Mandy Naglich is an Advanced Cicerone & Certified Taster and wants you to learn how to really taste your food and drink. Her journey to learning about tasting happened through being a brewmaster and Cicerone which then spread to everything else that you can eat and/or drink.
I think many people that review food or beverages start in one category and then our curiosity to taste and evaluate everything else often happens. This book, although it has some scientific and technical flavour and aroma terms, helps to show the depth of research that Mandy has undertaken in her quest to learn how to taste. Most of the book is written in a friendly style, with little quips about events in her life as she has tasted everything from beer, wine, cheese, chocolate, olive oil, and more.
Paraphrasing Mandy, the path to becoming a taster is not expensive or snobby, and not filled with Latin words. Her mission is to share what she knows about our neglected senses of smell and taste and apply it to everything that she learned since becoming a brewmaster and a Cicerone.
My Book Review
Mandy breaks down her book, How To Taste – A Guide to Discovering Your Senses and Savoring Life, into four parts: What is Taste, How to Taste, Using Your Tasting Skills, and Tasting Life. The first section, What is Taste, takes you into the science behind flavour and how different things like the colour on your plate and the ambience in a restaurant can affect your tasting experience.
In the section on How to Taste, Mandy gets into the tasting method that she uses for everything she samples. It is quite detailed. I have a tasting method I use for wine and her method has a few extra steps. I may incorporate some of them when I sample wine in the future. She also teaches you how to mentally record tastes for the future so that when you come across a flavour in the future you have a reference point.
In the third section, Using Your Tasting Skills, Mandy talks about professional tasters and how consistent they are with ratings, e.g. would the same wine get the same rating by the same taster if that wine was tasted blind, and how there is variability. She then gets into the different types of flavours we experience, like sweetness and how it affects other flavours that we may be tasting in a dish or a drink. This information would be very helpful to a novice chef. Lastly, in this section, Mandy discusses how to describe the flavours you are tasting, other than using “delicious” or “good”. For the growing number of online influencers writing about food and drink, this section would really help to expand their vocabulary and make their tasting notes much more interesting.
Finally, in the last section, Tasting Life, Mandy gives useful tips on how to keep your taste buds and your nose in top shape when you are going out to taste something. She also has some interesting tips on tasting while you are travelling and how to save your memory of that first time you taste something new. Once you do become a tasting expert, does that mean that you only can enjoy the most expensive dishes or beverages? Can a boxed wine be enjoyable? Mandy provides the answer.
To Conclude
Overall I enjoyed reading this book. It was quite an easy read and I appreciate Mandy including examples in her life and her experiences speaking with other flavour experts. This is a book that would be great for chefs, food and beverage influencers, as well as anyone that wants to dig a bit deeper into what they are tasting and maybe get a bit more enjoyment out of it.
Raise a glass of wine or beer, sniff and sip, following Mandy’s steps and start your flavour journey.
Where Can I Get This Book?
How To Taste by Mandy Naglich is from Mandy’s website, through Amazon.ca, and Indigo Chapters.
Other Book Reviews
I reviewed many other books covering wine, food, beer, cocktails and travel. You can read them at my Book Reviews web page.
