The Scent of a Woman Sommelier

ECLECTIC EPICURE

Capital Grille wine steward Milagros Marín is legally blind. She cannot comment on a wine’s color or make reference to the images on its label.

But that does not mean her capabilities as a sommelier are in any way diminished.

If anything, her remaining four senses are heightened, and her highly honed and focused palate set her apart from many of her visioned colleagues as a wine specialist with an unprecedented relationship with both her vins and her clients.

And at no time do Marín’s talents shine brighter than when she offers blindfolded wine tasting seminars for executive groups at the upscale aged beef Capital Grille steakhouse in the Juárez neighborhood.

The three-hour seminars, which can accommodate up to about 15 guests, are aimed at helping patrons to become more in touch with their nonvisual senses. (According to a 2000 study conducted by social psychologist David Hyerle, 90 percent of the information we absorb each day comes to our brains visually.)

“People become too dependent on their visual sense and do not explore and develop their other senses to their full potential,” Marín told a group of 12 wine connoisseurs and critics during a recent media blindfolded tasting, most of whom did not notice her impediment until she spoke about it at the end of the seminar.

“This exercise is aimed as intensifying and sharpening your sense of smell and taste, which are among the main ways we appreciate wine.”

The taste test began with the panel of blindfolded participants sniffing glasses filled with common household substances and trying to guess what they were.

Amazingly, when confronted with just the smell of a substance, over half of us were unable to identify scents as common as banana, black pepper, cloves, coriander, ginger or even lemon zest.

The entire process was humiliating for a group of people who supposedly are experts on food and wine.

Once the eye covers were removed, everyone immediately recognized the items in front of them, but when blindfolded and limited to only our sense of smell, we were, for the most part, dumbfounded by the odors.

“The reason that people do not always recognize smells when they are blindfolded is that they have become overly dependent on sight,” Marín said.

“It is important to learn to use all our senses in unison and individually so that we can better appreciate the world that surrounds us.”

In the second phase of the experiment, the panel redeemed itself impressively.

Yes, we were still blindfolded and tentatively groping with our hands to find the glass that Marín said was right in front of us.

But this time around, we all pretty much pegged the three wines that we were told to sample, perhaps because we are all more accustomed to analyzing wine than spices and often do so with our eyes closed.

The first wine was crisp and crabapple-y, with the meadow scents of white and pink flowers and notes of anise seed, and could have easily passed for a white had it not been for the telltale aftertaste of strawberries that gave it away as a rosé.

Its rich mineral base and hints of brine suggested a New World pedigree and its balanced, enduring flavor suggested to the panel more Mexico than United States.

Our calculations turned out to be right on the money.

The wine was a 2013 SIIS Clarette from the Barón Balché estate in the Valle de Guadalupe in Ensenada, Baja California, with a warm pink color and brilliant clarity.

A unusual blend of 60 percent carignan, 30 percent tempranillo and 10 percent grenache grapes imparted a rich texture and complex layering to this wine, which was made even more multifaceted by a 20-day stint in used American oak casks.

Having recovered some semblance of our dignity as taste specialists with the clarete, the panel — blindfolds in place — proceeded to sampling the next wine.

Wine Two was a 2012 Auro Chardonnay, also from the Barón Balché wineries in Baja.

This vin was full of mangos, pineapples and other tropical fruits and plenty of sharp lactates that made it virtually beg to be served with a plate of manchego cheese and guava ate jelly.

There were also notes of artichoke and vanilla that made the wine particularly intriguing.

Although there was considerable debate among the panel members before the unveiling as to the variety of grape, pretty much everyone pegged it as a white without question and most of the panel recognized it as a Mexican wine.

When the eye covers were removed, what most impressed the panel was the wine’s golden hue, which was extremely inviting.

By now, we were all feeling pretty good about ourselves, and had long forgotten in the veritas of our vino those embarrassing flubs of not being able to peg the scent of coriander at the start of the seminar.

We were only too eager to sample the third and final wine, quickly repositioning our blindfolds.

Simple deduction told us that we were likely to be in for a red (after all, we had already had a claret and white, so to complete the trifecta, we needed a cabernet sauvignon or merlot), and this time around even the sound of the wine being served was a dead giveaway.

No wimpy white or bashful rosé here – this was a full-bodied wine that practically glided into the glass with the weight of patient cask-aging.

The smooth texture of this fruit-forward wine proclaimed it as a red, and that message was reiterated by the intense woody scent at first whiff.

This wine was also perfumed with a hint of chocolate, leather and minerality, which seemed to again propose a U.S. lineage.

We were right, and as we raised our glasses to our sightless faces, we immediately detected the tannin-y scent of red jams and oak.

The wine was a 2011 Barón Balché Réplica blend of half petit syrah and half malbec (with vines transplanted from Argentina).

The blindfolded wine tasting exercise was, well — forgive the pun — eye-opening, but while we all made mistakes when confined to just one or two senses, we did learn to pay a little more attention to the various onslaught of smells and flavors that constantly bombard our lives.

And we also gained a new appreciation for Marín and her impeccable palate.

The Capital Grille is now offering similar blind wine tasting seminars to groups of from five to 15 people with professional sommeliers to guide you through the process. (Don’t worry, there is no need for a spoiler alert with this article because the wines presented change with every tasting.)

Worried that you might embarrass yourself in such a tasting?

Don’t be. Look how badly the panel of so-called experts did when they couldn’t figure out that they were tasting spearmint.

And anyway, everyone else in your group will also be blindfolded so they won’t be able to tell when you make a mistake.

The Capital Grille is also offering a four-class course of wine appreciation for dummies, also available for groups of five through 15, so if you feel like you flunked the blind taste test, you can always sign up for this beginner tutorial.

And if you are really daring, the restaurant even offers a daylong course on gin and tonics.

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