Wine and umami? This may just be the trick to elevating your wine tasting experience

A trip to Hermanus is always a delectable treat. And it’s no wonder: in 2019 the Overstrand region became the first in Africa to join the Unesco Creative Cities Network as a City of Gastronomy in recognition of the work done in using its food tourism industry to address social-economic development challenges. According to the educational, scientific and cultural organisation, this is a recognition driven by pillars of creativity and innovation.

As a good example of this, I recently attended a dinner at Creation Wines in celebration of 21 years in the wine industry where everything I’d previously been told about wine tasting was turned on its head.

In a move to elevate the wine tasting experience, the team in the Hemel en Aarde valley is using applied science to work with and reveal nature. To accomplish this, they’ve been working with professors around the world, looking at things such as virology.

They’ve recently partnered with a team of researchers which includes Prof Gabriel Lepousez, a neuroscientist and expert on sensory perception and brain plasticity from the Pasteur Institute in Paris, who is working on several projects with Stellenbosch University.

“In short, we intend to look at how we reverse engineer wine compounds from viticulture through to the fermentation process,” said Carolyn Martin from Creation at their celebratory dinner during which Lepousez enthralled diners with his explanations of the umami thresholds of wine.

But what is umami and what does it have to do with wine?

“I would say it’s the forgotten taste,” explained Lepousez. “If you translate it into English, it means ‘delicious’. We don’t use the word to describe our food even though this umami taste is everywhere. The idea is to put umami back on the stage and show that this taste is relevant also for wine.”

According to Lepousez, understanding umami and being able to identify it can help enthusiasts and drinkers to better understand wine — and that is no small feat. “Wine or having a piece of food is super complex. It’s more complex than looking at a painting, it’s more complex than listening to a piece of music. We’re trying to open a new door in the field of wine tasting.

Part of the work Lepousez is doing is helping people to understand that even though wine tasting can be an intimidating space, it’s a personal experience. He says at least a third of our taste receptors and genes work differently which means we don’t taste things in the same way.  

The idea is simple: if you enjoy it, wine should be accessible to you and you should be interested without feeling like your experience doesn’t matter.

This is only a recent excellent example of why the Overberg region was awarded the Unesco recognition and why Creation won the Great Wine Capitals (GWC) Best of Wine Tourism award for Innovative Wine Tourism three times.

Creation was started in 2002 by Carolyn and her husband, Swiss-born winemaker Jean-Claude. During this time, they’ve made a mark in the South African wine industry.

They have also been ranked the number one vineyard in Africa according to the World’s 50 Best Vineyards, have been in the top 50 twice and made the top 10 in 2021. Recently, the estate also won the GWC 2023 Wine Tourism Restaurant award as well as the Wine Tourism Services award.

“I set out on this mission to be recognised as one of the most innovative wine estates in the world but my mission was in three years and it happened three months later,” Carolyn told me when we discussed their award for innovation.

“People don’t really understand the impact of wine tourism on the economy,” she added. Each visitor to Creation creates 11 jobs locally. In other words, while they are enjoying themselves, they’re also making a valuable contribution to local economic development.

Looking at where they started and where they are today, it’s difficult to fathom the vision it took to make this happen.

For Carolyn, it’s all about grit and having the tenacity and staying power to work through the issues they faced. For one, they had little infrastructure when they started on what was essentially a farm with some sheep and an 11km gravel road.