Gord Stimmel’s article this week is a great introduction to wine tasting, and it got me thinking about Tinnitus.

Tinnitus is a medical condition where a person experiences either occasional or chronic ringing in their ears. It’s usually heard in a relatively tight frequency band, and while it’s not deafeningly loud, it can cause significant stress if it becomes inescapable. There are a long list of potential causes for tinnitus, but if nothing traumatic has happened to your ears lately, and if you don’t have any peculiar genetics, tinnitus can often be traced to a malfunctioning clump of neurons. The neurons of your inner ear are attached at different points and thus, given the amazing acoustic properties of the ear, triggered only at certain frequencies. The idea is that the more of a given frequency you hear, the more that nerve (or set of nerves) will fire, and the more your brain will perceive the sound. If a particular neuron should go haywire though, and start firing at will, even in the absence of outside sound, your brain won’t know the difference, and you’ll “hear” a sound that isn’t there - a ringing that won’t go away.

There are a variety of treatments for Tinnitus, but there’s one that’s particularly relevant here (yes, I’m coming around to a point.) When an audiologist decides that your problem is indeed caused by a wayward set of neurons, they can pull of quite a neat trick: they hack your brain. What they do first is identify the frequency range that matches the ringing you’re hearing, so they know which neurons are screwing up. Now they put you through a series of “tests” where they play two tones in that range and ask you questions like “which tone was higher pitched?” They do this for hours. You come back for multiple sessions. All the while doing these seemingly meaningless tests. And the tests get harder too - maybe at the start the two tones you had to choose between were 500Hz apart, then 200Hz apart, then 40Hz apart, and now that you’ve become such an expert at this utterly useless task, they’ve got you telling the difference between 2340Hz, and 2342Hz - an incredible party trick, to be sure. What happens as well, right around now, is that you go home from the most recent round of testing, and you notice that your tinnitus is gone.

People who say the brain is a muscle are, if not idiots, at least not being literal. But the brain can adapt; it is more flexible and rewriteable than any muscle. The “which tone is higher” test, repeated over and over, is something your brain notices you paying a lot of attention to, and in a process that is more magical the more we understand it, it starts tasking more neurons to the problem. And the more you do it, the better you’ll get - there are limits, but you can see thousandfold skill improvements. And if you’re a tinnitus sufferer, this sudden influx of neurons in charge of hearing these frequencies make the one misfiring neuron a lot less of a distraction for your brain, and a much fainter ringing in your ears.

If you’re still with me, I appreciate it, because we’re about to get back to the good stuff. If you’re a neophyte oeonophile, or even if you’re a pro who’s just frustrated by the coarse and brutish palates of your friends and family, I hope the truth is becoming clear. If you want to improve your tasting “resolution,” if you want to know why some people can pick out wine notes that you swear they’re making up, the answer is plain old fashioned practice. Of course it’s a good idea to read wine reviews from expert tasters. And in order to be an interesting and rounded individual, it’s good to study up on the influence of wine in the world, the sciences of viti- and viniculture, and the merits of the major regions. Of course it’s especially good to read Corks & Vines, every single day. But if what you want to do is develop your palate, no amount of reading can get you there. This is far harder than learning to swim by reading, or learning to ride a bike from a video - really this is damned near impossible to do any other way. The single best thing you can do for your wine tasting career is to go pour yourself another glass.