SPEAKING OF TONGUES

Neil Pendock’s is not entirely in his cheek as he reflects on this most vital tool of the wine-taster’s trade

Too bizarre to be pornographic, too colourful to be a flower photo by Robert Mapplethorpe, the seven-centimetre tongue of 12-year old Annika Irmler from Tangstedt, Hamburg, is the longest tongue in the world, according to the Guinness Book of Records, and recently Miss Irmler was sticking out her tongue at the world’s press.

The photograph of Ms Irmler’s tongue is shocking. As a drinks writer, however, I have a professional interest in that mass of interwoven, striated muscles interspaced with glands and fat and covered with mucous membrane, as Encyclopedia Britannica describes the organ in my mouth.

Apart from helping you speak, swallow and suck up liquids from a straw or a spoon, tongues contain taste buds that provide the four different sensations of taste. Salty and sweet at the front tip, bitter at the back and sour along the edges. (Recent research into taste receptors has strengthened the case for adding a fifth basic taste: savoury – or ‘umami’; see next page) Total flavour comes from more than just stimulating the appropriate buds: smell, temperature, texture and touch all play a part. Take the perception of sweetness for example: sugar tastes 40 per cent sweeter at body temperature (36OC) than straight from the fridge (4OC). Which is why sweet wines are served chilled – the sweeter, the colder. Or the taste of fats – which, although they may have no flavour, press against a bud, thereby producing a tactile sensation which is interpreted by the brain as slippery or greasy.

But by far the largest part of the experience of taste is smell – described by blind and deaf Helen Keller as ‘a fallen angel’. Apart from any aromas the nose catches as the food enters the mouth, once inside the oral cavity volatiles from food and drink are sensed by olfactory receptors located just behind the eyes. While the tongue’s tasting prowess lasts well into old age, the sense of smell diminishes, which leads to an overall degradation of the sense of taste.

At the other end of the human life span, the number of taste buds on a baby’s tongue is genetically determined: some tongues have as many as 1100 taste buds per square centimetre while others have as few as 11.

Which puts people into one of three groups: nontasters with few buds, average tasters and supertasters with plenty. Women comprise the majority of supertasters and about half the population are average tasters while a quarter are nontasters and a quarter supertasters. Supertasters are much more sensitive to sweet and bitter flavours and the creamy sensations produced by fat in food, while for a nontaster skim milk tastes the same as the full cream version. For supertasters, the caffeine in coffee tastes more bitter – and forget about serving supertasters cauliflower or broccoli: also far too bitter.

History is full of nontasters, like Atilla the Hun and the Duke of Wellington whose chef resigned his commission in disgust at the Iron Duke’s lack of interest in his culinary creations. Supertasters also attract attention on occasion, like the time US president George Bush the first (who famously hated broccoli) deposited his serving of a state banquet into the lap of the Japanese prime minister.

There’s a simple do-it-yourself test to determine your tasting status. Take one circular reinforcing ring used to strengthen papers held in a lever-arch file and place on the tip of your tongue. Dab some food dye on the ring, remove and count the number of dots on the coloured background. These dots map out your tastebuds and there’s a good correlation between the number of buds and your tasting ability. Average is between 20 and 40, while over 40 a career move to chef, winemaker or restaurant critic is a real viability.

As you might expect, David Byrne, the creative force behind the eighties musical phenomenon The Talking Heads, also takes a professional interest in tongues. In his recent book New Sins (Faber, 2001) he launches an eloquent tirade against the tongue – this ‘small organ’, he says, ‘this harmless-seeming, flaccid, fleshy muscle is a fire, a poison, a carrier of plagues and viruses’.

Byrne shares his opinion with the evangelist St. James who maintained that ‘the tongue is a little member ... the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity ... it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison’.

Sticking with the religious position on tongues, there is the strange case of the eight hundred year-old tongue of St Anthony. Parts of the body of St Anthony, patron saint of missing things and ‘hammer of the heretics’, are to be found in the Basilica del Santo in Padua, northern Italy. Along with various parts of his upper anatomy (jawbone, vocal chords and diverse ‘first class bone relics’) is his tongue, miraculously preserved from decay (because he spoke no evil), in a jeweled reliquary. Some years back, the tongue was stolen by armed masked gunmen and went underground for several months. It was discovered in a warehouse at Rome’s Fiumicino airport, destined for South America. I can’t help but imagine this saintly tongue calling for help as the bad guys attempted to silently spirit it away to the waiting aeroplane.

Salt, sweet, sour, bitter ... and umami

Kikunae Ikeda may be an obscure candidate for the culinary hall of fame but he certainly deserves a place up there alongside Brillat-Savarin, Ritz and Escoffier. Ikeda was the person who identified the elusive ‘fifth taste’, which he called umami (Japanese for yummy) back in 1908. His discovery increased the human taste vocabulary by a quarter and went on to make billions for the purveyors of fast food and snacks.

Umami is that rich and savoury ‘moreish’ taste you get from eating a ripe tomato or a slice of Grana Padana or Parmigiano Reggiano.

For a complete exposition of umami one must travel to the English home counties. In the village of Bray in Berkshire there is a restaurant called the Fat Duck which offers a dish of roast scallop and caramelised cauliflower with marinated cep and jelly of Oloroso sherry. The chef and doyen of molecular gastronomy Heston Blumenthal describes his signature dish as the ‘fullest expression’ of umami.

Rand refugees, cheapskates and stick-in-the-muds can make do with a local umami experience by dabbing some Aromat on the tongue. The active ingredient in this ubiquitous flavour enhancer is monosodium glutamate (MSG) which stimulates the tongue’s umami receptors and drives them into paroxysms of pleasure. Unless, of course, you belong to the estimated 30% of the population who get heart and asthma attacks, migraines and hives from the stuff.

For centuries people had described the flavours of food in terms of four basic taste sensations, namely sweet, sour, salty and bitter – although how tastes are actually perceived is still a mystery with the tongue’s receptors for sweetness and bitterness still unknown.

At the start of the new millennium, scientists from the University of Miami isolated a protein molecule called taste-mGluR4 which is present on the tongue and which responds uniquely to umami. It’s no wonder the Japanese were the first to tune-in to umami, as the main component of taste-mGluR4, glutamic acid, is particularly prevalent in the Japanese national diet. It’s in seaweed, soy sauce and that white fungus they harvest from stones on the slopes of mount Fuji. When Japanese babies are exposed to umami-rich foods their facial expressions ‘show marked signs of exceptional pleasure’. But then mothers’ milk is rich in MSG too.

Other examples of foods which score high in the umami stakes are crab, caviar, mushrooms (especially if dried), and miso soup.

The good news for wine lovers is that there are no umami wines (yet) and thus no need to lash out on a new flavour wheel or a radical redesign of your tasting sheets. The flavours of the vine are more pedestrian, consisting essentially of sweetness due to residual sugar, sourness from unripe fruit, bitterness, and, in the case of the wines of Vergenoegd, a salty character which winemaker John Faure swears is due to the farm’s close proximity to False Bay.

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