Seasoned cheese tasters often talk about how a cheese starts and finishes, and how it feels in the mouth. As mentioned previously, the start of a cheese is how it begins on your palate, and the finish of a cheese is how it ends. The full experience, then, is the starting aroma and taste, the middle tastes, the feel of the cheese in your mouth, and the tastes that linger, after the cheese goes down.

With starting tastes, your nose and the tip of your tongue are most involved, sensing taste through aroma and detection of sweetness. Often very mild and pleasing cheeses, like jack, Havarti, and young Goudas, have very sweet and lightly aromatic starts to them. They invite you in gently, and the flavors that follow unfold just as lightly.

As mentioned earlier, the finish is the aroma and the tastes that linger. People new to cheese tasting are often surprised to experience this for the first time. Ossau Iraty, a sheep's-milk cheese from the French Basque Pyrenees, is a spectacular example of a cheese with a long finish. It starts out slightly sweet, followed by buttery, hazelnut tones, and these are all pleasing enough to convince many people of the merits of this cheese.

But moments later, as they swallow their first bite, they realize they are beginning to experience entirely new tastes. The butter melts, the hazelnuts are roasted, and the aroma dances back and forth across the palate, bringing the sweetness back to life. It's almost like getting two cheeses for the price of one.

A Vocabulary of Taste

As you develop your palate, you'll want to go beyond sweet, salty, sour, and bitter to describe the tastes of cheese. You'll want to describe hints of butterscotch and tones of hay. Maybe you'll taste spring flowers or onions. Here is a cheese-tasting vocabulary to get you started:

• Milky: sweet, creamy, lactic

• Fruity: sweet, citrus, berry, pear, apple, plum, apricot

• Nutty: hazelnut, almond, peanut, walnut, roasted, dry, salted

• Herbaceous: grassy, herbal, vegetable, floral, hay, straw, wheat, onion, artichoke, mushroomy

• Spicy: bright, cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla, pepper, hay

• Candy: caramel, chocolate, butterscotch, toffee

• Pungent: overly salty, chemical, ammonia, stringent, barnyard, fermented, humus, burned, sour milk, wet wool

Taste Experiments

Now that you know what to look for, try a few experiments on your own. Taste conventional supermarket French Brie next to Brie de Meaux, and note where the flavors begin and end. Then try Kraft American Cheddar next to two-year-old American white Cheddar. Try a red-wax Gouda next to a six-month aged Gouda from Holland. Do a complete tasting of each and take notes. No matter which cheeses you prefer, you'll experience the difference between tastes that are short, those with one definitive taste and aroma, and tastes that are long, those that finish differently than they began.