How to Memorize Wine Facts Using Naked Ed Norton
3 tips on how to remember what you drink from memory expert Joshua Foer
Posted: Sep 25, 2012 11:00am ET
Getting
"good" at wine is not necessarily just about being good at tasting wine. A lot
of non-drinking homework is involved too. And the crazy volume of places, names
and vintages tends to reward those with a good memory for facts (or those who
work at memorizing facts).
It's
probably no accident many folk in the wine trade have deep knowledge of sports,
music or film. Being knowledgeable in those fields seems require the same kind
of memory skills as wine—what I refer to as the "baseball card" type of memory.
Runs batted in, home runs and batting averages are not so far from blending percentages,
months in new oak and harvest conditions.
I am,
unfortunately, terrible at this kind of memorization. Judging by the number of
stories I hear from sommeliers or wine retailers about customers asking for
"that bottle they had before with the green label and a name that started with
either a 'C' or 'T,'" I know I'm not alone.
Isn't it
enough to just focus on the immediacy of the wine drinking experience? Or isn't
remembering the tastes of a given wine the most important thing? Yes, and no.
It may seem like nerdy esoterica when a sommelier is rattling off details of
how the south-facing Mosel vineyards fared in 2002, but these are the tiny
bones that form a skeleton of knowledge. Without these facts, you don't have
the framework to hold up the taste memories—to get a working knowledge of what
15 months in oak taste like, or to recognize that most wines from 2007 in
Barolo have a particular character.
But is it
possible to get better at remembering data? Certainly, suggests author Joshua
Foer, in his 2011 book Walking with Einstein: The Art and Science of
Remembering Everything, which chronicles his rise from regular guy to winner of the 2006
U.S.A. Memory Championships. His experience shows that we all have the ability
to improve our memory, with effort.
I called
Foer to see if he had any memory tips regarding wine specifically. Below are
three of his suggestions.
To
memorize the name of a wine, create an outlandish image (that is different from
the label)
"All of the
memory tricks that go back to antiquity depend on using your visual memory to
come up with an image that you can tie to whatever it is you're trying to
memorize to make it more memorable," said Foer. I flipped open the October
issue of Wine Spectator and picked out the Bodega Norton Mendoza Privada 2009 as a test case.
The tasting note mentioned that it was a blend of three grapes: Malbec, Merlot
and Cabernet Sauvignon.
Foer walked
me through his process of creating a new image: "I would do an image that ties
all of those pieces of information together. For Bodega Norton, I would have Ed
Norton, the actor. I would want to remember there were three kinds of grapes,
so I would imagine him hobbling around on one foot with a grape in three
appendages. For Privada, maybe it's about his private parts. Picture Ed Norton: He's naked, on one foot and there's a grape in each hand and one under a foot …"
Foer continued, adding details to make it more vivid, but you get the
picture: "That is a really bizarre image. If I come back and ask you six weeks
from now, that image will hopefully be accessible. Those cue your ability to
remember these other facts."
Think
about wine as geography (and then imagine what it looks like)
"The best
way to remember information is for it to have meaning and context," said Foer
when I asked him how to memorize appellation maps. "What we did with the Norton
was to create an image that had context for information that previously had
none. A map, however, has real context."
Foer
suggested that beyond just memorizing a map, however, one might do well to
conjure actual images of the place: "One thing you might try is if you could
actually have a picture in your mind of what Mendoza is like—that's another
layer of meaning."
Turn
numbers into a picture
Between
vintage dates and blending percentages, wine stats tend to be heavy on numbers.
"I use a trick for memorizing numbers that goes back to the 17th century
[called the Major System]," said Foer. "It works by translating numbers into
words. For example, if I want to remember a wine is from 1974, I would picture
an image of a car, because '74 translates to "C" and "R" or "car." And you can
do that with any number. It truly takes all of five minutes [to master the
system]. Once you have that, it's a way of taking information like numbers, which
tend not to have meaning or context, and giving them a context in your memory."
Do you have
any other good tips on memorizing wine facts? How do you keep track of all the
wines you've tasted? Leave your suggestions in the comments.
Sorry, what were we talking about?