Does the container matter?
Because the flavour and odour of wine are partially constructed from elements external to the wine itself (emotions, context, etc.), it is possible to suggest that the same wine will not have the same flavour and odour if these elements differ. This was demonstrated by INRA researchers who asked 57 oenology students to taste the same wine, but presented in two different containers. In this case, only the context changed, and the tasters, of course, knew nothing about it.
The same wine was thus offered in the bottle of a grand cru classé, a prestigious wine well known to all the tasters, and then fifteen days later, in a bottle labelled "table wine". Of the 57 students, six detected the trick. Amongst the remaining 51, 50 gave lower scores to the "table wine" (average of 8/20), than to the "grand cru" (average of 13.2/20).
The comments of the tasters concerning the two wines thus appeared to be very different. While the tasters gave free rein to their views when judging the "table wine", the "grand cru" was treated with considerable respect and systematically excused for any faults. Faced with some defects, several tasters even called into doubt their own ability to taste such a great wine.
© INRA/N. Mansion ; Réf. PCD 0027- IMG0049.PCD |
From the glass... to the brain: constructing our perceptions of wine
The message generated by the activation of sensorial receptors is only the first stage (sensorial stage) in our olfactory and gustatory perception of a wine. This biologically coded message is then totally reconstructed by our brain (cognitive stage). Information arising from the other senses (sight, hearing, touch), the context (ambience), our memory (experiences, reference to a memorised wine) or other processes (pleasure, aversion, level of emotion, alertness of the brain) are then integrated with the initial sensorial signal and may considerably modify it. The signal then reaches the areas of the brain which correspond to a level of conscious perception. The cognitive stage thus serves to assemble a certain number of elements (sensorial and non-sensorial) and gives them coherence, which is what we then perceive.
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The great majority of tasters mentioned the presence of wood in the grand cru, and described the type of woodiness they perceived. However, the wine used for the experiment had never been in contact with wood. None of the tasters mentioned the presence of a woody characteristic in the "table wine". This illusion of the presence of woodiness in the grand cru resulted typically from a cognitive construct. The taster was persuaded that wood was present in the wine he was tasting, and created a representation of this wine which included a woody flavour. And surprising as this may seem, it is probable that in the context thus created, all the tasters who accepted the idea that they were tasting a grand cru actually perceived a woody flavour. The same phenomenon was observed when, during a tasting, one of the participants mentioned, for example, the presence of a blackcurrant aroma in the wine. Generally speaking, this aroma is very rapidly perceived by all tasters. It might be thought that unlike the woody flavour, the blackcurrant aroma in question was indeed present in the wine, but as we shall see, nothing was further from the truth. Colour influences olfactory comments
More astonishing, and perhaps more worrying with respect to our olfactory capacities, the INRA researchers have recently demonstrated the existence of a perceptive illusion in this area. By analysing the vocabulary used by professional wine tasters, they observed that the authors of these comments used different words to describe the odours of white and red wines. This result was particularly surprising because when subjects were asked to distinguish between a white wine and a red wine without being able to see them (the experiment being carried out using black glasses), they were mistaken in three cases out of ten.
When the words used to describe the odour of white and red wines were examined more closely, the researchers realised that for each wine, the odour descriptors involved a reference to colour. The odours of red wines were represented by red objects (red fruits, blackcurrant, raspberry, cherry, etc.), while those for white wine referred to pale-coloured objects (honey, apricot, apple, banana, etc.).
Does a wine really smell the same as objects with the same colour, or were the tasters, thinking they were talking about the odour of a wine, in fact refer to its colour? To answer this question, the researchers asked 54 oenology students to carry out a comparative tasting of a white wine and a red wine. The latter appeared to be red, but was in fact a white wine coloured red artificially using anthocyans (the natural colorants of red wine). The students were therefore asked to describe the same wine, which differed only in terms of its colour, although they were not aware of this. The results showed that the olfactory descriptors chosen by the tasters for a wine were indeed of the colour of that wine. It was therefore sufficient to modify the colour of a wine to modify the perception of aromas. White wine which smelt of butter and pineapple then smelt of strawberry and blackberry, solely because it had become red!
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