The Great Wine Experiment (Plus: Find Out If You’re A Super Taster)

I've been considering this experiment for a while, and Patt Flynn over at Smart Passive Income gave me the kick in the gluteus to finally do it with the Pillar Post Challenge he issued in his post on getting explosive sticky traffic.

So here goes!
 

I wanted to see if I could improve my accuracy when tasting wines blind.

So I bought 9 bottles of red wine: 3 merlot, 3 cabernet sauvignon, 3 syrah.

I tasted each blind with the help of my friend Olya, who played Vanna White for this experiment.

 

As I went through about 100mL of each wine, I smelled, swirled and tasted each one twice.

She tasted them after me so that we'd have a control group.

Of course, we didn't each drink 900mL of wine (that would end in pukage), but poured what was left after our guesses into the sink for our dead homies.

Even still, I apparently got "goofier by the glass."

Lies!

 

 


 

 

Despite this professorial face, I came in at a measly 1/9 wines correct and she got 5/9 correct. D'oh!

Olya is something of oenophile herself so I wasn't surprised by her results.

Rather, I was shocked at how I did since I have a good bit of experience drinking wine and distinguishing between varieties.
 

But it was actually a good thing, since doing well would have left little room for improvement and rendered the experiment almost pointless.

"Almost" because quaffing good juice needs no pretext ( see Hip Hop and Why to Blog Drunk: The Honesty Effect ) and because measuring something, anything at all, is a habit that will make you more effective than 95% of the general population.

Measurement is the father of reliable knowledge and effective action.

 

 

For the next three days, I spent some quality time with each wine, taking notes and trying to remember what each wine smelled and tasted like.

It's been my experience that when I turn on some really good classical music and close my eyes with a glass of red wine, I perceive the nuances of both the wine and the music more intensely. ( See: how to appreciate a symphony )

There's scientific evidence to support this kind of mutual synergy between the senses. (Bolding mine)
 

The responses of 80 amygdaloid neurons to the four basic taste (sucrose, NaCl, HCl and quinine hydrochloride), thermal (5 degrees C, 20 degrees C and 40 degrees C) and tactile (brushing) stimuli applied to the anterior part of the tongue were recorded in anesthetized rats. About 90% of the taste-sensitive amygdaloid neurons responded to thermal and/or tactile stimulations of the tongue as well, and some of them showed convergent responses to tactile stimulation of various parts of the body and to acoustic stimulation. Most (86%) amygdaloid taste-sensitive neurons showed a phasic pattern of excitatory response lasting 1-2 s after onset of stimulation with the broad breadth of tuning to the four taste stimuli. About 35% of the neurons showed monotonic increasing responses with increasing NaCl concentration. The rest of the neurons showed complex intensity-response function. The amygdaloid neurons could be grouped into classes based on their best responsive stimulus, and the response profiles of those neurons showed relative regularity when the four stimuli were hedonically ordered from most to least preferred (i.e., sucrose, NaCl, HCl, quinine). Across-neuron correlations between magnitudes of responses to pairs of the four basic taste stimuli have suggested a tendency that taste information is processed in a hedonic dimension in the amygdala. The neurons in the central (Ce) nucleus showed some differential taste responses from those in other amygdaloid nuclei, i.e., about half of the Ce neurons showed tonic responses, and the across-neuron correlation coefficients in the Ce neurons were much higher than those in the non-Ce neurons.

[Gustatory responses of amygdaloid neurons in rats] - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6468560

 

These 2 pieces of music carried me through most of the experiment.
 


Zimerman plays Chopin's Ballade no.1
 


Claudio Arrau plays Schumann's Piano Concerto
 

Now before I tell you how the rest of the experiment turned out, let's find out if you're a SuperTaster, shall we?

About 25% of Americans are born as "Supertasters".

These people have an unusually high number of taste buds.

You can actually eyeball this pretty accurately. Peep:

(Click for full size)

In the photo above, the tongue on the top slide is dense with fungiform papillae (uh..tastebuds), and the second one has fewer tastebuds spread further apart.

As you can see by these photos, I'm not a supertaster.

You can use green or red dye for this but swooshing some wine around in your mouth will do the trick too.
 

If you're a supertaster, congratulations - you're officially special.

It's also more likely that you find bitter foods especially unpalatable.

Things like coffee, beer and certain veggies.

Hot foods may also burn your mouth more intensely than other people.

 

The Conclusion
 

I had three 150mL glasses per night (not unusual ) for 3 nights.
 

[Night 1] - The Syrahs [Night 2] - The Merlots [Night 3] - Ze Cabs

I logged everything from color, opacity at 90 and 45 degrees tilt, bouquet, fleeting synesthetic impressions and tasting notes.

 

As an example, here's what I scrawled for a French merlot.

La Butte du Chateau La Gatte '06 Merlot:

Color: Dark Red; Completely opaque at 90 and 45 degrees.

Nose: Loads of freshly cut apples, fresh dry dirt.

Palate: Light, fragile body, little oomph on the finish. Little flavor!

 

 

3 days later, Olya came by the crib and we did the last blind tasting.
 

This time I fared 5/9 while she dropped to 1/9.

That's a +45% increase in accuracy for me and a -34% drop for Olya.

If Olya's results are taken as the margin of error, then I'd only really improved 11%.
 

My improvement might be partially explained through the "training" I'd done.

But how to account for Olya's 34% drop?

She offered this possibility: doing well the first time may have made her cocky and caused her to pay less attention to the tasting the second time around.

Then again, it could just be the odds.
 

There are a lot of things wrong with making conclusions based on this kind of data.

One is that there isn't much of it!

The sample size is super small: Me and Olya.

Two is that the probability of guessing the correct varietal was 33%, independent of any wine knowledge or experience.

 

That means if someone with no active tastebuds did this experiment enough times, they'd guess an average 3 out of 9 bottles correct.

We only did the experiment once, and every science student knows that results must be consistently replicable to be considered valid.

By all accounts, a shabby experiment...
 

BUT!
 

The overarching question is, did I learn anything useful or actionable at all?

 

Surprisingly, yes!

 

One thing I thought would give me an edge on the second blind tasting was color.
 

 

But as I went through the 9 wines, they were all fucking purple!

AND they were all opaque.

So it's safe to conclude that for these wines, at least, color and opacity weren't reliable indicators of varietal.
 

I had also counted on my hypothesis that a grape - say, Syrah - has similar characteristics regardless of where it's grown.

This turned out to be totally false and the most shocking surprise of the experiment.

My favorite bottle of the 9 was McMannis Merlot, a luscious, smokey, vanilla and fruit compot from California.

I knew it instantly when I smelled it and identified it correctly during tasting round 2.

 

The French Merlot, on the other hand, was reminiscent of sliced apples dropped on the ground and kicked about on a dank morning near a farm by an as yet unbathed ragamuffin.

And there was no "Merlot-ness", or shared bond between the two wines, even though they were technically the same grape.
 

Nurture trumps nature.

Of course it's also possible that I simply didn't recognize the "Merlot-ness" if it was there.
 

I also believe that sharpening the senses through mindful wine drinking is a fantastic form of mental stretching and may even help stave off dementia.

To wit (bold mine):
 


The sense of smell is greatly underappreciated, despite the fact that it monitors the intake of airborne agents into the human respiratory system and determines to a large degree the flavor and palatability of foods and beverages. In addition to enhancing quality of life, this primary sensory system warns of spoiled foods, leaking natural gas, polluted air and smoke, and mediates basic elements of communication (e.g., mother-infant interactions). It is now apparent that smell dysfunction is among the first clinical signs of such neurodegenerative diseases as Alzheimer's disease and sporadic Parkinson's disease. In this brief article, the author reviews the anatomy and physiology of this primary sensory system, means of assessing its function, and major diseases and disorders with which it is intimately associated.

[The olfactory system and its disorders] - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19214935

 

But here is the most awesome thing I took away from all of this:

Enjoy the good stuff in life.
 

I was lucky that my dad educated me on the pleasures of wine from a tender age.

I even worked in a winery and drank wine while I was in doing my thrilling heroics in central America and living in my car !

Sooth, spacing out with some amazing music and vino is a very sensual and profound thing.

If nothing else came of all of this, I had great fun hanging out with a friend and enjoyed some delicious wine and wonderful music.

(And then ranted about it on the interwebs). I am happy.

Special thanks to Sashole for contributing his thoughts on this post!
 

In Vino Veritas
 

*****

Additional References:

Yale Scientific Magazine - From “Supertaster” to the Taste-blind, 2004
http://ysm.research.yale.edu//article.jsp?articleID=77

BBC Supertaster Test
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/body/interactives/supertaster/index_01.shtml#

Wikipedia Entry On Synesthesia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia

 

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