Michael Plant, who gets up far too early in the morning, wrote:

> Dog Ma, what's that "wheel" thing you do with Ann up in Boston,
> and is it actually legal to do that there now?


Still legal, but only between people of opposite sex.

Actually, Michael's referring to a fun approach to learning and describing
flavors and aromas in wine. (It was developed at UC Davis, the big
wine-science school that also gave us square tomatoes and other agritech
travesties. Hope they never get hold of tea.) Anyway, to get away from the
"prismatic luminescence" blather, Ms. Noble has developed a flavor wheel
using commonplace referents. Better, she's developed a sort of tasting game,
in which common ingredients are added to bases of neutral red or white wine.
Read all about it at http://wineserver.ucdavis.edu/Acnoble/waw.html.

I haven't done this yet; am trying to gather a group to share the effort and
experience. Personally, I'm much less interested in nomenclatural precision
than in opening my senses to new distinctions and subtleties. I also suspect
that doing this with wine will provide new insight into smells and tastes of
tea, coffee, chocolate, and probably everything else.

If anyone else here has done the Noble experiment, please advise how it
worked. Sure would be nice if tea had some kind of accessible,
comprehensible and uniform vocabulary, at least for basics.

BTW, here are a couple more good web sites on sensory matters:

http://www.winepros.org/wine101/sensory_guide.htm

http://flatrock.org.nz/topics/scienc...the_senses.htm

-DM