What’s in a nose?

A nose by any other name smells just as well!

Sorry in advance that this post will be very wordy and without pictures. Actually, let’s add a picture for fun. He’s a quick picture from our instagram of our last home tasting:

Yes. It was VERY tasty 🙂

Anyways, after reading a number of scientific articles, it would seem that the human body is always a mystery unfolding. It turns out 90% of what we taste is actually attributed to what we smell. Have you ever tried the childhood experiment of drinking seltzer water while smelling lemons only to find it tastes like sprite?

Very interesting, right? Let’s add to the complexity of taste…

All of our lives (until recently) we’ve been told the tongue is segmented into four distinct tasting areas (salt, sweet, bitter, sour) but it turns out the taste buds are spread all over the tongue and there are more than four. The fifth (Umamai) was recently discovered and it looks like there may be plenty more taste receptors we haven’t yet named.

EXCITING, right?? One more twist!

To top all of that new found knowledge off, it turns out the cells in our body that sense taste and smell are replaced every 7-10 days. Do you have any idea what kind of implications can be made about our palates when they are constantly adapting and changing? 😀

This is the very reason we start beginning scotch drinkers with speyside and highland scotches. They are near void of noob-off-putting smoke and peat. Instead we ease people in with vanilla, oak, and honey. Alright, I’m getting long winded.

I think the next educational post will be about the SnS tasting method (which is really a pretty common way to go about tasting scotch and whisk(e)y in general).

Until then, Happy Whisky Wednesday and Slaite Mhath!!!