This organic Altura coffee from Veracruz is bright and acidic, with hints of caramel
or burned sugar, almonds and possibly molasses.
“They sniffed and slurped. Then came the tricky part: finding the mot juste to describe the flavors….’I tasted nuts and bark in the Guatemalan,’ said Katsu Tanaka…’And basil and jasmine in the Sumatra.’ A hush fell over the room; perhaps the others were intimidated by Mr. Tanaka’s sophisticated palate.”
--From “Do I Detect a Hint of… Joe?” Hannah Wallace, The New York Times, May 29, 2006, p. E6
It’s an experience we’ve all had. If not with coffee, then with chocolate or olive oil. Certainly with wine.
Someone with an insufferably sensitive palate tastes leather, green bananas, and other quirky ingredients while I’m stumbling around, trying to articulate something a little more specific than, “Umm, this dark chocolate tastes really good.”
Last fall, when B and I took a two-day Sensory Appreciation of Olive Oil course at UC Davis, we sniffed, slurped and spat out 44 olive oils. That, let me tell you, is a feat unto itself. A very, very humbling one.
While I was struggling to detect floral, herbaceous and tropical notes in the cobalt blue cups before me, a voice in the rear was intoning phrases like “unripe persimmon” and “artichoke.” Even worse, he correctly identified the very olives-Arbequina, Frantoio, Picholine and a dozen more—from which the oils were pressed.
I had an urge to throttle the paragon and his perfect palate. I won’t even tell you how badly I did on the final exam.
You do hear a lot these days about the well-honed palate. But what is it exactly? The Oxford English Dictionary defines the "palate," anatomically, as “the roof of the mouth, separating the cavities of the mouth and the nose, in vertebrates.” More broadly, it is “a person’s ability to distinguish between and appreciate different flavours.” And very loosely, it may describe “a person’s taste or liking.”
As the OED suggests, the sense of taste arises at the intersection of the mouth and the nose. We’ve long known that the tongue can detect the four big, basic flavors—sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. Now there’s a fifth, umami, which means “delicious” in Japanese and can be defined as brothy or savory. Current research suggests that we may have receptors for the tastes of other substances, such as metal and water.
But it is the smell receptors in the nose that make possible fine distinctions between the scent of cloves and cinnamon, peaches and pears, new-mown grass and sawdust. In an explanation of olfaction, chemist John Leffingwell observes that humans have a total of 50 million “primary sensory receptor cells” located on tiny patches in our nasal passages.
These receptor cells, says Harold McGee in On Food and Cooking, “can detect many hundreds of volatile molecules that are small and chemically repelled by water, and therefore fly out of the food and into the air in our mouth.” They focus our sense of taste, so that we can tell that we’re eating vanilla and not chocolate ice cream.
But about that well-honed palate: I’m guessing that it has as much to do with nature as it does with nurture. In other words, there are a lucky few who are born with an exquisite sense of taste. But the rest of us can train ourselves, as did the tasters in the Times article, to detect “hints of curry and cedar” in a cup of Kenya coffee, maybe even a little “hickory smoked barbecue” in another.
A helpful device mentioned in the Times article is the Flavor Wheel created by Ted R. Lingle, executive director of the Coffee Quality Institute. “It classifies flavors (including sweet, sour and bitter) as well as aromas (sugar browning and dry distillation), which are broken down into categories such as spicy and chocolatey. “
(See the Flavor Wheel at Sweet Maria’s website.)
While studying the Flavor Wheel, I brewed a cup of organic Mexican Altura Coffee from Ruperto Opoch in Veracruz. I inhaled its complex aromas, slurped and swallowed. The verdict: Light acidic top notes followed by dark, caramel flavors redolent of burnt sugar. Nuts, maybe almonds, perhaps even a little molasses.
In other words, really, really good.