Does Music Change the Taste of Wine?

Does music change the taste of wine?  That question is posed by an interesting entry in Jonah Lehrer’s Frontal Cortex blog on Wired.com.  Lehrer’s blog is a summary of another summary by Christian Jarrett at the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest web site.  The research being summarized is a paper by Adrian North in the British Journal of Psychology.[1]

In any case, North finds that his panel of tasters respond more to the style of the music being played than to the taste of the wine.  Of course they do.  His panel was 250 university students.

Even worse, both blog entries focus on the tongue.  Lehrer correctly describes the tongue as a “really dumb” organ, correctly noting that the tongue can only sense five flavors.[2]  However, they have managed to ignore a far more important component of wine: aroma.  A typical human nose can detect 10,000 different aromas.[3]  We’ve written about this before on our Wine Tasting Philosophy page.

But that’s not the real point.  There are constant references to the fact that “expert wine tasters” can be tricked, manipulated, and otherwise persuaded that bad wine is good and vice-versa.  Somehow these “experts” are never identified by name.  My guess is that many of them know less than we do after our weekend seminar at U.C. Davis and our experience tasting literally thousands of wines.

So uninformed college students respond more to music than the actual aromas and flavors of the wine.  Big deal.  Some of them will outgrow it.