The umami in wine, the right pairings to make

If you spontaneously associate umami with Japan without quite knowing why, let's clarify at the outset: umami is neither a flavor inherent to Japanese cuisine, nor inaccessible to Western palates. Quite simply, the chemist who discovered it over a hundred years ago, Kikunae Ikeda by name, is Japanese. To popularize his discovery, he chose the word umami, literally "savory taste".

Why does this concept seem so foreign? It's hard to distinguish a flavor that's never been named, as language defines our relationship with the world. On the other hand, we universally possess the sensor that enables us to detect it, at levels that differ little between individuals.

Our taste buds perceive amino acids, the building blocks of the proteins we need to survive. Three in particular are responsible for umami: glutamate, the predominant amino acid found in all animal and plant proteins, disodium inosinate, found in fish, and disodium guanylate, found in mushrooms in particular.

How do you detect umami in the mouth?

Flavor is more like a sensation. An enveloping sensation of roundness and softness. Think of a deep chicken broth, capable of comfort that doesn't come from fat alone. Umbami resembles saltiness, but its persistence in the mouth and the salivation it provokes take us elsewhere. It's this delicious je-ne-sais-quoi that makes each spoonful addictive, and encourages us to take a refill (to finish the sausage, for example).

The processes of drying, fermenting, ripening and cooking release glutamate. Umbami can be found in a spoonful of soy sauce, a tomato compote or a pan-fried shiitake. And just look at the effect these crystals have on old counties, sometimes mistaken for salt? Extremely tasty grains of amino acid, super umami!

Wine taster and neurobiologist Gabriel Lepousez details the presence of several types of saltiness in wine. One of these is umami, a caressing taste that lingers on the finish and makes you salivate intensely.

Which wines have umami?

It's important to understand what brings umami to wine. First, yeast. Their degradation during aging on the lees generates umami compounds. The longer the maturation, the more umami the wine. Secondly, poor soils. They cause a nitrogen deficit in musts. During fermentation, metabolically stressed yeasts produce more succinic acid, which has an umami taste.

Note that it's easier to read this flavor in wines with moderate acidity and tannins, so that these markers don't overpower its subtlety.

To get started, try these three wines, which are unexpectedly linked by this same gustatory trait:

• a champagne, aged on lees for several years
• a vin jaune, aged for six years in barrel
• or a Muscadet cru, which combines long ageing on lees, poor soils and malolactic fermentation to moderate acidity.

Sake, made from fermented rice, is also an intense umami concentrate.

What to pair it with?

In addition to the full, persistent salivation provoked by umami wines, which is ideal for tying food together, one characteristic of umami is particularly relevant to pairings. Synergy is created when several umami products are brought together. The overall intensity of taste is then multiplied, and the tasting experience takes on a broader dimension than if you had pecked at each food one by one.

To test this principle for yourself, try a crémant aged on laths for 36 months with a parmesan cheese, a Burgundy pinot noir or a Loire gamay with a long-aged cured ham, or a riesling with spring asparagus.