| The often overlooked sense when it comes to wine |
The eyes do, indeed, set the table.When a wine is presented to you, your first impression is what you see. It`s the initial pit stop of the sensory choo-choo train, followed by smell [olfactory]. tactile [touch] and taste [gustatory]. Sight is at the bottom of your senses in that it is the least perceptive of the four senses we em ploy in evaluating wines, notwithstanding the sophistication of the human retina. Its 100 million rods and cones and its layers of neurons perform at least 10 billion calculations per second and every second 10 trillion particles of light pass through the pupils of your eyes.They are received by the rod and cone cells in the layers of the retina, and, stimulated by light, the nerve cells begin transmitting signals to the brain. Some experts suggest the human eye can distinguish 300,000 different colour judgments. In our daily life, however, we encounter a tiny fraction of this potential. Each wine has its own particular colour and a range of colours it will span during its lifetime. For the most part, wine colours originate from two sources: the skins of the grapes and the effect of oxidation. Other influences include climate, the soil, maturity of the fruit, the grape variety, the fermentation process, aging and oak barrel treatment. As the red wine train cugs along, the colours will reveal themselves in the following sequence: inky, purple [still wearing diapers], violet, red, ruby, garnet, mahogany, brick, orange, amber and brown. White wines, on the hand, become darker as they age: water-white, green-yellow, pale yellow, lemon, straw, gold, amber and brown [deceased]. What colour is your wine this evening ?
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