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
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:
-DM