You know, I've been wondering this for a long time too: how can Riedel keep selling insanely overpriced (albeit pretty) cups of crystal targeted to the outdated tongue map?
The Tongue: Tasteless Myth Debunked
I suppose one reason that the slow moving mass of minds on the subject of the smell problem doesn't surprise me is that this absurd tongue map is still being taught in grammar schools, even though any child who has ever greedily shoved an ice cream cone up into her soft palate (and cried in dull frozen pain for several minutes) knows you can taste sweet back there, and yet her solemn science book assures her that the back realm is relegated to bitterness. Disproving the map is so easily done at breakfast that it's a true testament to human stubbornness in the face of nonsensical authoritative dogma that this crap is still taught as fact.
The tongue is not and never has been partitioned like some warring Balkan state, with taste buds marshaled along borders ready to defend their sole right to sour, sweet, salty, bitter, and even the mysterious umami (and maybe more, like fat). It is easily disproven by running sugar, salt, or lemon juice anywhere in the mouth, and I remember pondering the problem as a child on my birthday, my mouth full of some caramel sucker begged from strangers on Halloween the night before, the sweet pliable brown flap of the Sugar Daddy molded firmly to the center of my tongue like a cast for a retainer. There I presumably could not taste it, and yet there it was, sugary as sugar could be. The tongue map was so obviously untrue, and yet I convinced myself I must somehow be wrong, because the truth was written in every book. They even gave you experiments, so confident were they that you would agree that you tasted sugar intensely at the tip of your tongue—that tip, which for me, was always the least sensitive spot on the tongue, which I have always curled under so I could hit my food at the fat eager middle of the muscle.
Or perhaps, the child me considered, I was a mutant, a flavor pervert. Perhaps my taste buds had evolved into a profusion of receptors grown willy nilly all over every surface. Maybe I should donate my tongue to science. Whatever, I could taste the sucker anywhere.
And yet purveyors of shmancy wineglasses continue to tell you that, by adjusting the curve of the belly of a glass, by moving the rim here or there along that curve, they can optimize the delivery of that first splash of wine to maximize your enjoyment of its complex flavors, never mind that as soon as the wine is in your mouth, being liquid, it spills across the whole of the available space into every nook and cavern, sloshes through your teeth and up against your palate, runs cheerfully to the back of your throat where the map has set up poison skulls and crossbones for bitterness, electrifying taste buds wherever it goes. And never mind that much of the enjoyment of wine has little to do with taste buds and everything to do with the vaporous fog of its perfume rising up into the head through the back messy cave, the pharynx, or the front entrance, the nose. That is where you get the pineapple or raspberry, the plum or cassis, the apple or crème brulée, the mineral zing or the oaky complications.
The greatest thing a wineglass can do for wine is to hold it without spilling it until you are ready to drink it. To increase the pure pleasure of the occasion by tickling another sense, it is useful if the wineglass is pretty, and preferably clear and uncolored, so you can see the shades of the liquid as the light passes through it, ruby or straw, and watch its viscosity as it coats the inside of your glass as you, in an affectation you can't help because it's fun, swirl it about. If you are a smeller as well as a quaffer (and if you have bothered to buy a good wine you should be), you should fill the glass no more than halfway; perhaps you have a glass that like a cognac snifter tapers above the widest swell, to slow the escape of the vapors coming off the surface. Dip your nose into that concentrated space and breathe: that is a way to say hello to the wine before consummating your relationship at the lips. And then when you're worked up and ready, you drink it.
If it is a good wine, and you are with friends, this can all be done in clean jelly jars with little loss of enjoyment (although your hot hand may warm the wine above ideal temperature if you don't have a stem to keep you from gripping around the glass). And good wine with friends will be gone quickly, so another bottle may be required.
Isn't it nice to know that on a joyous occasion, you don't need to negotiate the tricky borders of the tongue map to have a good time?
Picture of tongue map nicked from Musings on the Vine
3 comments:
My first job was as a translator/archivist in the Neurophysiology lab of the Faculty of Science in Nice; since, as I learned there, most of our taste info comes from our olfactory system (which is why we can't taste anything and lose our apetite when we have a cold), the tongue map is, as you've found, probably untrue. 'Our' researchers were studying the olfactory system of the frog. It's fascinating, apparently.
Yeah, tastebuds, schmashbuds! When I'm drinking I'm looking for a nice buzz. What I want to know about wine is why all other forms of alcohol make me happy, warm and jolly, but wine sends me on a crying jag and gives me a wicked headache to boot? I hate that stuff. I thought maybe it was b/c of all the pesticides used on grapes, but then I tried the organic kind and it was the same. Wine and me do not agree.
I'd forgotten about the tongue map! How funny. And if it were true, the existence of those little tiny countries of the tongue, what implications would this have for French kissing? Je me demande.
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