Wine Enthusiast Magazine
SubscribeThis happens every day in group wine tastings or competitions: one group of tasters loves a wine that the other group really hates. These are experienced tasters who love wine. So how can they be so far apart?
I’ve often thought that the reason people can’t agree over which wines are best or worst is simply because they have different likes and dislikes. It must be comparable to people who love classical music vs. those who love hip hop. They’ve been enculturated to like one, and may extremely dislike the other because it’s not their’s.
But it’s becoming increasingly clear that something else is happening in wine tastings.
It’s not just that one taster has grown up to love lean red Burgundy from off years and can’t make the cultural leap to the ripe, full-bodied California Pinot that another taster rates 97.
The real issue, being confirmed a bit more each month by scientists and wine educators, is that the two tasters’ bodies don’t physiologically perceive the wines in the same way. It’s as if two music listeners didn’t hear the same notes.
Tim Hanni, a master of wine and long-time wine educator has staked his career on this issue, and it looks like we’re going to hear a lot more from him in the future. He recently was profiled in a big feature piece in the Wall Street Journal, and is working out a deal with Copia: The American Center for Wine, Food & the Arts in Napa to partner on promoting new ways to understand wine preferences.
The key difference between people lies in their taste buds, which has been known for many years. But Hanni has developed a more accurate way to rate people’s taste buds for sensitivity, and also now considers their habits and enculturation to classify them into three taster types: Tolerant taster, sensitive taster, and hyper-sensitive taster. The tolerant ones often love massive, saturated, tannic wines. The hyper-senstive ones truly like sweet white Zinfandel, because it’s gentle on their palates. Each can learn to like other things, by growing alternate neural pathways, Hanni says, but they’re always going to have a physiological bias.
He “did my buds” last week and I turned out to be in the large middle group, a sensitive taster. I guess that goes with being a Libra and having everything well balanced out. He dyed my tongue purple, and took three photos of it up close. Weird to look at, I must say. Check out the “budometer” and related survey on his website.
He also evaluated a written survey I completed for him, in which I ranked my preferences in types of coffee, salty snacks, cocktails, wine styles, and my stand on issues in wine tasting, like whether I’m an ABC person and for or against corks. It’s the secondary stuff besides counting the taste buds — what Hanni calls aspirational values — that provide the newer twist on assessing tasters.
The immediate purpose was so I can be a taster in the Lodi International Wine Awards next month. It is the first wine competition that will segregate the judges by palate sensitivity, and award medals in a way that will allow consumers who know their sensitivity to look for the wines that judges with the same sensitivity liked.
Now, that will be something different. And it could be the start of something revolutionary in the wine world.
Filed under: Critics/Competitions
8 Comments
February 20th, 2008 at 1:38:46 PM
Very interesting! I was helping a winery friend of mine last night pouring wines at a tasting event. It shouldn’t, but it never ceases to amaze me to observe the likes and dislikes among tasters. But its kind of fun, once you establish what people like, to pour them a wine that you have guessed they will like and watch a smile appear on their face.I took the taste bud test and am happy to report I’m with you in the sensitive category.
February 20th, 2008 at 3:20:48 PM
I’m not entirely convinced that differences in wine appreciation lie solely with taste buds. The appeal, and thus our perception of a wine, lies in its color, smell and taste. Remove any of these and our appreciation of a wine may change quite dramatically. Indeed differences in the ability to perceive (and describe) odors plays a central part the appeal of any wine.
February 20th, 2008 at 3:26:37 PM
Scandinavians love lutefisk. I hate it. This isn’t because they or I have unusual olfactory apparati. We each have a complex sensory background and culture that comes to play when picking preferences. Our sensory sensitivity and measured sensory thresholds have much less to do with determining preferences as some would have us to believe. Anyone with a background in sensory analysis in the wine and food industry knows of the large body of work that has explored this. I am surprised that you so readily accept a statement like “hypersensitive tasters truly like white Zinfandel” without asking where is the research that proves this? Are all the wine novices who are first attracted to sweet wines hypersensitive tasters? Or are they just novices who initially like sweet, but learn, adjust, and adapt their preferences to dry wines. Hanni is selling a product and is using pseudoscience to try to give it validity. Buyer beware.
If you look at the things that really make a difference in forming preferences in wine tasting they do not come naturally to the first time taster. They are learned. A good wine judge is professionally trained in sensory analysis. Wine judgings would be far better served to test panelists to ensure they actually have the sensory skills and experience to identify grape varieties, aroma components, off odors, regional styles and historical context rather than look at their tongues and fill out a favorite foods list.
February 22nd, 2008 at 12:16:29 AM
Morton Leslie has a forceful opinion, and I won’t attempt to offer Tim Hanni’s counter. He is very capable of defending himself and explaining the criteria for judges at the Lodi competition. He gathered extensive data from surveys of thousands of consumers and other research to back him up. When I wrote that entry I was excited about the possibility of a new way to view wine, and certainly oversimplified things for the sake of brevity. My epiphany was akin to realizing that rock ‘n roll critics have been rating jazz music for the public and finding it boring and insipid. But no wonder! Even if they’ve been trained as adults that jazz is great and that it involves intricate rhythms and different chord structures than rock, they’re still rock lovers at heart and may not ever feel the visceral enjoyment of jazz that born jazz lovers feel.
February 22nd, 2008 at 6:34:14 PM
Jim, raise that rock and roll critic in Salzburg 200 years ago and he will call both jazz and rock and roll “noise” and you will never convince him otherwise. My problem with this super-taster hype is that just when we see some light in the tunnel after two decades of the 100 point scoring scam, we now have something else to mislead the wine drinker.
Linda Bartoshuk, is a professor of otolaryngology and psychology at Yale. It was she who published research in the 1990s about what she calls “supertasters”. She first grouped them by their reaction to propylthiouracil, a bitter compound. She later found she could approximate the grouping with a method or dyeing the tongue and measuring fungiform papillae…a process which Hanni calls his “budometer.” Taking laboratory measurements of measured reactions to simple tastes and then correlating that to fine wine preferences in a professional wine judging is a huge leap.
If the linkage between wine preference were as straight forward as described by Hanni (tolerant tasters loving massive, saturated, tannic wines and hyper-sensitive ones liking sweet white Zinfandel) then how does one account for Robert Parker who is a hypertaster, but obviously prefers massive, saturated and tannic reds? This is what is called diet induced plasticity in the taste system. His body and brain naturally desensitize to accomodate.
Or if you think Parker likes secretly sips White Zin when no one is looking, try this. Put 100 wine critics in a room. Add 100 winemakers. Give them two Champagnes in brown bags. One is Moet White Star, the other Moet Vintage Brut. Ask them their preferences. Virtually all will prefer and guzzle the Brut. Now put 200 wine novices in the same room. The majority will guzzle the White Star. Yet in each group about 25% are non-tasters, 50% are medium tasters, and 25% are super-tasters. This is because the former is a conditioned and conscious appraisal and the latter is an unconscious response.
I’m sorry to say, but the Lodi International Wine Awards could separate judges by hair color, shoe size or alphabetically and also produce different wine preferences for each group. The issue is, “Do the preferences of the shoe size group have any less relevance than those separated by tongue print?” A far more relevant separation of judges would be by age.
Matt Kramer said it best. “Suggesting a linkage of taste buds to wine judgment is like confusing eyesight with insight.”
February 22nd, 2008 at 8:53:29 PM
Oh, but to be an Eye, Ear, Nose, and Throat specialist. It is wine. Period. We question the usefulness or practicality of a rating system, and now this. Let us just enjoy wine. It is just wine.
March 6th, 2008 at 10:13:57 AM
All points are well taken and none unexpected. Our criteria is NOT only the determination of the number of taste buds nor sensitivity to PROP. These are just key pieces of a very complex puzzle that establishes certain tolerances and boundaries for our preferences. We are also looking at how humans very uniquely process, store, recall and re-process their experiences in life. This can often totally override fundamental reactions to sensations over time and what we are coining as neural gustatory programming.
For anyone who cares to learn more about all this give me a holler next time you are in Napa – skeptics and cynics welcome. I will cook you lunch. It is hard to get a full grasp of all the components of what we are looking at in an article or blog. We are having a blast and learning all sorts of new things every day.
March 7th, 2008 at 2:18:53 PM
I am no wine guru but dearly love the meeting of art and science that we call wine. As one of the many volunteers producing the Lodi International Wine Awards, I feel that our new approach will help make more connections between our diverse wine drinking public and the fantastic array of grapes, wines and styles that are available in the marketplace. Is Tim Hanni the Galileo of Wine? I don’t know but this common sense connection to the consumer should make sense to anyone with good quality wine in inventory. If your forklift drivers and sales people are having all day lunches maybe you don’t care. However this journey of discovery is sure to be a hoot. Just reading the squeals of literary flagilation from our “traditional” experts brings images of rubbed pork ribs and a nice Cabernet.
I am looking forward to finding more middle ground between a full ripe Zinfandel (me) and a delicate and floral Pinot Grigio (my honey) that we can enjoy together. Afterall, a retirement budget will probably mean that we will only be able to open one bottle instead of the two we enjoy together now. Join us on Tuesday–we are on to something good. To life, love, wine and food. Sorry Bob, I know that’s one of yours.