Your taste buds taste four different things: Sweet, sour, salty and bitter. (Your nose really lets you know what you're eating.) A Japanese chemist "discovered" umami in the early 1900s. (Merrium-Webster Online defines umami as a taste sensation that is meaty or savory and is produced by several amino acids and nucleotides as glutamate and aspartate.)

"There is a taste which is common to asparagus, tomatoes, cheese and meat but which is not one of the four well-known tastes of sweet, sour, bitter and salty." He named it umami, from the Japanese word umai or "tasty." It has since been characterized as everything from meaty to savory and even chicken-brothy.

Undoubtedly, some of the early opposition to accepting umami as a legitimate taste stemmed from our inability to describe it in words, which gave it a somewhat mysterious aura. But just try to describe what salt tastes like without using the word salty. Umami is the fifth taste.

Professor Ikeda was able to extract the essence of umami from the seaweed kombu. It turned out to be a family of chemicals called glutamates which are salts of glutamic acid, one of the amino acids that are the building blocks of proteins. No less a slouch at business than at chemistry, Ikeda sold his formula for making monosodium glutamate (MSG) in 1917 to the Ajinomoto Co., which still supplies about one-third of the world's 200,000 tons of MSG per year. You can find it in the local supermarket. MSG has been under the microscope because it causes headaches and high blood pressure. MSG helps increase the appetites of the elderly.

Umami rich foods include: Mushrooms, tomatoes, soy sauce, fish sauce, asparagus, avocado's and Parmigiano Reggiano. Wheat also has a lot of umami.

What does umami do for wine? Pinot Noir, in this writer's opinion, has some umami. There's this earthy, acidic and almost creaminess in many Pinot's. Mushrooms and tomatoes pair nicely with Pinot and are rich in umami.

Contrasting wines with umami rich foods include dry sparkling wine and dry, unoaked white wines, like Sauvignon Blanc.

People like to eat umami rich crackers with wine for some reason. Crackers clog up your palate. Lighter rice crackers will work a bit better than the norm.

Umami is interesting. Check out the Chicken Marsala Recipe in the recipes section.