The Neuroscience of Wine
Galileo Galilei is best known for his novel way of looking at Earth’s place in the solar system and his consequent problems with the Vatican. But long before all the fuss blew up over his cosmology, Galileo told us that while the physical attributes of the planet are present, they are perceptually nonexistent until they have been interpreted by our senses. This theory applies to wine as much as to anything else, and Galileo, who described wine as “sunlight, held together by water,” did not forget that fact. As he put it, “A wine’s good taste does not belong to the objective determinations of the wine and hence of an object, even of an object considered as appearance, but belongs to the special character of the sense in the subject who is enjoying this taste.”
Anyone who has ever attended a wine event knows the five S’s of wine tasting: See, Swirl, Sniff, Sip, Savor. The five S’s allow us to directly hit three of our five senses—sight, smell, and taste. This leaves us with two senses that we rarely associate with wine—hearing and touching. But ignoring them is a mistake. There are few things more satisfying than the classic Pop! of a Champagne bottle, however déclassé purists may consider it (they prefer an unostentatious hiss). More important, what a person has heard about a wine usually influences his or her perception of it. In fact, the multimillion-dollar wine advertising industry depends on this aspect of wine appreciation. As for that fifth sense, touch is also critically important in how we perceive wine—not through our fingers but through touch sensors in our mouths and throats. If we couldn’t feel the wine in our mouths, our experience of it would be incomplete.
