Is the way we think and talk about wine a form of cultural colonialism that hampers our ability to enjoy what’s in the glass? A provocative question, but stick with me.
Whether or not you subscribe to old guard publications like Wine Spectator, the wine notes you’re most familiar with — and probably utilize yourself when describing wine — tread a well-worn path featuring fruits, flowers, spices, herbs and earth/animal notes that are deeply familiar to Western palates. But critics and winemakers can only offer notes that correspond with their personal experience, and the fact is, most prominent critics and winemakers were raised on a steady Western diet. That’s the big picture, in a nutshell. But there are other considerations.
“What about someone raised in a place that has 10 different types of bananas, all of which taste completely differently, or 20 types of citrus?” wonders Adam Casto, winemaker at Ehlers Estate Winery in Napa. “The banana or mandarin that serves as a reference point for many of us would be completely useless and possibly even unproductive for them.”
That would be reason enough to change the way he thought about tasting and discussing wine. But that’s just one element of a broader journey that he and many other wine professionals are embarking on that could radically reset the way we taste and assess the flavor of wine — and everything else, for that matter.
How to Taste Everything (and Not Sound Pretentious)
How taste expert Mandy Naglich demystifies whiskey, beer and moreIt all stems from a book by the late neuroscientist Gordon M. Shepherd, who broke down in layman’s terms how the brain creates the taste of wine and how each individual’s personal experiences in the world shape their perceptions. The book, Neuroenology: How the Brain Creates the Taste of Wine, is a cult hit in wonkier wine circles.
Neurology has become one of the most exciting fields of science for anyone curious about the nature of what makes us human. One of the most fascinating subsets of neurology involves the study of brain activity, which helps us better understand how language is processed and decisions are made.
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), invented in the early 1990s, allows scientists to explore and analyze how we taste, which brain regions are activated during the tasting experience and how that affects our perception of said tastes. In the process, neuroscientists have also proven, once and for all (I hope!), that tasting wine stimulates more areas of your brain than solving complex math problems. (Just to be clear, the science proves that tasting — actually smelling, tasting and analyzing — wine, as opposed to thoughtlessly guzzling it, is more of a brain exercise than advanced trig.)
The Science of How Flavor Is Perceived
Wine — or really anything we drink or eat — does not inherently contain flavor. It contains flavor molecules that our brain surveys and interprets through a complex behavioral system that holds our memories, perceptions, emotions, language and decision-making prowess. Every time smell and flavor data gets evaluated in your frontal lobe, it’s compared with thousands of other smell and flavor experiences you’ve had.
Much of our ability to perceive flavor depends on our nose. Once you have that cab in your mouth, most of the flavor you’re experiencing comes from retronasal, or internal smelling, using air from your throat, which wafts scent molecules up to receptor cells in your nose. But the act of actually putting the wine in your mouth and savoring it also affects the flavor, according to neuroscience. It’s moved around on the tongue’s eight very active muscles and stimulates thousands of taste and odor receptors. Plus, the wine interacts with the saliva in your mouth, breaking down the wine’s molecules and producing compounds (depending on what you’ve consumed that day) that were not originally in the wine.
In other words, we take a sip of cabernet sauvignon, and that sip gets processed through our “brain computer,” which then regurgitates an assessment. Like AI and Siri, this appraisal is deeply influenced by the data that built the system, with many similarly flawed results.
“This emerging field, which has just entered the public consciousness in the last several years, has brought to my attention how important the cognitive process is to sensory experience,” Casto says. “I’ve started separating taste — bitter, sweet, sour — from flavor — like cherry or chocolate, for example — when assessing and discussing a wine. I also focus a lot more on texture.”
Casto says he tries to create a consistent “saliva matrix” in his mouth every time he tastes wine now, grabbing a handful of almonds ahead of tasting to create a baseline for his brain and palate. He’s also tried to eliminate color and other visual cues from the experience, which he says can significantly impact his impression of a wine’s taste.
“When I’m blending or doing a serious wine assessment, I use black glasses now and taste the wines in a low-light environment,” Casto says. “I did a trial with the winemaking team, and it was so revealing. I served them pinot grigio with food dye added to mimic rosé, light reds and heavier reds, and they described them as you’d expect. The wine that presented as a rosé showed notes of strawberries and so forth. And even though I’d conducted the experiment and knew what was going on, I found myself falling into the same trap.”
The human tendency to adhere to baked-in judgments that belie facts has been documented. The neurology of confirmation bias — a phenomenon whereby we interpret new evidence of our existing beliefs and theories, i.e. rosé wine tastes like strawberries — is well-established.
When I’m blending or doing a serious wine assessment, I use black glasses now and taste the wines in a low-light environment. I did a trial with the winemaking team and it was so revealing.
Adam Casto, winemaker at Ehlers Estate Winery in Napa
Casto is also shifting away from descriptions of flavors like “strawberry” when analyzing wine, instead opting for impressions and feelings, a la Maya Angelou, who famously said “people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Erik Kramer, winemaker at WillaKenzie Estate in Yamhill, OR, has also become increasingly concerned with the way “physiological factors, tied directly to genetics” may drastically change the way we experience wine. “What’s happening in real time as you taste is proteins in your saliva are binding with the tannins that are present in the wine, drawing moisture away from the tongue,” Kramer says, adding that someone with higher “salivary protein levels” would inevitably perceive tannins differently than someone with average or below-average salivary protein levels.
Kramer notes that while he can’t “cater to all physiologies with one wine, it explains why we all have different preferred qualities in wine.”
When describing the terroir-specific pinot noirs produced at WillaKenzie, Kramer leans on texture and mood to introduce wine lovers to the one that might best suit them. “You might prefer our Emery Pinot Noir, which is brooding and darker, or you might prefer our Aliette Pinot Noir, which is floating and ethereal,” Kramer says. “Preferences are ultimately shaped by what you are physiologically predisposed to enjoy based on your genetics and life experiences.”
Memories, and how they infuse the scents and flavors we pick up, inherently alter our perceptions. “To me, the WillaKenzie Estate Chardonnay reminds me of sweet mustard seed, but to someone who hasn’t eaten a lot of mustard, they might equate it to white miso and yuzu,” Kramer says. “We can share how we feel the wine smells based on our memories, but if someone doesn’t have a similar experience, it can be harder to communicate those aromas and flavors.”
Shifting to describing wine through textures — like a chardonnay’s energy, nervousness, salinity and creaminess — provides a more universal language that anyone can relate to, regardless of their life experience.
Remixing Wine Tastings to Maximize Perception
Jo Burzynska — a New Zealand-based sound artist, wine writer and researcher, and a Doctor of Philosophy with a PhD in sound and wine — leverages this new understanding of taste with those who want to level up and think more deeply about how they taste wine without wading into “salivary matrix” territory.
“fMRI scans have shown us just how interconnected our senses are,” Burzynska says. “My research explores how the sensory experience of wine is effectively remixed by the environments in which it’s drunk, with a focus on how sound affects the perception of its aromas and flavors.”
Her research shows that crossmodal correspondences — i.e., an experience in which one sense influences an experience in another — change the way people assess a wine. “If you’re sipping a glass of pinot noir in a club with thumping bass, my research suggests you’ll likely find the wine feels fuller bodied than if you were drinking it in a quiet room,” Burzynska says. “Some of these correspondences appear to be universal and are likely based on neurological connections in the brain.”
But others, Burzynska is quick to add, are specific to certain groups or cultures because personal experience inherently shapes our ability to discriminate and assess flavor and taste. She advises restaurants, bars and wineries on providing the ideal environment conducive to enhancing the enjoyment of particular wines. As for her work assessing wines, she says she always opts for a “quiet, neutral space.”
In the end, there are many more oppressive and alienating ways to conduct business than to describe a rosé as having strawberry notes and call it a day. But expressing the mood and texture of that rosé may still be more democratic, not to mention accurate.
Like any other muscle, sniffing and tasting improve the more you do them. Consider your next wine (or beer, bourbon or bonbon) tasting experience as an exercise in data collection that will only enhance future tastings down the road; do it in silence, then crank up the bass. And the next time you see a new-to-you fruit or flower, pick it up and take a whiff in the name of neuroscientific analysis.
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