Quote of the Day

If the taste of a wine turns out to be good, the nose is the most important thing. When I taste several wines, I go through the nose of every one first; then, after one taste, the ones that I've decided are out I push back and don't taste again. But if the taste and feel in the mouth of one live up to its smell, I say there's the winner. A lot of old Frenchmen I know always have a cigarette hanging out of their mouths; they're great tasters, but if they stop smoking, they have to learn a whole new way of tasting. At dinner, your nose will recover faster than your palate, even if there are a lot of smells around the table. After a certain point in a long meal you don't need any more liquid, but you find yourself still sitting there, smelling the wine. Eighty percent of the quality of the pleasure is in the smell. (Paul Draper, as quoted by David Darlington in Angel's Visits: An Inquiry Into the Mystery of Zinfandel, p. 52)

I really don't know about the Frenchmen who taste wine with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths, but what Draper says about eighty percent of the pleasure in wine coming from the smell of it is accurate, at least for me; and the same is true for whiskey.