Try visiting a rural village in India in the heat of the Indian summer. You are likely to experience a sea of colours – red chillies left to dry and shrivel. You hear the hawkers with mounds of huge mangoes on their carts and spices galore on the roadside all inviting you to buy some. There is the overwhelming pungent aroma wafting in the air while you wipe your brow dripping with salty sweat.Then you go to the spice shop where you see these spices converted in to ground powder neatly stacked in sacks. It is a glorious and breathtaking array of colours.
Let’s digress and return to the West and pour a glass of white wine labelled Gewürztraminer, Viognier, Riesling or red wines labelled Malbec, Syrah, Merlot or Zinfandel. These wines are also supposed to be spicy. I am an Indian and I would expect these wines to be red-hot pours that would singe my tongue upon my first sip or swirl.
I have tasted most of these wines and I am expected to experience hints of vanilla, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves and black or white pepper. I can’t say I have sensed the aromas or the tastes of all these spices but when I have deliberately focussed on one or two spices in my mind, there seems to be some truth to this claim.
But then I begin to wonder whether it was my mental picture of a spice that made me experience that spice in that wine or in fact my tongue actually tasted that reality. Am I deceived by the wine rhetoric or am I not a connoisseur yet to “see” these spices in wine?
