Understanding Modern Wine Tasting and the Geosensorial Method with Julien Camus

Abstract

The flavors and aromas of particular wines embed in our memories just as does a piece of music or the famous madeleine in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, aka Remembrance of Things Past). Many have commented on not only wine’s evocative nature but also its sensorial complexity, which requires practice and education to comprehend. As the film- and winemaker Francis Ford Coppola recently said, “Wine is like music, the more you know about it, the more you can enjoy it” (Wine News 2021). Tasting wine has even informed the discourse of philosophers and scientists. Historian of science Steven Shapin investigated wine tasting to plumb the depths of conceptual subjectivity and objectivity over time (e.g., Shapin 2012, 2016). Philosopher Barry Smith founded the Centre for the Study of the Senses at the University of London, which pioneers collaborative research on wine among philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists (University of London n.d.; Smith 2019). Wine tasting is also significant because it has commercial and economic consequences. Worldwide wine market revenues will amount to US $333.00 billion in 2023, and the market is expected to continue to grow (Statista 2023). Wine sensory analysis based on its organoleptic properties, or simply “wine tasting,” plays a hugely influential role in wine production decisions, marketing, and consumer preference. Unlike the straightforward evocativeness of the madeleine, current wine-tasting practices confuse most people, including seemingly obtuse, specialized, or incomprehensible language for wine descriptions that guide marketing, buying choices, and personal recommendations.This situation has recently gained further complexity with a bewildering range of wines with distinct flavors and aromas available in many markets. Digital apps now threaten to replace subjective wine critics’ tasting notes with a kind of group intelligence—for example, the popular Vivino.com—but point systems exemplified by Wine Spectator’s 100-point scale remain highly influential and often seem arbitrary (Drummond and Rule 2005; Smith 2019). Tamlyn Currin, who writes for Master of Wine Jancis Robinson’s website, sums up the current situation facing an increasing number of people who want to learn to communicate about wine:Entire books have been written and courses (such as the WSET [Wine and Spirit Education Trust]) have been designed to teach us how to taste and how to communicate what we taste. The format, common to most of these educational systems, is almost always rigid, prescriptive, pedantic and comes with a tacit understanding that there is a wrong and a right when it comes to tasting, understanding, experiencing, judging and communicating about wine. (Currin 2022)Indeed, enrollment in WSET classes on wine appreciation has boomed, spreading to seventy-five countries and 117,000 students as of 2021–2022 (WSET 2023). Many of us want to learn more about wine and to taste with greater precision, but find this a difficult and daunting pursuit.How wine is tasted and described also has implications for accessibility, equity, and diversity in the influential but seemingly elitist world of wine. Wine books, magazines, and study guides often use language with an exclusive, male, white, and developed Western world vocabulary, which closes the doors of wine tasting to large groups of people, including “anyone who falls outside of the paradigm of wealthy white male wine collector” (Pariseau 2021; Leary 2022). The common labels of “New World” and “Old World” wines, for example, descend from European colonization of other world regions. Not everyone knows the aromas of toasted brioche (or fresh-baked madeleines), the flavor of raspberries, or what exactly is a blackcurrant? In brief, wine education has started to change—but slowly (Leary 2022).How did this situation develop? Do other avenues exist for new kinds of wine-tasting methods that are less bewildering to most people and also more accessible, equitable, and inclusive? What follows is an interview conducted in late 2022 with entrepreneur, educator, and wine expert Julien Camus. Born in France, Camus is the founder and president of the Wine Scholar Guild (WSG), which he started in the United States to teach Americans about wine. The Guild soon built an international presence online. Formerly, Camus was the trade attaché for wine and spirits at the French Embassy in Washington, DC. He founded the Guild, which initially offered courses only on French wine, including regional appellations, but has since expanded to offer courses on Spanish and Italian wines. Thanks to the school’s virtual character and its many worldwide program providers, Camus now lives in the acclaimed wine region of Alsace, whose wines boast distinctive flavors relating to the details of their distinct vineyard origins, soils, and production techniques. He earned a university diploma in terroir and geosensorial tasting from the University of Strasbourg in 2019 and now helps teach the program there. Camus and the WSG are working on developing a new method of wine tasting. Camus’ sensibilities are in many ways particularly French, but he yearns to develop a path to wine tasting that is comprehensible to everyone. In this interview, I asked questions, and have also elaborated on Camus’ answers in order to explain the level of innovation in his new, more ecumenical vision for tasting wine.I first asked Camus to describe briefly geosensorial wine tasting, including its history. He told me, “Geosensorial tasting is a developing school of thought, in France notably, which stands in contrast to the leading ‘analytical tasting’ method as an interesting foundation but also limited and incomplete.” Camus contrasts two philosophies of and approaches to wine sensorial analysis. The predominant “analytical tasting method” descended historically from three sources: the British wine trade, which in the mid–twentieth century established standards and methods of wine sensory analysis reproduced by educational organizations like the Institute of Masters of Wine (IMW), the WSET, and the Court of Master Sommeliers (CMS), the latter targeted at wine service workers (sommeliers), and the former two targeted at wine trade managers and workers (Leary 2022: esp. chp. 1).Notably, today’s analytical tasting method appears to owe its early origins to the prominent French pomologist Jules Guyot in the nineteenth century. In 1860, Guyot established a set, step-by-step method of wine analysis using the senses: first the color and clarity, then the aroma, and finally the taste. This approach continues to dominate today. Guyot wrote: “The true connoisseur, the taster, knows well how to judge and love wine, but the knows as well that the appreciation of the sight and smell must immediately be followed by the introduction of the liquid into the mouth” (Guyot 1860). His book was widely translated into other languages. Nineteenth-century wine-tasting vocabulary, however, remained mostly limited to describing sensorial properties in the mouth, without comparison to the aromas of fruits, flowers, wet slate, brioche, and the like. There was one notable exception: a precursor to twentieth-century research. English medical doctor Robert Druitt, who became a popular wine commentator with his book Guide to Cheap Wines, wrote in 1873:The various alcohols, aldehydes, ethers, and oils combine to the result, and in many wines there are chemical elements which can be combined by art into imitations of well-known flavours—notably the butyric ether smells of pineapples. The finest bouquet I ever was conscious of was in a bottle of Rauenthaler, 1846…The grape, the peach, the strawberry, and the pineapple were all brought to mind. (Druitt 1873: 39)In the 1930s, French researchers began linking a wine’s biochemical properties to its aromas, performing wine tastings alongside chemical analyses (Jacquet 2022). The advent of France’s appellation of origin (AOC) regulations to combat fraud and enhance commerce demanded the ability to define a wine’s organoleptic qualities as they related to its place of origin. By the 1950s, influential trade groups, government researchers, and bureaucrats came to rely on the ideas of a scientist and wine trader named Jules Chauvet. Giving primacy to bouquet and aromas, Chauvet conducted numerous experimental tastings of Beaujolais wines that took a revolutionary approach to sensory analysis, calling on collective sensory referents to distinguish the wines. For example, he tasted a 1949 Morgon that gave him an “impression of freshness, purity” but also of “apricot fruit, currant, etc.” A 1947 Fleurie he found had an “animal and intimate perfume (heady and disturbing),” with aromas “of amber, musk” (Jacquet, 2018).In the United States, European ideas regarding the best methods for tasting and evaluating wine became highly influential. Research on wine tasting began before World War II, particularly in California. The work of University of California professor Maynard Amerine helped define wine sensory analysis as a field of scientific study (Amerine and Roessler 1976). Like Chauvet in France, Amerine struggled with developing an “objective” wine-tasting vocabulary. Despite his emphasis on scientific methods of sensory analysis, progress was slow. Amerine came up with few objective descriptors for wine, and although he had some faith in chemical analysis, the contemporary paucity of research and technical methods meant that “there are many difficulties replacing organoleptic examination with chemical analysis.” Amerine continued to rely on personal aptitude based on experience, like that of wine judges. “[O]ur knowledge of the influence chemical constituents have on odor is still very incomplete,” he wrote (cited in Shapin 2016). That changed in the mid-1970s, as Amerine retired. 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