“Wines are not made chiefly to please the senses of sight and smell—­ Aroma, like colour, is a favourable or unfavourable sign, agreeable or disagreeable.  Yet before everything wine is a nourishing beverage.  It is a very good thing that sight and smell should be gratified in this way, but it would be puerile and ridiculous to exalt beyond measure the importance of these organs of sense; and to pretend that the superiority of wine rests almost exclusively on the pleasurable impressions which are derived therefrom.  I have seen many hosts bother their guests with vexatious insistence to look at, hold up to the light, sniff their wine, even the empty glasses, almost throughout the whole duration of a banquet—­at the risk of making them well nigh die of thirst.  The true amateur, the wine-taster, knows perfectly well how to look at and how to smell his wine; but he knows full well also that these two preliminaries ought to be immediately followed by the taking of the fluid into the front part of the mouth.  Colour and smell are merely two notes introductory to a gastronomic theme; if they are only by themselves they lose their relative value, and the theme is not properly understood.

“Wine judged by taste; that is, by the mouth at its anterior and posterior part.—­Before speaking of the impression wine gives to the sense of taste, I ought to say that this sense is the only one in the animal organization which possesses a double apparatus for perception—­ one at the tip and edges of the tongue, the other at its root and at the soft palate.  The first perceives acid or electro-positive tastes through the two lingual nerves; the second detects alkaline tastes by the two glosso-pharyngeal nerves.  Tastes perceived by the front part of the mouth, in the case of liquids as well as solids, are not the same as those discriminated by the back part of the mouth.  An alkaline salt, for instance, gives to the front part an acid, styptic, salt, or sweet taste, but communicates to the posterior part a basic, bitter, or saponaceous taste.

“Wine-tasting properly so called.—­Wine taken into the front part of the mouth gives rise to acid, sweet, and styptic tastes at the outer edges and tip of the tongue.  All shades, in harmony, ought to give a pleasing sensation to the organ, when neither acidity, sweetness, nor astringency predominates.  Next we pass the wine to the posterior part of the mouth, and delay it there by a kind of gargling.  It is now that we get the smack of the soil, the taste of cask or wood, the insipidity of salts, or any bitterness.  If the whole effect is pleasing to the back part of the mouth, with the absence of all disagreeable impressions, we must, to put the finishing touch on the wine-tasting,