I’m preparing for the WSET Level 1 Wine exam in a couple of weeks and need to memorize detailed information about 16 examples of wine.
For each wine example, I need to recall the
name (Beaujolais, Chablis etc)
body (light / medium / full-bodied)
acidity (high / medium / low)
tannin levels (high, medium, low)
aromas (apple, red plum, etc)
grape type (pinot grigio, chardonnay, etc)
region(s) (California, Burgundy, etc)
whether it’s oaked or unoaked
Examples:
Beaujolais is a dry, light-bodied red wine from France that is unoaked, with fresh flavors of red fruits (raspberry, red cherry) and low tannins.
Sancerre is a dry, medium-bodied French whit wine. It is typically unoaked with high acidity and pronounced green fruit (apple) and herbaceous (grass) aromas. It is made from Sauvignon Blanc.
I’d love to hear any advice on specific memory techniques, systems, or methods that have worked for you in organizing and retaining this type of information.
I’m very much an amateur. I used a PAO system and memory palace to memorize the first 100 digits of pi, I have experience using visual associations to remember names and using Anki to remember flashcards.
One idea I had was to create a character to represent each of these wines. For example, “Bo” for Beaujolais… but not sure how to associate all the other details with each of these wines, and do so in an organized way I can apply to all 16 of them.
Any suggestions will go a long way, thank you so much in advance!
Some of my students who have studied to become sommeliers have followed a similar intuition.
Bo Derek would become a Body Memory Palace and with a Major-based journey from top to bottom, or bottom up, cover your bullet points handily on a bottle-by-bottle basis.
These “Statues,” as Bruno calls them, can themselves be stood in traditional Memory Palaces.
Bruno speaks of 30 stations per statue, but in my own practice, that’s been too much. I prefer the version Ron White talks about where 0 is the space over the head, thereby linking perfectly with one of the most common renditions of the Major System. The rest maps beautifully down the body because you can link the Major consonants to body parts (2 = nose, 3 = mouth, 4 = rib cage, etc.)
In other words, characters for kinds of wines is apt, and you are fulfilling Bruno’s ideal. I’m paraphrasing, but he says, “Anyone who thinks long and hard enough will come to the same conclusions about these techniques as I have.”
Hi. Bruno used body parts? I dont know much about him. Only tried to read yates book but shes too complex and dont know about mnemonics. Benavente used body parts inside buildings but I don know how to use it well. I dont know how to use palaces well. Peg and link is more easy to me. I use to study only. Not compete.
Yates knows a few things about mnemonics, but there are more than a few issues with The Art of Memory, to be sure. It’s still an important work.
In any case, Bruno’s not an easy read either, but well worth working through. It’s good for the brain to read overall and there are many gems in his texts, prompts to rethink the fundamentals and experiment with them.
One thing to question that might stimulate your practice is this:
How is a peg not a Memory Palace?
In my view, if you’re using pegs successfuly, than you are indeed using the Memory Palace technique in part. It’s just a matter of further inquiry, practice and development.
More specifically, and this is an idea I see in Bruno, every letter is a kind of statue. It has parts like a body has parts. So wherever we are using words, images, signs, symbols, sigils, sounds, etc, we are using objects in space. Space itself is a kind of object in his ontology and metaphysics, and that’s an important part of the larger consideration.
But the key point is that every sentence is a kind of Memory Palace built of multiple, mini-Memory Palaces. So where there is linking, there too is the method of loci. You’re probably better at it than you think!
Anthony, Thank you for taking the time to reply thoughtfully!
To confirm - I can use a character to represent each wine and imagine their body as a place to store the wine’s details?
For example, the head could store the acidity (maybe acid pouring out if high acidity), the mouth for flavors (raspberries and red cherries coming out of the mouth), etc…
A quick followup question - Where might I store these? Each character gets their own room in a house? Or maybe there’s a French-themed room for all the French wine character / statues?
Yes, you can, though to clarify: I’ve had students do this but have not memorized anything about wine myself (except for references to wine in poetry).
I would certainly experiment with exactly this approach were I to memorize types and kinds of wines, though. Provided that each body is optimized for Recall Rehearsal, it’s a golden approach.
Where and how you will “store” them is the great adventure for each mnemonist to enjoy.
But I place emphasis here on “store,” because having things in or on Memory Palaces is not the end goal. Using these Memory Palaces as a means of ushering the information into long-term memory is the better and higher place upon which to focus.
In fiction, Sherlock Holmes “must go” to his Mind Palace. That’s not at all my experience or finding with these techniques in reality. Sure, sometimes I have gone into Memory Palaces on the fly to “look” for things. But the ideal is to simply know the information.
For example, I gave a TEDx Talk on memory once upon a time. I used a very lovely Memory Palace to memorize the talk, but I was not “in” a Memory Palace while delivering the talk. The Memory Palace was used to usher the talk into longer-term memory for the purposes of the presentation.
Likewise in passing various language exams. The MPs were not drawn upon in any extended way because they had been used to help establish long-term retention.
In any case, I don’t mean to deviate from your exact question, but figuring out where exactly a person “stores” things is but a part of the art of memory… and I would take caution around the idea that MPs are for storing. It’s more like encoding and decoding during the learning process with the fringe benefit that you often can remember where in MPs you’ve placed the images… but don’t want to have to spend the time on navigating back when you can do things in such a way that the knowledge is known and simply comes to mind when needed.