Yale neuroscientist Professor Gordon Shepherd believed that tasting wine “engages more of our brain than any other human behaviour”. Photo / Getty Images
Yale neuroscientist Professor Gordon Shepherd believed that tasting wine “engages more of our brain than any other human behaviour”. Photo / Getty Images
If you want to give your brain the finest workout, forget trying to solve difficult maths problems or listening to classical music. Tasting wine is best. According to Yale neuroscientist Professor Gordon Shepherd (1933-2022), tasting wine “engages more of our brain than any other human behaviour”.
Wine tasting involves a“tremendous range of sensory, motor and central brain systems”, according to Shepherd. A taster swirling a wine around their mouth needs “exquisite control of one of the biggest muscles in the body”. The tongue’s thousands of taste and odour receptors send a flavour signal to the brain “that triggers massive cognitive computation involving pattern recognition, memory, value judgment, emotion and pleasure”.
In his 2016 book Neuroenology: How the Brain Creates the Taste of Wine, Shepherd offers a fascinating summary of the major steps in the tasting experience. The first step occurs entirely in your head, based on your experience with wine and your anticipation of the tasting. “The expected flavour of the wine is thus due entirely to vision and to the imagination.”
Once the wine is poured, our preliminary analysis starts. Close visual inspection “strongly influences the expected flavour (‘We eat first with our eyes’). The aroma (bouquet) is the first encounter with the olfactory sense …”
At the ingestion stage, you put the wine in your mouth. “Initial analysis occurs by each of the major internal senses: touch and mouthfeel, taste, retronasal smell and hearing. Touch is critical in locating the wine in the mouth; as with food, it fools the brain into assuming that all the ‘taste’ of the wine comes from the mouth.”
Meanwhile, memory mediates recognition and emotions mediate feelings. Language enables categorisation that can be communicated to others. Retronasal smell from the back of your throat – rather than your nostrils – floods your olfactory receptors with volatiles from the wine.
This represents the peak of the wine tasting experience, reports Shepherd. “The prefrontal cortex decides when all the systems have reached their culmination, and the conscious decision is made to terminate by swallowing.”
As French wine scientist Frédéric Brochet declared in 1999: “The taste of a wine is not in the bottle, but in our minds.”
Drinking well in its youth, this very easy-drinking wine from Riverby Estate is fleshy and smooth. It has gentle acidity, slight sweetness and fresh, generous peach, pear and distinctly spicy flavours. (14% alc/vol) $24
