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As the psychologists: See James W. Tanaka and Marjorie Taylor, “Object Categories and Expertise: Is the Basic Level in the Eye of the Beholder?,” Cognitive Psychology 23, no. 3 (1991): 457–82.
But even trained experts: See L. A. Gills et al., “Sensory Profiles of Carrot (Daucus carota L.) Cultivars Grown in Georgia,” HortScience 34, no. 2 (1999): 625–28.
“Nor are the different tastes”: John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: T. Tegg, 1836), 35.
“a sensory methodology”: Herbert Stone et al., eds., Sensory Evaluation Practices (New York: Academic Press, 2012), 202.
“bite, burn, and numbing”: See Steven J. Harper and Mina R. McDaniel, “Carbonated Water Lexicon: Temperature and CO2 Level Influence on Descriptive Ratings,” Journal of Food Science 58, no. 4 (1993): 893–98.
“Although the sensory characteristics”: See Janine Beucler et al., “Development of a Sensory Lexicon for Almonds,” http://www.almonds.com/sites/default/files/content/Sensory%20Lexicon.pdf.
“This is not giving us”: See John Locke, The Philosophical Works of John Locke (London: George Ball & Sons, 1892), 2: 20.
Humans bring their own: The idea of devising some flavor based purely on a gas chromatograph brings to mind the line from The Matrix in which the character Mouse says, “Maybe they [the machines] couldn’t figure out what to make chicken taste like, which is why chicken tastes like everything.”
Add a small amount of vanilla: This example comes from Harry T. Lawless and Hildegarde Heymann, Sensory Evaluation of Food: Principles and Practices (New York: Springer, 2010), 216.
Words must be chosen carefully: See Herbert Stone and Joel Sidel, Sensory Evaluation Practices (New York: Academic Press, 2010), 210.
If you ask panelists: “There is no good solution,” writes Lawless, “to the question of what to do with preference judgments from correct versus incorrect panelists in the discrimination tests.” See Lawless and Heymann, Sensory Evaluation of Food, 306.
A lot of stereotypical “wine talk”: F. J. Prial, “Wine Talk,” New York Times, May 29, 1985.
“taste more attentively”: E. P. Köster, “Diversity in the Determinants of Food Choice: A Psychological Perspective,” Food Quality and Preference 20, no. 2 (2009): 70–82.
“gourmands of Rome”: Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste; or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 55. Brillat-Savarin also argued that humans had the most developed taste apparatus, though his logic is somewhat perfunctory: “Man, king of all nature by divine right, and for whose benefit the earth has been covered and peopled, must perforce be armed with an organ which can put him in contact with all that is toothsome among his subjects.”
But we should be wary: See Harry T. Lawless, “Descriptive Analysis of Complex Odors: Reality, Model, or Illusion?,” Food Quality and Preference 10, nos. 4–5 (1999): 325–32.
The importance of practice: See Sylvie Chollet, Dominique Valentin, and Hervé Abdi, “Do Trained Assessors Generalize Their Knowledge to New Stimuli?,” Food Quality and Preference 16 (2005): 13–23. In the study, a number of panelists were trained on a number of beers and then given new beers to which new flavors were added. As the authors note, “Trained assessors did not use different terms to describe learned and unlearned beers. Rather they tended to apply the aroma descriptors they have learned during training to all beers even if these terms were not a priori appropriate. This result suggests that while trained assessors are able to provide efficient descriptions for new beers, they are not able to identify new aromas in beer.”
Studies comparing expert: See Dominique Valentin et al., “Expertise and Memory for Beers and Beer Olfactory Compounds,” Food Quality and Preference 18, no. 5 (2007): 776–85.
much as a chess expert’s superior memory: See, for example, Yanfei Gong, K. Aners Ericsson, and Jerad H. Moxley, “Recall of Briefly Presented Chess Positions and Its Relation to Chess Skill,” PLoS ONE 10, no. 3 (2015).
Wine experts and sommeliers: “Wine expertise,” the study’s authors concluded, “which is seemingly based on perceptual ability, is similar to a number of other expertise domains in relying heavily on knowledge.” A. L. Hughson and R. A. Boakes, “The Knowing Nose: The Role of Knowledge in Wine Expertise,” Food Quality and Preference 13, no. 7 (2002): 463–72.
Wine experts first consider: For an account of the prototypicality of wine expert language, see Frederic Brochet and Denis Dubourdieu, “Wine Descriptive Language Supports Cognitive Specificity of Chemical Senses,” Brain and Language 77, no. 2 (2001): 187–96.
“think and sniff”: Chollet, Valentin, and Abdi, “Do Trained Assessors Generalize Their Knowledge to New Stimuli?”
Wine experts think so prototypically: Experts in general are, it has been suggested, susceptible to the so-called Einstellung effect: that is, when they depend so rigidly on their expertise, it blinds them to new information or to different solutions. For a good survey, as well as an experiment involving chess players, see Merim Bilalić, Peter McLeod, and Fernand Gobet, “Inflexibility of Experts—Reality or Myth? Quantifying the Einstellung Effect in Chess Masters,” Cognitive Psychology 56, no. 2 (March 2008): 73–102.
“Possibly,” noted Pangborn: Rose M. Pangborn, Harold W. Berg, and Brenda Hansen, “The Influence of Color on Discrimination of Sweetness in Dry Table-Wine,” American Journal of Psychology 76, no. 3 (Sept. 1963): 492–95.
The wine experts’ knowledge: See also Wendy V. Parr, Geoffrey White, and David Heatherbell, “The Nose Knows: Influence of Colour on Perception of Wine Aroma,” Journal of Wine Research 14, nos. 2–3 (2003): 79–101.
“Either the aromas and flavours”: Barry Smith, Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 67.
It is less what you have: As the wine critic Mike Steinberger notes, “Some people are better at judging wines than others, but based on what I’ve learned, the reasons for this are more likely to be found in the brain than in either the nose or the mouth.” Steinberger, “Do You Want to Be a Supertaster?,” Slate, June 22, 2007, accessed Dec. 17, 2013, http://www.slate.com/articles/life/drink/2007/06/do_you_want_to_be_a_supertaster.2.html.
The “acoustic ecologist”: The description of Schafer’s work comes from Trevor Cox, Sonic Wonderland: A Scientific Odyssey of Sound (London: Bodley Head, 2014), prologue.
“on the order of twenty”: See David G. Wittels, “You’re Not as Smart as You Could Be,” Saturday Evening Post, April 17, 1948.
In a fascinating Dutch study: K. Kjaerulff, “Comparing Affective and Cognitive Aspects of Sensory Tests—Are Affective Tests More Sensitive?” (master’s thesis, Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2002). Referenced in Köster, “Psychology of Food Choice.”
This emotional response: In another fascinating experiment, Danish milk consumers were better able to discern among milks when they were asked to pick between their own “Danish” milk and some “foreign” milk about which subjects had been told an “upsetting, untrue, story” versus when they were asked to perform a more analytical sensory analysis of the milks. See Lise Wolf Frandsen et al., “Subtle Differences in Milk: Comparison of an Analytical and an Affective Test,” Food Quality and Preference 14, nos. 5–6 (July–Sept. 2003): 515–26.
By the early 1970s: Joseph T. Plummer, “How Personality Makes a Difference,” Journal of Advertising Research 40, no. 6 (2000): 79–84. Curiously, as Dr Pepper became ever more popular, moving into third place, its sales soon began to reverse. As Plummer notes, “We had inadvertently walked away from Dr Pepper’s major strength—its unique brand personality. That was what really set it apart for certain consumers as an alternative to Coke and Pepsi and fruit flavors.”
Odor is famously talked about: See Keller, “Odor Memories,” as well as Yaara Yeshurun et al., “The Privileged Brain Representation of First Olfactory Associations
,” Current Biology 19, no. 21 (2009): 1869–74.
Science is rather divided: For a discussion, see Vanessa Danthiir et al., “What the Nose Knows: Olfaction and Cognitive Abilities,” Intelligence 29, no. 4 (July–Aug. 2001): 337–61.
“You will never experience”: A few weeks after the panel, I conducted my own blind taste test using a few sodas I thought were most similar to Dr Pepper—Dr. Brown’s black cherry and Moxie, the regional New England soda favored by Calvin Coolidge. Perhaps these were poor choices, but I was struck by how quickly I was able to pick out Dr Pepper, now aided by the language provided to me at the panel. Dr. Brown’s black cherry has a hint of the same cherryness, but it is a much simpler, sweeter, syrupy sort of cherry. Moxie is similar to Dr Pepper in that it is a complex blend of flavors, but it is rather different, with more of a medicinal flavor that reminded me of a (slightly flat) cola.
“locked in a sub-optimal equilibrium”: David Y. Choi and Martin H. Stack, “The All-American Beer: A Case of Inferior Standard (Taste) Prevailing?,” Business Horizons 48, no. 1 (2005): 79–86.
“A violet color”: Kant, Critique of Judgment, 301.
“There is something about these beers”: Matt Lawrence, Philosophy on Tap: Pint-Sized Puzzles for the Pub Philosopher (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2011), 45.
“On the one hand”: Christian Helmut Wenzel, An Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics: Core Concepts and Problems (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), 11.
But Pabst, through a rather accidental process: Steve Annear, “Are Hipsters Driving Up the Cost of Pabst Blue Ribbon at Bars?,” Boston Magazine, May 13, 2013, accessed Jan. 15, 2014, http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2013/05/23/pabst-blue-ribbon-price-hipsters/.
“coffee doesn’t taste to me”: Dennett, “Quining Qualia,” in Lycan, Mind and Cognition, 390.
CONCLUSION
TASTING NOTES
people will like the Napa Valley wine: Robert Ashton, “ ‘Nothing Good Ever Came from New Jersey’: Expectations and the Sensory Perception of Wines,” Journal of Wine Economics 9, no. 3 (Dec. 2014): 304–19.
As the researcher: Evgeny Yakovlev, “USSR Babies: Who Drinks Vodka in Russia” (Center for Economic and Financial Research, working paper W0198, Nov. 2012).
Studies have found that when subjects: See Winkielman et al., “Easy on the Eyes, or Hard to Categorize.”
Our facial muscles work harder: See Paul Rozin and Edward B. Royzman, “Negativity Bias, Negativity Dominance, and Contagion,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 5, no. 4 (2001): 296–320.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tom Vanderbilt has written for many publications, including The New York Times Magazine, WSJ Magazine, Popular Science, the Financial Times, Smithsonian, and the London Review of Books. He is a contributing editor of Wired (U.K.), Outside, and Artforum. He is author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) and Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America. He has appeared on a wide range of television and radio programs, including the Today show, the BBC’s World Service, and NPR’s Fresh Air. He has been a visiting scholar at NYU’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management, a research fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, a fellow at the Design Trust for Public Space, and a winner of the Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant, among other honors. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and daughter.
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