The Pleasure of Almost Remembering

One of the odd pleasures of wine occurs when an aroma seems familiar but cannot be clearly identified. You take a whiff and catch something. You think you know it. But then it shifts. The familiar tasting terms come to mind: dried cherry, cedar, clay, anise. None of them quite gets it. Whatever held your attention was already there before you started looking for a way to describe it. We tend to describe wine pleasure through intensity. A wine is powerful, concentrated, explosive, or persistent. This language favors sensations that announce themselves and can be ranked. One wine has more fruit, more tannin, a longer finish. Yet much of wine’s appeal takes place at a lower volume. A faint resemblance can matter more than a blast of flavor. A mature Bordeaux, for instance, may smell like a room in an old house. Perhaps “cedar” appears in the tasting note, but cedar is only the nearest available word. The aroma doesn’t bring back a particular room you inhabited. It brushes against the…