Yesterday I ran into the product SanTásti on the Food & Beverage Buzz blog. Janet Majors writes about and recommends the slightly carbonated beverage that can be used during wine tastings to cleanse your palate. Basically, it is a clear, mostly tasteless liquid with a bit of sugar and citric acid and about half the carbonation of sparkling water.
After drinking different wines, a person’s mouth will be affected by the sugars and tannins and wines drunk later will essentially taste different. By drinking this beverage, however, your tongue will be ‘cleaned up’ and the acidity, sweetness, and astringency in your mouth will be rebalanced ready for a fresh taste of wine.
Of course, to the average drinker at home this product probably won’t be worth it, but if you are making a trip to California wine country, attending a wine tasting, or in the wine/beverage trade, a drink like this may come in handy. The site does doest try to cross market the product billing it as a drink to make you taste things more (after coffee or during a dinner party), but I think that goes a bit far. Bottled water’s reputation isn’t that great right now, and I am simply not going to order it to taste my food a bit better.
The beverage is a creation of Nicole Chamberlain and Andrew Macaluso who met each other as freshmen at Cal Poly. They later entered the new Wine and Viticulture Program at the school and used their science background to create the SanTásti beverage in 2008. I can imagine how a drink like this would be invaluable to enology students who need to differentiate between a lot of different wines.
On the SanTásti website, they have a tips page that features an 8-minute video by a blogger who tests the new drink. It involves a guy sucking and swishing wine and talking a lot during a sample tasting. The video could have been much shorter, but it gets the point across. Apparently, the SanTásti drink does a good job of cleansing the palate and preventing taste bud fatigue.
I was intrigued enough to order a sample, so they are shipping me my two bottles at a total cost of $5. I’ll give it a try, and if it works I may order a pack before my next trip to wine country.
