On the freakin' Wine-Os.

OK, so I've bashed a few of the wine folk in the valley for posing as people with sophisticated palates, yet insisting on drinking dark-roasted coffee with cream and sugar in a 20 oz cup.
I take none of it back, but I thought I should balance these thoughts out with some positive stuff. I've been very, very impressed with some of the wine folk of late: drinking the coffee black; making very, very sophisticated and intelligent observations on the coffee.

You've got to hand it to them--they've got some great vocabulary and good imagination when they're tasting. Now, by imagination, I don't mean that they're "imagining" tastes that aren't there, but rather that it takes some creativity to identify the taste of butter-nut squash in a cup of coffee. It might be there, but most people don't put it together because they're not thinking of squash when they're drinking coffee. That's certainly an area where I could improve. I mean, I can single out a particular taste amidst the complexities in the cup, but describing the taste is very difficult.

I'm working on it. Today I recognized the smell of freshly baked pinto beans in the 'nose' of my Kenya. Hmmm, doesn't sound that appetizing, so I might not say that to a customer when I'm describing it, but I'm proud that I was able to recognize the aroma. Usually I'm stuck in the rut of coffee describing words: fruity, chocolatey, berried, lemony, citrusy, balanced, crisp, thick mouth feel, clean-finishing, etc... These aren't bad, but there are a lot more tastes in the coffee besides these. In fact, the coffee tasting wheel has twice as many tastes as the wine tasting wheel, so we coffee people should be able to describe coffee (and wine for that matter) in at least as sophisticated a way as the winey folk. Hats off to you, Wine-Os.