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by Tom Vanderbilt

  Wine experts and sommeliers internalize a certain way of talking about wine, generally based on a “taste grid” that lists a wine’s qualities in a very particular order—not unlike the familiar strategies employed by a chess master. The ordering of these words becomes so dominant in memory that the words themselves, when encountered outside those familiar combinations, become less memorable. In any case, the words are as important as tasting itself.

  We might think of a wine-tasting panel as a group of people sitting around, sniffing and aspirating their way through wines, then trying to summon the mysterious secrets lurking within through colorful language. What is usually happening is rather the opposite. Wine experts first consider a wine’s category (for example, New Zealand sauvignon blanc), summon a prototypical version of that wine, then look for things in the wine that match their memory of the prototype. It is far easier to recognize, say, the aroma of wine when one has a sense of what one is looking for. As the psychologist Sylvie Chollet and colleagues note, “think and sniff” is a better strategy for correctly identifying odors than “sniff and think.”

  Wine experts think so prototypically, in fact, that when you tamper with wine in interesting ways, it can backfire. When the sensory scientist Rose Marie Pangborn added flavorless red food coloring to white wine, it was wine experts—not novices—who suddenly declared it sweeter. “Possibly,” noted Pangborn, “through their familiarity with sweet rosé wines.” The wine experts’ knowledge colored their taste, just as the substance colored the wine.

  Maybe we want to ascribe natural talent to expert tasters because of the trouble we have, in tasting the very same products, “seeing” the things they are seeing. As the professor of philosophy Barry Smith notes, this discrepancy invites a dilemma: “Either the aromas and flavours of a wine are there for all to recognize, or there are flavours and aromas available only to those who enjoy particular taste sensations, who have special sensory equipment, as it were.” By now, it should be clear that the answer is largely the former. Taste is less a gift than an outcome. It is less what you have than what you do with it.

  Most of us do not do so much with it. In general, we skim across the surface of the sensory world, and taste is no different. The “acoustic ecologist” Murray Schafer once observed that to really hear, you needed to retrain the way your brain processed sound. His suggested training exercises ranged from closing one’s eyes to help purge distractions to trying to craft an “onomatopoeic” name for a sound (an echo here of using language to try to describe flavors). But we typically consume food or drink with any number of distractions, with little or no language for what is going on in our mouths. Most of what we learn and remember about that food is “incidental,” often beneath consciousness.

  Samuel Renshaw, an Ohio State University psychologist, was known for creating a training system to help American soldiers during World War II more readily recognize enemy planes and ships. But he also worked with a distillery to improve its tasters’ ability to detect variations in its products. Renshaw argued that most of us manage, in daily life, something “on the order of twenty percentile utilization of the sense modalities.” Do we have a hidden reserve of discriminatory abilities, waiting to be deployed with the right training or under the right conditions?

  In a fascinating Dutch study, subjects were asked to pick out the 1.4-percent-fat milk they usually favored from a sample of five milks with varying fat content. Few could do it reliably; all options seemed similar to their “own” milk. But when a different group was given the same milk, and this time asked to pick out their authentic “Dutch” milk from a group of what they were told were cheaper, lower-quality foreign imports, panelists suddenly became much better at choosing the 1.4 percent milk. People were suddenly motivated to detect differences (How dare you replace my milk with this cheap foreign stuff!). This emotional response “unlocked” implicit preferences that were there all along. The implication of this experiment is that our very own preferences are often hidden from us (We are strangers to our taste) and that simply asking us what we like may provide hardly a clue.

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  As I was talking over the sensory attributes of pretzels with the experts at McCormick, my attention somehow drifted to a can of Dr Pepper, one of a number of drinks offered on a nearby table. Like Locke with his pineapple, I realized that I did not have a good sense of what the flavor of Dr Pepper was, nor, admittedly, had I invested much thought in it. My thought was that it tastes “like Dr Pepper.” How would I describe its various qualities to someone who had never had one? Clearly, the company uses this epistemological murk to its advantage, prominently advertising “23 flavors” right on the can. This invokes an appetizing mystery: What could those flavors be? Surely 23 is better than 11!

  That mystery indeed informs the heritage of the brand. In the 1960s, the perception of Dr Pepper, notes Joseph Plummer, was riddled with misconceptions: It was medicinal or made from prune juice. But the company was able to turn the eccentricities of this brown not-tasting-of-cola drink into strengths. By the early 1970s, it was the country’s fourth most popular soft drink. Not being able to identify a precise flavor can actually be a strength. As Howard Moskowitz had suggested to me, part of the popularity of Coca-Cola versus, say, an orange soda is its more complex flavor blend. Consumers tire of it less quickly than of an orange soda, which has a simpler, more recognizable profile (which might be “easier to like” on the first go-round). The more you can identify any one flavor, Moskowitz said, the more it sits in memory and thus is easier to remember.

  As it happens, I am agnostic on Dr Pepper. It is not something I generally seek out, nor is it something I would reflexively avoid. Whatever my level of liking, it is a feeling for the thing as a whole, instead of an analytical distribution of various sensory and trigeminal attributes. My feelings may be partially informed by exposure. Dr Pepper has a southern regional identity, and not having been raised in the South, I have not had as many chances to consume it. But could it be a lack of appreciation as well? If I knew more about Dr Pepper, would I like it more?

  It occurred to me: What better time than sitting with a bunch of sensory experts to have a taste test? “Let’s train Tom on the aromatics of Dr Pepper,” Gillette announced. I bring the glass to my nose. “What does it smell like to you?” Ridgway asked. “If you can’t describe it, what does it remind you of?” There was something, but it evaded me. I could almost feel some frustrated synapse waiting to be fired that would connect my sensory machinery to my memory. Gillette, sensing my struggle, put her nose to the glass. “I smell something that isn’t a beverage. It’s something that I love to eat for dessert.” An image shimmered at the edge of my mind. “It’s always tough when you don’t have the language first,” Ridgway said, consoling me. Gillette gently asked me if she could help. “It reminds me of burgundy cherry ice cream. The vanillin, the creamy note, the black cherries.”

  It was as if a door had been opened. I smelled it again, and there it was, hanging like a sign right in front of me; how could I have missed it? I clearly knew the smell; this was no Lockean pineapple. Did I have some memory of what I thought it was, and did it take that terminology to bring forth the memory? Odor is famously talked about as a strongly evocative triggering mechanism for memory (particularly when the smell is unpleasant). But what triggers the memory for odors?

  Science is rather divided on whether words (that is, “semantic mediation”) are essential in triggering odor memories or whether smell memory fundamentally works on its own. Regardless, it struck me as curious that I could be having this clear sensation, smelling Dr Pepper, knowing that it was not Coca-Cola or 7UP but not really knowing what it was. How much of life itself comprises this sensory sleepwalking, these subconscious perceptions? How different is this sensation from hearing a piece of music from an unrecognizable genre or not being able to make out something in the distance with our eyes?

  Paying too much attention could drive you crazy, I thought as we comp
ared tasting notes. “I thought it was pruney,” Aldredge said. Someone else countered, “I went nonfood—mulch.” “Ah!” Gillette said, eyebrows raised. “There are some earthy notes,” Aldredge said. “It’s woody.” A bit sheepishly, I proffered, “Some clove?” “Maybe,” Ridgway responded evenly. In any case, no one in the room was going to nail all twenty-three flavors; remember the finding that people begin to peak after identifying three compounds. We were talking about flavor, using language to unlock our senses, forging new memories—and thus future tastes—in the process. As Gillette told me, “You will never experience Dr Pepper the same way again.”

  WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE BEER? ON KNOWING WHAT TO LIKE

  I was intrigued by the aesthetically minded, theoretically objective judgments on display at the cat show and, by contrast, the rigorous, detached sensory analysis of the “human instruments” at McCormick. These seemed to represent two sides of the human brain. I wondered what happens when you effectively combine these two pursuits; that is, when you try to make a qualitative judgment of something that you have put in your mouth.

  And so I headed to Denver, Colorado, where, in the basement-level conference rooms of a large hotel, judging was under way for the Great American Beer Festival (GABF)—the Super Bowl of the American craft beer renaissance. There, in a vast “staging room,” I found the festival’s director, Chris Swersey, standing in the center of a sea of stouts and saisons, all precisely chilled to thirty-eight degrees, waiting to be poured, randomized, and dispatched to panels in the neighboring rooms. Speed was of the essence. “In twenty minutes’ time, those samples will taste totally different,” he said as he scanned the room.

  As Swersey—middle-aged, goateed, and, like many of the beer people I seemed to meet, extremely affable and engaged—described it, the judging at GABF is a sort of “tweener.” “We’re not 100 percent subjective or 100 percent objective,” he told me. A purely objective judging would hew strictly to the standards, with precise measures of IBUs (or International Bitterness Units) and “final gravity.” This sounds like something astronauts experience, but in beers it refers to the liquid’s density at fermentation, measured in “degrees Plato.” As Garrett Oliver, the brewmaster of Brooklyn Brewery, had told me, beer people tend to talk like scientists—“here’s our EBV, here’s our IBU, our final gravity”—while the “wine guy is talking about rolling hills.”

  A purely subjective judging, by contrast, would see judges going down a list of a dozen beers and expressing liking. “You might give it a one because you love apricot,” says Swersey, “or you hate it because you don’t like apricot.” Some judging styles are more pleasure based. In some beer competitions in England, for example, judges are asked questions like “Would you go out of your way to drink this beer?”*

  The judging in Denver was held under the usual strict secrecy. Judges with mobile phones have been asked to leave. Swersey, going against usual GABF protocol, has allowed me to sit in and briefly observe—but not record or take notes on—the judging for the American-style stout category. The first thing he wants me to know is that beer judges do not spit. This is not because zythologists inherently lack willpower. “There are taste buds down below your Adam’s apple that are highly attuned to hop components,” Swersey told me. “It’s proven in the research: You have to swallow it to get a full profile of that beer.” Swallowing is only a small part of the whole process. Aroma, for Swersey, is the first step. “Aromas are very ethereal, they tend to disappear, and then you’ll get a whole new suite later. You have to get on that beer fast and capture what you’re smelling.”

  As we joined the stout panel and I began listening to their comments, it seemed like a more jocular and opinionated version of the McCormick sensory panel. There is similar descriptive language: “condensed milk,” “solventy,” “burnt vegetables,” or, my favorite, “I wouldn’t call it horse blanket.” This is joined, however, by more expressive comments like “pretty amazing,” “really clear,” or, simply, “I just like that beer.” Watching the panelists, I am reminded of something James Shanteau, the psychologist of expertise, had implied to me: Experts are people who have the same opinions as other experts. The panels here, Swersey said, are not about taste tyrants imposing their will but about finding carefully considered consensus on what beers best represent the particular style guidelines. “I don’t really like conversations that go like this: ‘Well, I was in Belgium last month, and I tasted this and this and this, and this doesn’t taste like any of those.’ ”

  While a beer competition might seem a world away from the Paris cat show, all the same issues are in play. There is the phenomenon of changing standards. Consider IPA, or India pale ale. Pale ales, as one of the stronger ales, are in general prized for their hoppy (that is, bitter) character. This in itself is a hallmark of beer connoisseurship. An interesting study by the Stanford University computer scientists Julian McAuley and Jure Leskovec examined review data on the popular Web site RateBeer.​com. One of the ways you could distinguish novice reviewers from expert reviewers, they found, was that expert reviewers’ opinions, as I have mentioned, tend toward concurrence. In certain genres of beers, however, expert and novice reviews almost entirely diverged. As they write, “Beginners give higher ratings to almost all lagers, while experts give higher ratings to almost all strong ales.” And while no one really cares much for Bud Light on the site, experts really dislike it. Strong ales, apart from being an “acquired taste,” indicate where you stand in relation to beer, the way the Velvet Underground became a totemic marker of one’s musical taste.

  The question of what an India pale ale is might seem settled. “In its heyday,” Brooklyn’s Oliver told me, “IPA was probably the most specific thing ever created; it was made to survive a sea voyage from England to India. It was always made dry, always bitter, always pale.” But time, and the market, move on; to Oliver’s distaste, there are now brews like the seemingly paradoxical Black IPA. In the staging room in Denver, Swersey poured me a glass of Mojo IPA, from Colorado’s Boulder Beer. “This is a really hoppy IPA,” says Swersey. “It’s got Amarillo hops, which has a really intense grapefruit taste.” There were also notes of spruce. “A lot of the same compounds in hop oil,” he noted, “are identical to what you would have in a spruce tree.” All this certainly seems to hew to the GABF standard for American-style India pale ale: “Hop aroma is high, exhibiting floral, fruity, citrus-like, piney, resinous, or sulfur-like American-variety hop characters.”

  But he suddenly snapped to quizzical attention. “They entered it as a strong pale ale,” he says, referring to another GABF category, with less alcohol content. “They under-entered it.” It was like putting a heavyweight boxer in the middleweight division. Perhaps, Swersey mused, Mojo IPA is actually in the American strong pale ale range (even if it has been marketed as an IPA). What is more likely is that the entire IPA landscape has shifted; everything got hoppier, more bitter. What was once a perfectly respectable IPA suddenly seems, by the rest of the entrants in the category, to be a pale imitation. “This beer is about seven or eight years old,” he said. “IPAs may have grown up around them, past them.”

  Like the Persian cats, the product has gradually been getting more extreme, even if the same written standard still seems to apply. Consider one of the seminal American-style IPAs, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, which was first brewed in the early 1980s and is now one of the country’s most popular craft brews. “Back in the day,” Swersey said, “it was a groundbreaking beer. It was unlike anything being made anywhere on earth. It really challenged people.” While he says Sierra is still the beer that he, and other brewers he knows, “always keep in the fridge,” it is “far out in the weeds” compared with Mojo; that is, it seems like pale ale with training wheels. Just by bittering units alone, the change is dramatic: Sierra Nevada has thirty-eight, while Mojo has seventy.

  Categories set the entire landscape for liking. Even large, mainstream beers like Budweiser and Pabst Blue Ribbon, the less
intensely flavored, more industrially produced brews that the craft movement essentially defines itself against, have their own category at GABF: American-style lager (“hop flavor is none to very low”; “corn, rice, or other grain or sugar adjuncts often used”). I found this a bit odd, as if the Sundance Film Festival had a category for “Big Hollywood Summer Action Flick.” But it just reinforces the power of categories. Before you can determine whether something is good, you have to define good as what?

  There are many people who would view something like Budweiser as not “real” beer. And there are many more people who actually drink Budweiser. The management professors David Choi and Martin Stack argue that the U.S. beer market has become “locked in a sub-optimal equilibrium in which most consumers are not familiar with the full range of what beer is and can be.” Why? Prohibition, for one. People simply forgot the taste of beer. Post-Prohibition lagers, perhaps influenced by soft drinks, were higher in carbonation and made from gradually shrinking amounts of malt and hops. They literally lost their taste. The second factor was a post-Prohibition switch from draft beer to bottles and cans and a related insistence on serving beer “ice cold” (which “deadens” the taste). Over time, “consumers began to associate ‘beer’ with an increasingly narrow range of product characteristics.” Why bother switching beers if the beer you were drinking was good enough, if it was beer? GABF, simply by having a category for this kind of beer, could get around the entire sticky question.

  In beer (and in cats), I kept running into an endless loop of circularity. What is a good beer? A good beer is one that best represents the standard. What makes the standard? Those things that people think make a beer good. Repeat. And something else: A good beer is one that best represents the standard. Then why did the standard change? Because people’s thought of what a good beer was changed. Does that mean that what was once a good beer is no longer a good beer?