• To each color an aroma - Part 2

To each aroma a color

By Doris Blum

Wine-speak – cryptic for some, eccentric nonsense for others. Didier Michel expresses himself colorfully, impressing large wine producers and distributors.

“When someone says something tastes of raspberries how do I know whether we’re both thinking of the same kind of raspberry? Some taste sweet, while others are almost bitter.” Didier Michel takes exception to the “florid” comparisons so common to wine descriptions: leather, plum, chocolate or celery are just some examples of this flowery repertoire. The French chromatist and color artist with a diploma from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués in Paris started transferring wine terminology into colors around thirty years ago. In France he is now considered unequalled in this field. Major wine producers like Moët & Chandon in the Champagne, Château Figeac in the Bordeaux region or La Romanée Conti in Burgundy have all worked with him in the past.

“When someone says a wine reminds them of melon with a hint of grapefruit, I say: melon consists mainly of water and sugar, and sometimes smells of honey and pineapple,” says Didier Michel. He defines the sun-hungry fruit as a warm yellow, the grapefruit as a pale pink and the contentious raspberry, of course, as red. Didier Michel is an acolyte of the Bauhaus color design theory and works on the principle that colors have a direct influence on our senses.

Unlike language. Using a highly developed technique he has so far assigned a color to some 700 different aromas. In future, such chromatic “bar codes” could be used to describe wine on menus, wine labels and elsewhere.

In Switzerland too, the Vaud-based association Clos, Domaines & Châteaux has had Didier Michel decode several of their Chasselas wines. André Fuchs, managing director of Schenk S.A., one of the top wine producers in the country’s west, describes the color codes as groundbreaking.

Didier Michel is not the first artist to devote himself to the colorful language of wines. The eccentric Catalan Salvador Dalí, for example, painted a whole series of paintings dedicated to the subject. His characterizations are simply named “fiery wines” or “purple wines” and the associated comments don’t make matters any clearer: “Purple was always an expression of sovereignty, dignity and power. Therefore,” Dali wrote, “it shouldn’t be surprising that the top wines from the Burgundy revel in these deep reds.”

Deciphering wine aroma in the laboratories of research institutes is nothing new. With the aid of gas chromatography, a method widely used in analytical chemistry, some 600 aromatic components common to wine were discovered and identified as early as the seventies. And these components are what it’s all about, even though in chemical terms they only account for a tiny fraction of what you’ll find in a glass of wine. The lion’s share is made up of water, ethanol, sugar and traces or glycerin. In linguistic terms, a wine’s overall aroma is simply referred to as its “bouquet”, even if not all of the aromatic notes are so fragrant; for instance cat’s pee or wet wool. And even though man with his relatively primitive olfactory organ is only able to smell a tiny part of the rich tapestry of aromas, whether it be fresh hay, tar or truffles, the perception thereof is hotly debated.

>> Part 2

Translated from the German.  Originally published in the Basler Zeitung on February 9, 2007