I've seen flavour wheels done for Wine, Brandy, Whisky, Coffee, Beer, Italian cheese, French cheese, Maple Syrup, but none for Rum.Andrew Plotkin wrote:To fulfil the lack of descriptive clarity, people have started inventing "flavor wheels", in analogy to color and pitch wheels. It isn't a great analogy, because color and pitch both form repeating cycles, for underlying physical reasons. (Completely different reasons for color and pitch, by the way. But I won't get into that now.) Flavors don't even form a linear scale, much less one whose end matches its beginning.
Fortunately, the weakness of the analogy doesn't stop people from trying. The results are interesting. Even if they aren't wheels in the sense of the color wheel, they're organized hierarchical categories of flavor. They're usually labelled by reference, so you can either identify the categories from your own experience, or go out and find some examples.
On the other hand, none of these wheels are complete. A color wheel encompasses all pure colors (and can be extended to a 3-D solid that encompasses all colors). A pitch wheel encompasses all pitches in an octave (and if you categorize all D-flats together, the wheel encompasses all pitches). But I haven't seen a wheel which claims to describe all flavors.
Which is fine, really. The ones I've seen are for specific purposes: a chocolate flavor wheel, a coffee flavor wheel, a wine flavor wheel. The idea is to cover the flavors you're likely to find in a particular food. And each one was built by an expert in that food -- which is nice, because you can assume that the expert has tried many different varieties of that food. So you have some reason to believe that the wheel is complete, in its domain.
What is your opinion of those charts? Should Rum have one?