Sweet vs. Fruity

[Botafogo]

Since we sell a LOT of aromatic whites that SMELL like honey, candied fruit, tropical flowers and even fancy bath soap but are BONE DRY (and amazing with Thai, Sicilian, Indian, Persian and other highly spiced cuisines), we spend a lot of time talking about this.

One thing we have to point out is that your entire sensory system is built on pattern recognition: you can read text even if half the letters are smudged or truncated, you can recognize a solarized or profile portrait of a celebrity with no problem and you can figure out a song from a mere tease of the melody.

This is a truly wonderful expression of the heights of cognitive evolution to which we (and maybe dolphins and even cuttlefish) have reached, BUT it can also be a two edged sword: back to wine, we sell an insanely concentrated bone dry Zebbibo (a clone of moscato from the island of Pantelleria near Tunisia) that smells like orange marmelade, molasses, honeysuckle blossoms and maybe Sophia Loren after a brisk jog and, since your feeble little cerebelum is CONDITIONED to associate these aromas with jam, candy, perfume and maybe even soap, it INTERPOLATES non-existent sweetness into its sensory report to your conciousness in the same way it tells you that you are seeing actual movement at the cinema instead of 24 still pictures per second.

Our friend Terry Thiese (an amazing importer of German and Austrian wines and Grower Champagnes) often pours the SAME Kabinett style Riesling from both its own (tall, slender and green = sweet in many peoples minds) and a Burgundy bottle like your average Chardonnay come in and asks tasters "Which one do you like better and why" and over half of them prefer the erzatz Chard and pronounce it "so much drier"!!!

So, in short, just because something TASTES like super ripe tripical fruits (because it contains the same chemical compounds that tickle the same receptors in your tongue) that doesn't mean it is also sweet (full of actual sugar) any more than Kenny G playing a soprano saxaphone makes his music Jazz.


Cheers and check out some Alsatian wines, Roberto

[This message has been edited by Botafogo (edited 03-20-2001).]

[This message has been edited by Botafogo (edited 03-20-2001).]