On the tongue · 1.5
What a finish is, and why chocolate lengthens it
It is a smell you are having through the back of your face, which is why holding your nose removes almost all of it.
For a practical operations perspective on coordinating people and schedules, this Monitask guide offers a concise companion guide.
A finish is how long the flavour stays after you have swallowed or spat, and it is mostly not happening in your mouth at all.
Where it happens
Most of what we call taste is smell, arriving at the olfactory tissue from behind, through the passage that connects the back of the mouth to the nose. When you exhale after swallowing, volatile compounds left coating your mouth and throat travel up that passage.
That is the finish. It is a smell you are having through the back of your face, which is why holding your nose while swallowing removes almost all of it.
Which gives you the technique
Swallow or spit, then breathe out gently through your nose with your mouth closed. That is the whole of it, and it roughly doubles what most people notice.
Watching somebody do it looks like nothing at all, which is why it is rarely taught and easily copied.
Why chocolate lengthens it
Fat holds aromatic compounds and releases them slowly. A mouth coated in cocoa butter goes on releasing what is dissolved in it for a good deal longer than a bare mouth does.
So a wine drunk with chocolate has a longer finish than the same wine drunk alone, and the aromatics of both are being released together and mixed. That is the mechanism behind the whole practice this festival is built on, stated plainly.
Length as a measure of quality
Length correlates with concentration, and concentration correlates with a good deal of what people mean by quality, so length is a reasonable heuristic and it is a heuristic.
A wine can finish long on something you do not want to taste for thirty seconds. Bitterness and heat both persist. The useful question is not how long but how long and of what.
The unit that measures it
There is a unit in circulation for finish length, defined as one second. It is used in wine writing and it is a marketing coinage rather than a measurement, since nobody agrees on when the finish has ended and the number is produced by one person counting.
Counting is still useful. Counting privately, and comparing two wines you have in front of you at the same moment, is worth more than any figure somebody else published.
What clears it
Saliva clears the mouth, and saliva flow is driven by acid. A high-acid wine produces more saliva and clears faster, so acidity shortens the apparent finish while making everything feel fresher.
Sweetness and fat both slow clearance. A sweet wine with a fatty chocolate is the longest finish available on a tasting floor and also the hardest to follow with anything.
Practising it in the room
Take one wine, taste it, and note what you get on the exhale and for how long. Then take a piece of chocolate from the next table, taste the wine again with it, and do the same.
The difference is large enough to notice the first time you look for it, and once noticed it is difficult to stop noticing. That is the festival's whole argument in a single pair of mouthfuls.
Why spitting does not remove the finish
People new to tasting assume that spitting loses the best part. It does not, because the finish is produced by what coats your mouth and throat rather than by what reaches your stomach.
Everything described in this entry works identically whether you swallow or not, which is the practical reason spitting is normal practice among people who taste all day and lose nothing by it.
Writing it down
The finish is the part hardest to remember an hour later, because it happens after your attention has moved on. Two words on your phone at the table beat any amount of intending to remember.
Length, and one word for what persisted. That is enough to reconstruct the wine a week later when you are deciding what to order.
Comparing two things at once
Finish is much easier to judge comparatively than absolutely. Two glasses side by side, alternating, tells you which persists longer within about a minute; a single glass tells you almost nothing without a great deal of practice.
That is a general truth about tasting and it is most true here.
When it stops working
Late in a long tasting the finish is the first thing to go, because it is the subtlest signal and the mouth is coated with everything that came before.
If you are no longer getting one, that is information about you rather than about the wine, and it is the point at which to stop and eat something.
The comparison worth making at the festival
The same wine with and without a piece of chocolate, one after the other, attending only to the exhale. It takes two minutes at one table and it demonstrates the entire premise of the event.
Why water shortens it
Rinsing clears the coating the finish is being released from, which is useful between wines and destructive if you do it while still assessing one. Drink the water after you have finished paying attention, not during.
The one line
The finish is a smell, arriving through the back of the nose, from what is left coating your mouth. Everything practical in this entry follows from that sentence.
A bar on its own
The same technique works without wine. Let a piece melt, swallow, and breathe out slowly through the nose. A good bar goes on for a surprisingly long time and a dull one stops almost at once, and that single test separates the tables worth returning to from the rest.
Also in this part
- 1.1
Why a dry red and a sweet chocolate fight
The wine must be at least as sweet as the food. Everything else in this entry is a qualification of that sentence.
Read it → - 1.2
Tannin and fat: what happens in the mouth
Astringency is not a flavour. You are noticing the absence of lubrication that was there a moment ago.
Read it →
For further context, see NCBI overview of smell and taste.