The Wine Lover's Daughter: A Memoir

by Anne Fadiman

  Hated, vile, foul herb

  One mere leaf destroys the meal.

  Oh, to be tongueless!

  Others described the object of our mutual disaffection as tasting like old soap, moldy carpet, dirty laundry, toilet cleaner, dish detergent, paint thinner, furniture polish, Scotch tape, burnt rubber, wet dog, cat piss, skunk spray, ear wax, doll hair, baby wipes, damp socks, moldy shoes, old coins, stink bugs, feet wrapped in bacon, and “a cigarette if you ate it.”

  I had never eaten a cigarette, but I felt sure that if I had, I would have recognized the incontestable rightness of the comparison, as I did the others. The sandalwood and lavender lurking in a glass of Haut-Brion may have eluded me, but when it came to cilantro, I was on firm ground. Old soap—yes! Moldy shoes—totally! Feet wrapped in bacon—amen! These were tasting notes I could get behind.

  The seed of a radical new thought had been planted. What if wine was sort of like cilantro? Though I didn’t abominate wine, I certainly didn’t appreciate it. What if the sense that had given my father more pleasure than any other was wired differently in his daughter, in which case there was no way she could like exactly what he liked? Maybe wine was a blind spot not because I was morally, emotionally, intellectually, or aesthetically deficient but because I was biologically deficient. That would get me off the hook, wouldn’t it? I’d be like someone who doesn’t enjoy reading not because she’s uncultivated but because she’s dyslexic.

  I started thinking about other foods I didn’t like. Capers. Kimchi. Cloves. Pepper. Kale. Coffee was drinkable—in fact, positively delicious—only with milk and sugar. Seltzer required enough discreet mouth-sloshing to subdue the effervescence. And I couldn’t imagine why anyone would eat a radish unless paid. It was more like a bee-sting than a vegetable.

  What did these foods have in common with the way wine tasted to me (which was to say sort of sour, sort of bitter, pucker-inducing, not just a taste but a sensation)? They were all too strong. And to whom did foods taste too strong? Supertasters.

  I had come across the word when I looked up cilantro. You couldn’t read an article on taste without bumping into it. There was even an indie rock song called “John Lee Supertaster,” which contained the memorable lines “When he tastes a pear / It’s like a hundred pears.” (The backup singers croon in response, “It’s like a million pears.”) According to Linda Bartoshuk, the taste scientist who coined the term in 1991, supertasters were people for whom salt tasted saltier, sugar tasted sweeter, pickles tasted more sour, chard tasted more bitter, and Worcestershire sauce tasted umami-er. (Umami, the so-called fifth taste, is the meaty or savory flavor imparted by glutamate.) Their tongues had more—lots more—fungiform papillae, the little mushroom-shaped bumps that house the taste buds. As King Arthur was identified by pulling a sword from a stone and witches were identified by being bound and dunked, supertasters could be identified by either counting their papillae or placing on their tongues a filter-paper disk soaked in 6-n-propylthiouracil, a chemical used to treat hyperthyroidism, otherwise known as PROP. To 25 percent of the population, the non-tasters, the disk tastes like nothing. (“Non-taster” is a misnomer. Everyone can taste PROP, but not everyone can taste it at very low concentrations.) To 50 percent, the medium tasters, it tastes bitter. To the remaining 25 percent, the supertasters, it tastes so terrible that one unfortunate consumer said his tongue thrashed around his mouth like a hooked fish convulsing on the deck of a boat.

  One might expect that wine connoisseurs—those people who confidently call a Syrah “peppery” or a Pinot Noir–based champagne “biscuity”—would possess the papillae to which a pear tastes like a million pears. That isn’t necessarily the case. Supertasting may be a liability. If you experience bitterness, astringency, acidity, and alcohol (which is sensed as heat) far more intensely than an ordinary mortal, you may find it hard to enjoy wines that are tannic or tart or have a high alcohol content. You want less. If you’re a non-taster, on the other hand, you want more. You have to clobber your palate in order to feel you’re tasting much of anything and are at greater risk of becoming an alcoholic because you don’t dislike the taste of alcohol. The Goldilocks via media is happily occupied by the medium tasters. I couldn’t resurrect my father in order to ply him with PROP-impregnated paper and see if his tongue thrashed, but I’d have bet my unabridged OED that he was a medium taster and I was a supertaster.

  Supertaster: Now there was an identity I could get used to. I was a delicate flower whose hyper-refined sensibilities were assailed by the crude world! I was off the hook, but not because I was dyslexic; my problem was that I read too well! I liked wine less than my father did because my palate was superior! I resolved to confirm my rarefied status without delay.

  I didn’t yet know that not all taste scientists view PROP as the alpha and omega of gustatory assessment. Although Linda Bartoshuk found that responses to PROP correlated strongly with papilla density, as well as with many other aspects of taste perception, some of her critics have pointed out that it is possible to be insensitive to PROP but have receptors that can taste many other bitter compounds; that taste sensitivity depends on the response to a variety of stimuli; and that PROP testing ignores the role of smell in taste perception. In any case, I couldn’t find PROP online, so I sent away for a strip flavored with phenylthiocarbamide, PROP’s chemical cousin. After it arrived, I read that PTC is poisonous (one website reported that, pound for pound, it was “safer than a poison dart frog, but deadlier than strychnine”). Although .005 milligrams would probably not have done me in, I retreated to Plan B: counting my fungiform papillae.

  The word “fungiform” was new to me. So were “foliate” and “circumvallate,” two kinds of papillae located elsewhere on the tongue and in the mouth and throat, both crucial to taste though less easy to see and thus not employed in supertaster testing. But “papillae” was an old friend. When Kim and I were in middle school, we had entered a jingle contest sponsored by Dr Pepper. Our collaborative offering:

  Dr Pepper has a zest

  Which makes it far the tastiest.

  So buy a bottle, make the test!

  Your papillae will do the rest.

  Kim, who had a larger vocabulary than I did, was responsible for “papillae.” We were astonished and outraged when we didn’t win.

  Following online instructions, I used a Q-tip to stain my tongue blue with food coloring. Its spongy surface would allegedly absorb the dye while the fungiform papillae remained pink and prominent. I placed a gummed reinforcement on the middle of my tongue. My mission was to count the rosy bumps that lay within the reinforcement’s six-millimeter circle: non-tasters had fewer than fifteen, medium tasters fifteen to thirty-five, and supertasters more than thirty-five. Unfortunately, the mirror fogged up every time I leaned in close, and even when I wiped a patch clear for a few seconds, my middle-aged eyes could no more distinguish an individual papilla than they could a neutrino. I tried reading glasses, a magnifying glass, and a flashlight. No dice. I tried my husband. He couldn’t see anything either. Finally, I conscripted my college-age daughter and stuck out my bright blue tongue.

  She counted five papillae.

  Five! Oh my God. Could I be—I could hardly say it to myself—a non-taster? It wasn’t possible. I always did well on tests. Perhaps I had placed the reinforcement in a less than optimal spot on my tongue, a sort of papillary Sahara.

  I moved it toward the front. Susannah counted eighteen.

  I moved it to the very center of the tip. Twenty-five.

  Better. Still, not what I’d had in mind. Instead of being incomparably sensitive, was my palate smack in the middle of medium?

  Smarting from my demotion, I decided to pay a visit to Virginia Utermohlen, the former director of the Cornell Taste Science Laboratory and an authority on individual differences in taste sensitivity. I was interested in her claim that she has saved marriages by proving that spouses with divergent food preferences are not being fussy or stubborn; they simply liv
e in different perceptual universes. I’d also enjoyed a paper in which she persuasively argued that Marcel Proust could probably taste 6-n-propylthiouracil.

  When I arrived in Ithaca, I wasn’t sure why she had reserved a table at a wine and tapas bar. I wanted to talk about wine, not drink it. However, I was delighted by Dr. Utermohlen, who looked exactly the way a taste scientist should: pink-cheeked and round, as if she’d spent her life eating delicious foods, which indeed turned out to be the case. She immediately affixed her white cloth napkin to a necklace equipped with two alligator clips, a gift from a relative who had noticed that she ate with such enthusiasm that she often spilled her soup. She then ordered us each a flight of five local wines from the Finger Lakes region: a Hermann J. Wiemer Cuvée Brut, a Treleaven Chardonnay, a Charles Fournier Gold Seal Vineyards Riesling, a Hazlitt 1852 Vineyards Sauvignon Blanc, and a Bellwether Sawmill Creek Vineyard Pinot Noir. I had told her beforehand that wine tasted overly strong to me, and she had told me that it did to her, too. In order to reduce its intensity, she swallowed wine down the center of her tongue, just like me.

  Soon, along with several plates of tapas, our table was occupied by a brigade of tiny glasses. I cautiously sipped from each of them.

  With the exception of the Sauvignon Blanc, they were—well, much better than I expected.

  Dr. Utermohlen said, “Of course they are.” She explained that at this northern latitude the growing season was shorter, the grapes developed less sugar to ferment, and the lower sugar levels meant less alcohol. The alcohol content of these wines was between 11 and 12.5 percent, well below the 14 or 15 percent that is now common in California. “You don’t like alcohol,” she said. “This is your wine country.”

  The Sauvignon Blanc tasted bitter. “Methoxypyrazine,” she said. “That’s the Cabernet signature. How do you feel about green peppers?” I told her I preferred red and yellow ones. “Of course you do,” she said. “The green ones have methoxypyrazine, just like this wine.”

  The Pinot Noir was my favorite. “Of course it is,” she said. She explained that, compared with the Cabernet, it was lighter in every way: body, flavor, tannin, color. Pinot Noirs tend to be low in pigment because they are made from thin-skinned grapes, but the cool climate and long winters of the Finger Lakes give the grape skins an especially brief opportunity to develop color, and the resulting wines are pale and delicate. Was it possible that I preferred this anemic-looking red—perilously close to a rosé, my father’s bête noire—to the Haut-Brion I had tasted in New Haven? Thomas Jefferson would never have bought six cases. But I had to admit that it was sort of pleasant.

  For a moment, a flicker of hope stirred within my fungiform papillae. Might these unintimidating wines serve as training wheels? Could I eventually graduate to Haut-Brion?

  The flicker didn’t last long. “Sort of pleasant” was unbridgeably distant from “bottled poetry” (Robert Louis Stevenson), “constant proof that God loves us” (Benjamin Franklin), and “one of the indices of civilization” (Clifton Fadiman, who makes at least one appearance in every list of wine quotations).

  After dinner, Dr. Utermohlen—who had grown even pinker because, as she explained, she has an acetaldehyde dehydrogenase deficiency that causes her to flush when she drinks alcohol—drove me to an ice cream parlor where she was obviously well known. I had a large dish of Mint Chocolate Chip and Chocolate Bittersweet. She had a kiddie-sized scoop of Pumpkin in a sugar cone. We agreed that the wines had been pretty good but the ice cream was better. Had my father been present at Purity Ice Cream that evening, he would not have been pleased. He once wrote that watching adults drink ice cream sodas gave him “the same queasy feeling one gets from watching an adult playing with a rattle in a lunatic asylum.” Dr. Utermohlen would have had an excellent rejoinder. She’d told me at dinner that children avoid bitter and sour flavors because they have far more sensitive palates than adults. Their tastes change not because their palates improve but because they deteriorate.

  The next day, Dr. Utermohlen photographed my tongue with her iPhone. She wasn’t interested in a six-millimeter circle; she wanted the big picture. “It’s a beautiful tongue,” she said. “It’s exquisite.” She zoomed in on the image and showed me a forest of fungiform papillae, including many, tucked into an inch-long fissure, that might not have been visible at home because, as she explained, fissures have a high concentration of papillae but tend to absorb food coloring. “You’ve got a ton of papillae—a ton, a ton, a ton. And look at how many you have on the side! An insane quantity. That’s why you swallow wine down the center. You are highly sensitive.”

  My first realization was that I’d been mispronouncing “papillae” for nearly half a century. I’d never heard anyone say it until that moment and had always thought the accent was on the first syllable, not the second. No wonder Kim and I had lost the Dr Pepper jingle contest! My second realization was that Dr. Utermohlen had just snatched my tongue from the jaws of mediocrity.

  However, she had called me merely “highly sensitive”; she had not used the word “supertaster.” I had an inkling why after I asked if I could see her tongue. Out it came, a very pink, very clean tongue, so extravagantly fissured that it deserved its own topographic map. It was the tongue of an imperial supertaster. My tongue was not in the same league. (She later confided that she could detect PROP at a concentration of one part per billion, though she belongs to the camp of taste scientists who believe that its importance has been exaggerated. She actually prefers the term “highly sensitive taster,” which encompasses the tasting cosmos beyond PROP.)

  Dr. Utermohlen confirmed her assessment by instructing me to think about a favorite meal in order to stimulate salivation (spinach ravioli), place a peppermint Life Saver in my mouth, wait till it softened, crunch it, and rate the intensity of the taste and the rush of coolness. They were both strong. She explained that the rush, which not everyone feels, came from the activation of the trigeminal nerve endings in my mouth and nose. Taste is transmitted not only by the papillae but by the trigeminal nerve, which carries sensations of heat, cold, astringency, pungency, pain, and prickle. Menthol activates the same taste receptors that sense cold temperatures, so we perceive it as cold; the same is true for capsaicin (the active component in chili peppers) and heat. Carbonated beverages activate prickle receptors: a matter of mouth-feel, which combines with taste and aroma to form the complete profile of a food’s flavor.

  She then brought me a cup of strong green tea. Bitter! And unpleasantly astringent, even several seconds later. Before the next sip, I swallowed a teaspoon of sugar, and before the third sip, a pinch of salt. In each case the tea tasted milder, even though the sugar and salt were no longer in my mouth when I drank it. Dr. Utermohlen told me that both sugar and salt prevent bitter and astringent compounds from binding to taste receptors, and that their effects linger after they are swallowed. Salt is especially effective, which explained why, like most highly sensitive tasters (the term was starting to grow on me), I often wanted more of it even though I wanted less of almost everything else.

  After asking a battery of questions about my flavor preferences (Do you like your chili hot? How are you with Listerine?) as well as my father’s (Did he like parmesan? Did he drink his coffee black?), Dr. Utermohlen drew a chart of the spectrum of some major oral receptors, protein molecules that unlock specific ion channels in nerve cells and allow particular tastes and sensations to be perceived. On the left were the “cold” receptors, TRPA1 (transient receptor potential, subfamily A, member 1) and TRPM8. On the right was the “hot” receptor, TRPV1. Both extremes caused pain. Capsaicin and alcohol, sensed by TRPV1, could burn; so could wasabi, which, to my surprise, was sensed by TRPA1, a receptor that responds both to unpleasantly cold temperatures and to pungent compounds in the mustard family. (I dislike hot chili but like wasabi.) In between lay TRPM5 and TRPV3. All the foods I enjoyed were sensed by the three receptors on the left: the cool side. All the ones I didn’t were on the right: the h
ot side. My father’s favorite foods were concentrated in the center and near right. Dr. Utermohlen said that he was probably highly sensitive at the level of the taste buds but less sensitive at the level of the trigeminal nerve. I was highly sensitive at both. I would prefer low-tannin, low-oak wines on the cooler side of the spectrum, like last night’s Pinot Noir, though even they might seem too sour or too bitter. “Your father had the perfect palate for wine,” she said. “The way wine was then. Lower alcohol content, higher residual sugar. The classic Bordeaux. He wouldn’t have liked today’s big reds, over on the right: too much alcohol burn.”

  Before I left, Dr. Utermohlen told me that the tongue inspection, the Life Saver test, and the taste questions had not been strictly necessary. She’d known the previous night what kind of taster I was because I had been interested in only a few things on the tapas menu (I’d shuddered at the thought of the Warm Baby Kale with Goat Cheese Vinaigrette, Beets, Walnuts, Pickled Onion, and Radish), but the ones I’d wanted (particularly the Saffron Risotto Cake Stuffed with Fontina Cheese, with Grilled Ramps and Sliced Tomato) I’d really wanted. “That’s what we’ve found with the highly sensitive tasters,” she said. “They have loves and hates.” She explained that the beloved foods inspire such rapture that first bites are remembered decades later; the hated foods are viewed as invaders that must be vigilantly barred from entering the body, even in minute quantities. That’s exactly how I feel. Dr. Utermohlen’s own loves include empanadas (“but not with peas”), artichokes (“but not the hearts”), spinach (“Oh my God”), coffee mousse (“straight from heaven”), and cinnamon (“I like a little TRPV1”). Her hates—“Holy mackerel! Hate, hate, hate!”—include hazelnuts, goat cheese, Brussels sprouts, peaches, and rice pudding. She dislikes going to other people’s houses for dinner because she’s afraid of encountering one of her hates, about which the host or hostess will invariably say, “The way I cook it, you’ll love it.” That, of course, is invariably untrue. Dr. Utermohlen left me with the impression that the term “picky eater” was invented by people with fewer papillae in order to diss people with more papillae.