Tasting note adjectives - how specific can one really be?

[Flyfish]

I put it down to professional reviewer ennui. I recall whisky writer Jim Murray commenting he occasionally had to come up with new tasting terms to keep his reviews fresh. To me that's like saying 'there really isn't any tapioca root or tamarind rind in this whisky, that's just something I thunk up on the spot'.

Parker Beam said it best in a broadcast interview, "I don't find all these tastes they talk about in whisky, to me it just tastes like whisky".

I have heard that the sense of smell is the most powerful stimulus to memory. Once in a while something triggers an association with things long past--the smell of the garage behind the house where I grew up, the Murphy's oil soap my mother used. The trigger never actually smells like the old things associated with it. Perhaps it's just a misfiring synapse or a glitch in the old corpus collosum.

Still, there are times I find something highly specific in a bourbon that was not there before and never returns again. This makes me suspect that what I found was not actually in the bourbon. If you can't duplicate the experiment, it ain't science.

[smokinjoe]

Some of the adjectives are BS. There are no cherries put into straight bourbon. However their are chemicals in bourbon that we taste and smell as cherries. In the case of cherry that comes from an ester, geranyl butyrate, created during the fermentation and distillation process. It's the same with all the other "flavors" one may taste in a spirit.

I ain't a puttin' my nose anywheres near geranyl butyrate....:crazy: What are yas, crazy!!!???!!!

[squire]

I have disciplined myself to keep drinking until the experiment is duplicated.

[AaronWF]

There is no wrong way to describe a taste. There are degrees of accuracy, there can be agreement and disagreement, but when you labor to define a sensual experience, you're talking about art more than science (as someone else mentioned in this thread).

[Bourserker]

I, like many who replied to this thread, cannot make out more than a handful of flavors in any one whiskey either. I am also amused by tasting notes that have all kinds of exotic descriptors in them. I find them entertaining, but not that helpful. I can say one thing though, even though I can only pick out a few flavors in a given whiskey, I can definitely tell the difference between decent quality and crap.

[p_elliott]

I, like many who replied to this thread, cannot make out more than a handful of flavors in any one whiskey either. I am also amused by tasting notes that have all kinds of exotic descriptors in them. I find them entertaining, but not that helpful. I can say one thing though, even though I can only pick out a few flavors in a given whiskey, I can definitely tell the difference between decent quality and crap.

If you can tell the difference between decent quality and crap that's all you need to know!

[tanstaafl2]

Just have to keep in mind one person's decent quality spirit may be another person's crap!

[p_elliott]

Just have to keep in mind one person's decent quality spirit may be another person's crap!

Very true................