularly as some spirits continue to generate flavor after the spirit has been swallowed. Many factors are at play, chief among them the fact that enzymes in saliva have begun to catalyze, break down, or otherwise alter the spirit’s compounds. Time, especially for very complex spirits, often offers great rewards.
Beauchamp, Gary, and Linda Bartoshuk. Tasting and Smelling. Cambridge: Academic Press, 1997.
Wolfe, Jeremy, Keith Kluender, and Dennis Levi. Sensation and Perception. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2011.
By: Doug Frost