The Budometer for Wine Drinkers
If you read my March 26 column on wine-buying habits, maybe you’re ready to learn about wine-tasting habits. The Washington Post ran a neat story the other week about Tim Hanni, a wine expert who has developed a system for categorizing people’s tastes in wine.
If you know a person who likes only white wines or who will drink fruit-bomb zinfandels but nothing else, Hanni has some plausible answers to explain their preferences.
He calls his system the “Budometer.” Basically it measures how many taste buds you have. In person, Hanni will actually examine a person’s tongue through a super-duper magnifying glass to determine how many taste buds a person has. On his Web site, he offers a short questionnaire that essentially achieves the same purpose by asking about sensitivities to salt and other foods.
The idea is that people with more taste buds have more sensitive tastes, and people will prefer certain kinds of wines based on their level of sensitivity.
Hanni divides people into four types of tasters:
• Tolerant Tasters. These folks tend to like big, intense wines, and usually don’t mind heavy oak or high alcohol. Wine choices include rich and oaky chardonnays, and plenty of full-bodied reds, such as cabernet sauvignon and Rhone blends.
• Sensitive Tasters enjoy intensity, but like it paired with smoothness, with moderate oak and alcohol. Wine choices include sauvignon blanc, smooth chardonnays, syrah and merlot.
• Hyper-Sensitive Tasters want balanced, delicate, elegant wines, not rich or intense ones. They react against high alcohol, and prefer little if any oak. Wine choices dry and off-dry German rieslings and pinot noir.
• Sweet Tasters are those even more hyper-sensitive. They’ll balk at any sign of bitterness, and prefer sweet wines that are fruitier and lower in alcohol. Think white zinfandel, sweet rieslings, moscato or fruit wines.
The Budometer questionnaire is geared toward novices. As Hanni notes on his Web site, “aspiration values” — his term for life experiences — also figure into wine preferences. Such experiences might include a memorable trip to Bordeaux, France, or even wine reviews read in a magazine.
Hanni is working on a more sophisticated version of the Budometer suitable to people who are knowledgeable about wine.
To learn what kind of taster you are, visit http://www.budometer.com.
