How Water Can Actually Enhance Alcohol’s Flavor [Taste Test]

Water’s essential for cooking, nevertheless it’s just a little boring. It’s tasteless, neutral, and usually lacking the pizazz of alternative popular flavor-enhancers like salt, pepper, herbs and spices. But as it turns out, water can actually enhance flavor. Huh!

It started when a bartender in London observed to Times writer Harold McGee that watered down cocktails could actually smell stronger than stiffer ones. Drinks like water and whiskey are away from uncommon, but also to cutting down the alcohol’s bite, the water also intensifies the drink’s aroma.

That may appear like exactly the other of what should happen, but, McGee explains, aroma molecules are likely to cling to alcohol molecules, and when there’s less total alcohol inside the drink, the aroma molecules evaporate more readily and you get a fuller, stronger smell. And with smell being so closely tied to taste, the diluted drink can still seem plenty flavorful.

But that’s only the start. Water, McGee found, had a good more significant effect on some wines-specifically stronger wines, those containing greater than 14% alcohol:

I couldn’t find any recent trials of wine dilution, however it’s been practiced since the days of ancient Greece, so I went ahead and tried it on a California zinfandel with 14.9 percent alcohol. I poured a partial glass of the wine and added about a quarter of its volume in water, to get it right down to 12 percent.

A glass of the whole-strength wine tasted hot, dense, jammy and a touch sulfurous, while the diluted version was lighter all around but still filled with flavor, tarter, more fruity than jammy, and no more sulfurous. It was no substitute for a true 12 percent wine, made up of grapes harvested with less fermentable sugar and a special balance of flavors that we taste full-strength.

But the watered-down wine was surprisingly pleasant, and maybe more suited for summer evenings than the extreme original. I stopped up alternating sips and enjoying the contrast.

Double fisting, he means. So next time you’re playing mixologist, don’t dismiss water as something which could just be used to take the brink off. It turns out it will probably make some drinks even tastier. [ NYT ]

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This post is tagged: ancient greece, california zinfandel, flavor enhancers, herbs and spices, summer evenings