Demystifying wine tasting: Cognitive psychology's contribution

Abstract

Over recent decades, cognitive psychology has made a significant contribution to our understanding of wine-tasting phenomena. At the most fundamental level the discipline's contribution has made us aware that even an apparently ‘simple’ judgment, such as noting that a wine's odour reflects over-ripe fruit, involves not just our nose but sophisticated cognitive processing. With its information-processing model of how people interact with their surrounding world, and its methodologies and theories regarding how we perceive, conceptualise, remember, image, make judgments, and communicate our experiences, cognitive psychology has markedly advanced our understanding of wine tasting and wine tasters. This review highlights notable wine sensory research outcomes that make evident the importance of a taster's cognitive processes in their wine analysis and appreciation. These include data providing evidence for colour-flavour perceptual bias, prototypical thinking, knowledge-based wine judgments, the close links between olfactory memory, autobiographical memory and emotion, and the notion of wine expertise. Further, it will be argued that such data demonstrate how a consensus model, still dominant in much wine sensory analysis, is limited at best and inappropriate for sensory analysis of complex products such as wine in many contexts. Critical to this argument is appreciating that differences amongst tasters, reflecting each individual's physiology, experience and knowledge, are valid data in themselves rather than ‘error in the machine’ as they were conceptualised within traditional consensus models of sensory analysis. The article terminates with reference to a promise for even greater understanding of wine tasting phenomena that the future offers by links between cognitive psychology's behavioural data and recent technological advances in neuropsychology and neurophysiology (e.g., cerebral imaging techniques).