Flavor, Taste, and Money
I rather like bad wine, said Mr. Mountchesney,
one gets so bored with good wine.
—Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, 1845
As I tracked down clues about Cremisan’s wine, a more basic question emerged: What had I really tasted? I don’t mean the type of wine, or what grape variety it was, though I thought of it that way at first. I mean how my brain processed the wine. The latest research suggests that even before that first sip in the hotel room, my preconceptions influenced what we call taste.
Neuroscientist Gordon Shepherd thinks our historical understanding of flavor gets some key points wrong. He writes that flavor is not in food; it is created from food by the brain. Shepherd, a professor at the Yale School of Medicine, received his MD from Harvard and his PhD in philosophy from Oxford University, so he brings an entirely different rigor to the question of whether a bottle is “plonk,” to use the slang term for barely drinkable wine, or some critics’ vision of perfection—a 100-point score.
Shepherd and others use real-time brain scans to study how the mind reacts when people sip wine or eat potato chips, and different areas do light up with activity. In a 2015 journal article entitled “Neuroenology: how the brain creates the taste of wine,” Shepherd found that multiple brain regions fire up before, during, and after we drink a glass, “apparently engaging more of the brain than any other human behavior.”
He’s hedging on the claim, but the data is impressive, with several key points: Shepherd said our experience of flavor begins before we open our mouth. “The first step . . . occurs entirely in the head, consisting of the accumulated experience of the taster with wine in general and anticipation of this wine or wine tasting in particular. The expected flavor of the wine is thus due entirely to vision and to the imagination.” (Emphasis mine.)
Shepherd’s theory suggested how preconceptions might have influenced my first Cremisan experience. In that hotel room I was tired, the label surprised me, and some part of me was curious even though I usually avoid mini-bars. What synapses fired up in my brain that evening? I drank wine for many years before thinking about any of these points.
Of course, Shepherd doesn’t claim that flavor is all about preconception, just that many senses are at work, including sight (how wine looks), sound (fizzy bubbles or even background music), and aroma (which accounts for most of what we call taste). We don’t just smell wine by swirling it in a glass and sniffing. After swallowing, a secondary burst of aromas travel from the throat into our nasal passages, and without that we’d miss a tremendous amount of flavor.
In 2014 French researchers monitored ten expert sommeliers and ten non-experts of roughly the same sex and age as they each tasted a red wine and a white wine. The MRIs found some common areas of brain activation, and differences. Everyone’s insula, operculum, and orbitofrontal cortex lit up—areas that help process tastes and odors. But the wine experts also showed brain stem activity, suggesting that they immediately start cross-referencing various types of memories. In other words, all the training may really change how their brains experience wine. “A sommelier can distinguish a subtle difference of taste in wine by training their ability to integrate information from gustatory and olfactory senses with past experience,” the research found.
That doesn’t exactly mean somms are better tasters, since other studies question how well people really remember flavors and aromas. But somms do put their experience to use, and the new research illuminates why people respond differently to the same food or wine. Taste buds vary widely. So when you go bonkers over a particular vintage and share the news, there’s a chance it could be like praising Rembrandt to someone who prefers de Kooning.
If you’re enjoying a glass in a wine bar or buying a bottle in a store, take a moment to consider the background music. In one field study a display of French and German wines was accompanied by music that alternated between the two countries. The results? Playing French music increased sales of that country’s wines, but German music had the opposite effect—sales of French wine went down. The customers weren’t aware of the musical influence in their purchasing decisions, and the researchers remarked that the study raised ethical questions about in-store music.
In another study twenty-six people tasted three different wines, with and without classical music. They “perceived the wine as tasting sweeter and enjoyed the experience more while listening to the . . . music than while tasting the wine in silence.” The same researchers studied twenty-four people while pairing specific wine with specific music. The overall consensus was that Mozart’s Flute Quartet in D major went better with white wine, while Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet No. 1 in D major paired better with red.
But what about the grapes themselves? Flavor and aroma aren’t all mind games. A 2007 paper by French and Italian scientists in the journal Nature found that grapes have many more flavor-producing genes than their close relatives, poplars and rice. For example, the grapevine has eighty-nine functional genes that drive the production of terpenoids—types of resins, essential oils, and aromas—compared with poplar’s thirty or forty. The research also found that wine grapes have forty-three genes that drive the production of resveratrol, which may have health benefits. The scientists concluded that it may someday be possible to trace diverse wine flavors down to the genome level.
Laboratories can now detect incredibly tiny amounts of flavor. In 2008 Australian researchers identified the precise compound that gives Syrah wines their peppery taste. It’s called rotundone, and in grapes it’s present only in the skin (it’s also what makes pepper peppery). Some people can detect rotundone concentrations as low as two parts per billion in red wine (that’s roughly the equivalent of one drop in a nine-thousand gallon liquid tanker truck).
Consider this: about 25 percent of people can’t taste rotundone at all, even in much higher concentrations. Jamie Goode, the British wine writer, tells of one professor who breaks up lectures on flavor by handing out strips of blotter paper treated in a particular solution. When students put the paper in their mouths, about a quarter taste nothing at all, half find the taste bitter, and another quarter experience an extremely unpleasant, intense bitterness. In other words, there are biological (and probably genetic) differences in how we taste. Scientists call the most sensitive group “super-tasters.”
Continuing with my earlier analogy about painters and personal preferences, trying to share your love for a particular wine could be like showing a Matisse to someone who is color-blind. About 35 percent of American women are super-tasters, compared to just 15 percent of men. (Yet more men are color-blind, so I’m not sure where that leaves us in making comparisons!)
Take a moment to consider the implications of all this variation for wine lovers—and wine critics. No matter how carefully or honestly someone describes a taste, a significant chunk of the population will experience the same bottle in a different way. Not only that, but money changes everything, as the song goes.
A Stanford University study offered the same wine to people twice during blind tastings—telling them one bottle cost ninety dollars, and that the other sold for ten. The supposedly higher-priced wine was deemed to be better. There’s also this story: A sommelier found an enticing French rosé for just three dollars a bottle. He priced it at three dollars a glass, ten per bottle, feeling he was doing customers a favor. The cases gathered dust. The owner scowled. The somm couldn’t give the wine away, until he raised the price to seven dollars per glass and twenty-eight dollars per bottle. It immediately became one of the most popular wines on his list, and six cases sold out in a week.
In another experiment people were served the same white wine twice. The only difference? One bottle had a California winery label, while the other said the wine came from North Dakota. The test subjects overwhelmingly rated the “California” wine as far superior. In one more famously sneaky test, researchers again served identical white wine twice, but the second round had flavorless red food color added. The drinkers described the colored white wine as if it were a red!
Then again, instincts may sometimes be right. Steven Shapin, a History of Science professor at Harvard, points to a passage from Don Quixote that manages to both poke fun at and honor wine-tasting expertise. In the story, villagers doubt the quality of a hogshead, or barrel, of wine and ask Quixote’s squire, Sancho Panza, for an opinion. Sancho tells them:
. . . I have had in my family, on my father’s side, the two best wine-tasters that have been known in La Mancha for many a long year, and to prove it I’ll tell you now a thing that happened to them. They gave the two of them some wine out of a cask, to try, asking their opinion as to the condition, quality, goodness or badness of the wine. One of them tried it with the tip of his tongue, the other did no more than bring it to his nose. The first said the wine had a flavor of iron, the second said it had a stronger flavor of cordovan [leather]. The owner said the cask was clean, and that nothing had been added to the wine from which it could have got a flavor of either iron or leather. Nevertheless, these two great wine-tasters held to what they had said. Time went by, the wine was sold, and when they came to clean out the cask, they found in it a small key hanging to a thong of cordovan . . .
I did find something to celebrate amidst all the evidence of marketing and psychological pitfalls. Lesser-known wines had an unexpected bonus: there’s little to no “hype markup” on forgotten grape varieties (at least not yet). Even with a focus on small vineyards that produce handcrafted wines, I wasn’t paying a premium—a refreshing contrast to the astounding cost of famous French, or more recently, California wines. Most of the wines I enjoyed cost between fifteen and forty dollars, which seems very fair for an uncommon experience. If you don’t love them, it wouldn’t be a great loss.
The prices of the famous classic vintages do present a real problem. The vast majority of wine drinkers can’t afford the stuff and never have a chance to taste it. Consider Burgundy’s Domaine Romanée-Conti. Often portrayed as one of the best wines in the world, a single bottle could theoretically cost you thousands of dollars. Theoretically, because you can’t just buy one. New vintages are doled out via an opaque process that rewards long-standing distributors. You can put your name on a list, try to buy a bottle at auction, or even gamble on what might be called the wine futures market, where you pay huge sums of money years in advance in hopes of getting a bottle.
Perhaps the French poet Charles Baudelaire had the right attitude in the 1850s: “Wine resembles man. We will never know how far it is to be prized or scorned, loved or hated, of how many sublime actions or monstrous crimes it is capable. Let us not then be more cruel towards it than we are towards ourselves, and let us treat it as an equal.”
All the modern studies about wine made me consider what judgments ancient people made about it. There’s plenty of evidence that quality mattered. Pliny the Elder wrote this about the differences in wines almost two thousand years ago: “Who can entertain a doubt that some kinds of wine are more agreeable to the palate than others, or that even out of the very same vat there are occasionally produced wines that are by no means of equal goodness, the one being much superior to the other, whether it is that it is owing to the cask, or to some other fortuitous circumstance?” Another line echoes a dilemma we still face: “I shall not attempt, then, to speak of every kind of vine, but only of those that are the most remarkable . . .”
The Greek writer Athenaeus might have qualified for a job with Robert Parker’s influential Wine Advocate, based on his exuberant prose: “As for Magnesia’s sweet bounty, and Thasian, over which floats the smell of apples, I judge it far the best of all wines excepting Chian, irreproachable and healthful. But there is a wine which they call ‘the mellow,’ and out of the mouth of the opening jars . . . comes the smell of violets, the smell of roses, the smell of hyacinth.”
There is also evidence that humans developed taste preferences at an early stage in our evolution, long before grapes were even domesticated. After leaving Israel I called the Gath archeologist Aren Maeir with some questions about our sensory systems. He told me that even hunter-gatherer societies show distinct food preferences. They don’t just wander all over the place, gobbling up everything in sight.
Maier mentioned studies of the Bushmen in southern Africa. “They have a very wide range of food that they can hunt or gather, but they choose of that wide spectrum only the very specific things they find appealing. The others they’ll only use in extraordinary circumstances, for example when the preferred foods are not available, or there’s a drought.”
Maeir said recent excavations in Israel point towards discerning ancient palates. In 2013 archaeologists found a 3,600-year-old wine cellar at Tel Kabri in northwest Israel, three miles from the Mediterranean and close to the Lebanese border. The 66,000-square-foot complex is the largest palace from that era ever found in the country, and was likely home to powerful regional rulers. There was wine residue in forty large storage jars, each of which held fifty liters. Most of the wines were red, and they were flavored with various combinations of honey, cedar oil, juniper, and perhaps mint, myrtle, and cinnamon. “These additives suggest a sophisticated understanding of the botanical landscape and the pharmacopeic skills necessary to produce a complex beverage that balanced preservation, palatability, and psychoactivity,” concluded a team of researchers from several universities. In other words, the rich wanted variety and specific tastes, just like today.
Wine “labels” turned out to be far older than I expected, too. Swedish researcher Eva-Lena Wahlberg did her master’s thesis on Egyptian wine-jar labels, analyzing 444 of them, including those found at a palace city, in King Tutankhamen’s tomb, and at a laborer’s village.
Hieroglyphs contained details of specific vineyards, types of wine, and even the names of individual winemakers. Vineyards marked different jars with designations such as wine for offerings, wine for taxes, and wine for merry-making. One “label” gives these details:
Year 5
Sweet wine of the Estate of Aton
Vineyard supervisor Ramose
Others mention vineyard supervisors Hatti, Tju, and Hori, and “the vineyard of the Temple of Millions of Years . . . in the Estate of Amun that is on the river of Usermaatre-Setepenre,” and the “Very good [wine] of the Estate of Aton from the Southern Oasis.” Reading all those details, I could imagine some long-dead Egyptian forming a mental attachment to a particular vineyard, just as I did with Cremisan.
Reflecting on wine flavor and aroma, I came up with this list of influences: the variety of grapevine; the age of the vine; the soil it’s planted in; the rainfall that season; the temperatures and periods of drought; the microbes in that soil; the nematodes or other creatures that prey on the vine; the viruses or other tiny creatures inside the nematodes; the time of harvest; the type of rock, clay, wood, stainless steel, or plastic that the grapes were pressed in, fermented in, or stored in; the temperatures when any of that happened; the way the amphoras, barrels, or bottles were sealed; how long they were stored; the emotions of the people who drank the wine; the DNA of the people who drank the wine; their individual taste buds; what they read or heard about the wine before they drank it; whether they knew how much the wine cost; how it was poured or decanted; the music and light in the room; and perhaps some other intangibles we don’t know about yet. All a reminder that I still needed to look into the role of yeast and fermentation. My to-do list grew even as I checked off items.
Taking wine diversity and human diversity into account, both madly passionate wine lovers and the legions of casual drinkers make sense. Super-tasters are natural candidates for the first group—of course they go wild over all the subtle variations. For many people with average taste buds a pleasingly simple Chardonnay or Merlot may do the trick just fine. It still delivers the primordial alcohol buzz, and some can’t taste all the flavors anyway.