The Physiology of Wine Tasting

The Physiology of Wine Tasting

The sheer variety of tastes is what wine is all about. Unlike beer or spirits, wines can have an almost infinite number of tastes and even wines from two vintages or even one wine, depending on its age, can have different tastes! But why are we so sensitive to these different tastes and how do we detect them?

Many forget that one of our most important senses is our sense of smell. Perhaps one thing that people don’t realise is that the sense of smell can conjure up all sorts of emotional responses and the bouquet and aroma (known as the ’nose’) in a wine does just that!

Many people don’t realise that wine is not really ‘tasted’ in the mouth. The mouth is only capable of detecting four tastes – salt, sour, sweet and bitter. These are important parts of the ‘taste’ of wine but the real taste is generated by the nose, where the olfactory nerve endings can detect many thousands of different chemicals, each of which gives a different taste/smell sensation.

During the fermentation process the sugar present in the grape is converted into alcohol. If only that happened then all wine would taste of weak vodka and be very un-appetising. In fact many other molecules already present in the grapes and the many more that are also generated by the heat and fermentation process produce a complex combination of molecules that give us the unique combination for each wine. The continual interaction between the molecules even carries on after the wine has been finished, bottled and stored. Several molecule combinations produced are already familiar to us such as gooseberry, mushroom or strawberry, well known identified wine tastes, and where these are present in the finished wine, will give the character of that style of wine. These familar tastes are detected by the olfactory nerve endings and produce the emotion!

So just remember it all happens in the nose.

On the other hand, if you like a particular wine, do you really need, or want, to know?

Share this