The Critic (17 page)

‘Enough.’

‘She’s leaving, Charlotte.’

‘That makes two of us.’

He stared at her very hard, but she refused to turn and meet his eye. ‘Because of Michelle?’

‘Because I have patients.’

And he knew there was no point in discussing it further. He looked over his shoulder to find Braucol watching him with big, sad eyes. Almost as if he had understood. Enzo breathed silent frustration through his teeth and turned the key in the ignition. The one reliable thing in his life turned over, as it always did, the characteristic tinny purr of the two horsepower engine idling patiently, waiting for him to engage first gear.

***

Sophie followed Charlotte around the
gîte
as she collected her things. ‘But
why
are you going? It’s because of her, isn’t it?’ She glared at her father. With a woman’s instinct, she had gone straight to what she perceived to be the heart of the matter. Bertrand gave Enzo a sympathetic smile, and Enzo found himself grateful for even that small crumb of support in this conspiracy of the sexes which he knew would always cast him as the villain.

‘No. I have patients.’ Charlotte wasn’t playing the game. ‘I have no reason to be jealous of anyone in relation to your father, Sophie. Least of all a child like Michelle Petty.’

Sophie looked towards Nicole at the computer, in search of an ally. But Nicole just shrugged. ‘In my limited experience, women are always fighting over him. I can’t think why.’

‘I am still in the room, you know,’ Enzo said.

When, finally, Charlotte emerged from the bedroom with her case packed, Bertrand stepped smartly forward to relieve her of the burden. ‘I’ll take that for you.’

Enzo glowered at him. A look that said,
traitor
! And grabbed the handle before him. ‘I might be nearly twice your age, Bertrand, but I think I can still handle a suitcase.’

After Sophie and Charlotte had kissed goodbye, Enzo followed the psychologist across the grass to her car and heaved her case into the trunk. She banged the lid shut, and they stood looking at each other. He wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her, and tell her if only she would commit to him he would have no need for any other woman in his life. As if she could read his thoughts from the frustration in his face, her eyes softened suddenly, and a slight smile curled up the corners of her mouth.

‘If you go to California, you’ll be flying from Paris?’

‘Probably.’

‘Stay over at my place before you go, then.’ She slipped cool fingers behind his neck and gently pulled his head down so she could kiss him. And then she stepped into the car, backing up before accelerating away on the long drive through the trees to the road.

He watched her go, filled with love and frustration and anger, and wondered if he would ever understand her.

A tugging at his feet drew his eyes down, and Braucol sprang away, never tiring of his party trick, eyebrows pushed up in anticipation of admiration or admonishment. Either would do.

Chapter Thirteen

I.

‘Hold still!’

Enzo sat in the chair with his tongue sticking out, and struggled to prevent it from twitching involuntarily.

Bertrand held his head back with one hand, and with the other squeezed the rubber nipple of his eye-dropper to let the blue food dye drip on to the tip of Enzo’s tongue.

‘Now keep your tongue out, don’t swallow.’

Enzo gurgled incoherently as Bertrand pressed the punched hole in a sheet of paper on to the end of his tongue and brought a magnifying glass up to his eye. He started counting the fungiform papillae visible in the hole.

‘Twenty-seven,’ he said. ‘Which puts you bang in the middle category. A taster.’ He gave Enzo his tongue back, and watched as the older man pulled a face and washed away the food dye with a glass of water.

Bertrand had explained the experiment before dropping dye on to each of their tongues in turn. The tongue would take up the dye, he told them, but the small round structures of the fungiform papillae, or taste buds, stayed pink, allowing them to be counted. Fewer than fifteen, concentrated in the seven millimetre hole in the sheet of paper, classified you as a nontaster. Fifteen to thirty-five, as a taster. And more than thirty-five made you a supertaster.

Nicole had been delighted to learn that she was a supertaster, until Bertrand told her that this wasn’t necessarily a good thing. ‘If you’re too sensitive to taste, then you can end up with flavour overkill. Things are too sweet, or too bitter, or too salty.’

Bertrand, Sophie, and her father all had average counts in the fifteen to thirty-five middle range.

‘We can only perceive five different tastes.’ Bertrand was warming to his subject, revelling in his knowledge. ‘Sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and
umami
—which is a Japanese word that translates as meaty or savoury.’

Enzo looked at the young man with renewed admiration. He really did know his stuff. However, this was an area about which Enzo also knew a little. ‘But we’re sensitive to thousands of smells,’ he said. ‘Although we can only identify up to a maximum of four odours at any one time in any mixture, regardless of whether it’s a single molecule odour, like alcohol, or something more complex, like smoke.’ He grinned. ‘So the next time you see some flamboyant wine review, extolling the virtues of a half dozen or more wonderful aromas, you’ll know just what bullshit it really is.’

Bertrand took up the baton again. ‘The hardest thing, though, is to identify the smells. The olfactory epithelium…’

Sophie pulled a face. “All factory what…?’

‘Epithelium,’ Enzo said. ‘The tissue that traps and identifies smell molecules.’

Bertrand ignored the interruption. ‘The olfactory epithelium in humans is only about a fifth as sensitive as cats, and we just don’t live in the same smell universe as dogs.’ He looked at Braucol, who cocked his head and looked back at him. ‘If dogs could taste wine, Robert Parker would be out of a job.’ He turned back to Enzo. ‘What made Gil Petty almost unique, was his ability to remember smells, to classify them in some way that allowed him to associate them with words.’

Enzo nodded. ‘Michelle said he had the smell equivalent of a photographic memory.’

Bertrand started lining up bottles and glasses. ‘It’s much harder than you think to identify a smell. The first day of my training course, they gave us little bottles of clear liquid infused with different odours. Some were easy, like peach, or strawberry. Others were impossible. You recognised the smell, but couldn’t for the life of you say what it was. Until the
prof
would tell you it was ground pepper. And immediately you thought, of course it is! Why the hell couldn’t I tell that?’ He turned to face the others. ‘It’s a long, hard learning process.’

‘It can’t be that hard, surely?’ Nicole said. ‘I mean, we’ve all got the same sense of taste and smell. Except for me, of course. I’m a supertaster.’

Bertrand started pouring a little wine into each glass. ‘They did this experiment in Italy with something called fMRI. I’m not sure what it stands for.’

‘Functional magnetic resonance imaging,’ Enzo said. ‘It’s an MRI scan specifically applied to the brain. It allows scientists to actually see the brain working.’

‘Well, anyway, they did this experiment taking seven professional
sommeliers
and seven other people matched for age and sex, who didn’t have any specific wine-tasting abilities, and scanned their brains while they fed them different wines.’

‘Hmmm, I’d have volunteered for that,’ Sophie said.

Bertrand tipped her a look of mild annoyance. ‘While the wine was actually in the mouth, it stimulated activity in the same area of the brain in all fourteen participants.’

Nicole let a little explosion of triumph escape her lips. ‘Like I said, we’ve all got the same sense of taste and smell.’

But Bertrand shook his head and raised a finger. She was being premature. ‘No, you’re wrong, Nicole. Because there was another area of the brain that showed activity only in the
sommeliers
. And then during the aftertaste phase, when they’d swallowed the wine, the
sommeliers
had brain activity on both sides of the…the…amagama hippo something…’

‘Amygdala-hippocampal?’ Enzo suggested.

‘That’s it. Well, the professionals showed activity on both sides of that, and the others only on the right side.’

‘So what’s your point?’ Nicole was impatient to get on with the tasting.

‘Well, the experiment showed that the professional tasters were accessing parts of their brains that the nonprofessionals weren’t, almost certainly consulting database material accumulated through training and experience. You can’t just walk in off the street and be a professional winetaster, you know It’s a learned art, and it takes time.’

‘Not much point in us even trying then, is there?’ Nicole was skeptical.

‘Well, let’s see,’ Enzo said.

Bertrand spread the tasting information sheets from the Maison du Vin across the kitchen worktop and handed them each a glass. ‘Okay, this is how we do it. We hold the base of the glass between thumb and forefinger, and tip it away from us, preferably towards something white. We’re looking for the colour here, and how the light strikes through it.’

In silence, they all did as they were told, peering at the wine through tilted glasses.

‘Okay, so this is the Sarrabelle syrah. Petty described the colour as being tile red. Like terracotta tiles on a roof. You can see what he means. It’s a good, strong red, but if you look around the edges of it, there’s a slightly brownish quality that gives it a sort of brick colour. That comes with age and oxidation. This wine’s five years old now, so it’ll be browner than when Petty looked at it.’ Bertrand glanced up at Enzo’s whiteboard. ‘He also suggested that it would have a drinking life of five to eight years. So it should be perfect for drinking right about now. Let’s see if he was right.’

He dipped his head, putting his nose right into the glass, and breathed deeply.

‘This is important. The first smell. Don’t shake the glass or disturb the wine.’ He watched as the others followed his example. ‘So what do you think? What do you smell?’

No one had any immediate thoughts to offer. Nicole looked disappointed. ‘I don’t really smell anything. I thought I was supposed to be a supertaster.’

Bertrand shook his head. ‘No, you smelled something. You just haven’t identified it. Try again.’

They all tried again.

‘Fruit,’ Enzo said.

‘Yeah, fruit,’ Sophie agreed.

‘Yes, but what kind of fruit?’

‘Plums.’ Nicole looked pleased with herself. ‘Red plums.’

‘No, I’m getting strawberries,’ Sophie said. ‘And maybe something a little more tart, like black currants.

‘Could be rasperries there,’ Enzo said.

‘Yeh, and ripe melon.’ Nicole was on a roll now.

Bertrand sighed in exasperation. ‘Sounds like you’ve found a whole fruit salad in there.’

‘Okay, smartass, what do you smell?’ Nicole thrust her jaw at him.

Bertrand sniffed again. ‘Strawberries certainly. Raspberries, maybe. Red fruit, for sure. But we need to swirl the glass and smell again?’

‘Why?’ Sophie asked.

‘To get oxygen into the wine and release more of the smell molecules.’

So they all swirled their glasses and hung their noses over the rims once again.

‘Big fruit,’ Enzo said. ‘And something meaty, maybe.
Gibier
. Like game. That…what was it,
umami
smell?’

Bertrand canted his head doubtfully. ‘I don’t know. I’d say it was more…woody. Oak, maybe.’

‘Liquorice!’ Nicole looked pleased with herself. ‘I can smell liquorice.’

Sophie breathed deeply from her glass. ‘Me, too.’

Enzo began counting on his fingers. ‘Okay, so now we’ve got strawberry, raspberry, red plum, ripe melon, black currant, meat, liquorice and oak. That’s eight different smells.’ He looked up at the whiteboard. ‘Petty lists five.’

‘I thought you said we could only smell four things at the same time,’ Nicole said.

It was Bertrand who responded. ‘Yes, but we’ve had two tries at it, the second time after oxygenation. So we’re picking up different things.’

‘Too many things,’ Enzo said. ‘I’m not sure this is going to work, Bertrand.’

But Bertrand was not to be deterred. ‘We’ve still to taste it, Monsieur Macleod.’

‘About time.’ Nicole raised her glass with relish.

Bertrand lifted his own glass to his lips. ‘Just take a small mouthful, then let it flow back over your tongue. The front of the tongue is more sensitive to sweet tastes, the back of it will pick out the sharper notes. And while the wine is still in your mouth, suck in a little oxygen to help the wine release its flavours.’

They all gurgled and slurped, and Nicole nearly choked.

Bertrand kept up his commentary. ‘The first thing you experience is the attack. That initial flavour and texture in the mouth. Then as the complexity of the wine develops, you should start being able to distinguish all the flavours. And after you’ve swallowed, there’ll be an aftertaste—what’s called
the finish
. The longer that lasts, the better. Provided, of course, that it’s a pleasant taste. Then, really, we should spit it out.’

‘I’m not wasting wine this good.’ Sophie rolled her eyes dreamily. ‘It’s fantastic. Smooth and silky. And I’m not getting any of that meat that you were smelling, Papa. But I’m still getting strawberries.’

‘And liquorice,’ Nicole chipped in.

‘And soft, soft tannins,’ Bertrand said. ‘And vanilla from the oak.’ He smacked his lips noisily several times. ‘And the finish just goes on forever.’

But Enzo was looking at the board again. ‘Petty lists codes for six flavours. We’ve come up with three.’

‘Yes, but he’s also describing textures, tannins, acidity, complexity, finish,’ Bertrand said. ‘Just look at any of his reviews. And those pluses, and plus-pluses alongside the codes probably translate as something like
very
and
extremely
, or words to that effect.’

Enzo shook his head. ‘All of which means, we’re wasting our time here. There are too many variables. We’ve hardly agreed on a single smell, or flavour.’

‘Can’t we even just
try
the other wines?’ Sophie said, disappointed.

‘Or even just finish this one.’ Nicole held out her glass for Bertrand to fill it up.

‘Apart from drinking them for the pleasure of it,’ Enzo said, ‘I don’t see the point. Like Bertrand said, you can’t just walk in off the street and be a professional wine taster. It would take an experienced professional to identify the smells and flavours we’re looking for.’

Bertrand sipped thoughtfully at his syrah. ‘And I know a man who might be able to do just that, Monsieur Macleod.’