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The Physiology, Psychology, and Philosophy of Wine Tasting

Kandinsky, Composition VII (1913). The mind at work.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

What happens when a novice and an expert taste wine? Is it simply a matter of the wine impressing itself onto their senses? Or does the expert enjoy a different wine?

To answer this question, we need to begin with the biology of taste.

The Physiology of Wine Tasting

Our sense of taste arises from specialised sensory cells in taste buds on the tongue, hard and soft palate, and pharynx. There are around five thousand taste buds in the mouth, each with fifty to one hundred of these sensory cells, or chemoreceptors. Together, these chemoreceptors enable us to distinguish five basic or fundamental tastes: alkaloids and other compounds as bitterness, sugars as sweetness, salts as saltiness, acids as sourness, and amino acids as umami or savouriness. Although some parts of the tongue are more sensitive to certain tastes than others, the ‘tongue map’ that divides the tongue into discrete tasting areas very much overstates the case.

Chemical sense of taste is supported by the physical and chemical sensation of the liquid in the mouth, or mouthfeel. The physical sense of touch, which is responsive to dissolved particles as small as three microns, transmits the texture and temperature of the wine through specialised mechanoreceptors and thermoreceptors. The prickle of dissolved carbon dioxide is conveyed by chemesthesis, the same sense or sensibility by which chemical irritants such as chilli or mustard register their fieriness—not through taste, but through provocation.

Sense of smell, or olfaction—which is even more important—is triggered by airborne chemicals acting on olfactory receptors on the tiny hair-like cilia of olfactory receptor neurons in the nasal epithelium. The axons of these olfactory receptor neurons form the olfactory nerve (cranial nerve I), which courses up through the sieve-like cribriform plate of the skull to synapse in the olfactory bulb of the brain. There are around four hundred types of olfactory receptor, which, through a form of combinatorial processing, are capable of discerning several thousand aromas. Sensitivity to aromas can differ significantly, both from one aroma to another and from one individual to the next, with some aromas detectable in concentrations one hundred million times smaller than others.

The olfactory apparatus can be stimulated orthonasally, through the nostrils, or retronasally, from within the mouth and pharynx. Much ‘tasting’ actually takes place retronasally, which is why a runny nose can leave our food and wine tasting of cardboard.

What we call ‘taste’ is therefore much more than taste: it is also touch, temperature, chemesthesis, and, above all, olfaction. But this still leaves out the most important organ of all: the brain.

The Psychology of Wine Tasting

The ‘flavour’ of a wine is an integrated interpretation by the brain of all the various sensory stimuli detailed above. Upon tasting the wine, the brain experiences a sensory overload, whence the difficulty in picking out individual aromas and flavours. To ease its task, it relies heavily on preconceptions (including injurious ones, i.e. prejudices), context, and memory to inform its interpretation of the sensory stimuli.

The effect of expectation is so strong that, if a white wine with an aroma of lemons and apples is dyed red with food colourings, most people will describe red berry aromas; and if an ordinary table wine is served in a bottle labelled ‘Grand Cru’, most people will praise it as ‘balanced’, ‘complex’, and such-like.

The olfactory bulb is closely connected to the limbic system, an area of the brain linked with emotions and memories. Smells and tastes can trigger strong emotions and vivid memories that bias our perception of the wine. Conversely, our emotional state affects our appreciation of sensory stimuli, which explains why wine tastes better in good company or why champagne has it easy.

Blind tasting can help us overcome all these biases, first, by removing a number of their sources, and, second, by inviting us to focus on the wine itself. Paradoxically, by depriving ourselves of cues—grape variety, region, vintage, price, reputation, memories associated with the wine—we become a lot more attentive to the information that remains.

The Philosophy of Wine Tasting

In engaging with a wine, blind tasters activate not only the limbic system, but also areas of the brain responsible for cognition, which is a conscious, higher-order function. This process can be assisted and developed by writing tasting notes that seek to accurately describe the sensations produced by the wine. Given the limitations of language in accurately describing our sensations, this, like writing poetry, is no mean feat.

Nonetheless, language is by far the best tool at our disposal for communicating our experiences to others and, indeed, to ourselves. The practice of consciously describing the sensations produced by wine trains the mind and, over time, makes it much easier to taste and think about taste. As Wittgenstein famously remarked, ‘The limits of my language are the limits of my world.’

But does the language of wine merely enable us to describe what we taste, or does it enable us to taste more in the first place? Learning to taste involves learning what to attend to, how to discriminate, how to compare, and how to remember. What was once an undifferentiated sensation gradually resolves into parts, patterns, and relationships. Language does not merely label the world: often it helps us to notice it.

Although some people do have a higher density of taste buds, this does not necessarily make them better wine tasters. To use a computing analogy, tasting is not so much a function of the hardware (the sensory apparatus) as it is of the software (the mind or brain). That’s why I often say we taste far more with our brains than with our mouth and nose. Regardless of the sensitivity of their tasting apparatus, untutored tasters struggle to ‘get their head round’ more complex wines, and, as a result, derive greater enjoyment from simpler wines.

Just as an untrained ear can struggle with complex music, an untutored palate can struggle with complex wine. To the beginner, it can seem as though the more experienced tasters are making it up. But with enough experience and training, almost anyone can turn into a wine expert.

Think again of Kandinsky’s Composition VII. To an untutored eye, it can seem like a bewildering profusion of colours and forms. With sustained attention, relationships, rhythms, tensions, and depths begin to emerge. The painting has not changed.

If a novice comes to dinner, open something you can both enjoy. But keep your best Burgundy for experienced tasters such as me.

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A History of the Orgy

Paul Cézanne, Bacchanale, c. 1875–80.
Paul Cézanne, Bacchanale, c. 1875–80.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Why orgies are no longer what they were.

Civilisation depends upon restraint. We are expected to play our allotted roles, respect boundaries, control our appetites, and maintain a coherent sense of self. Yet, across cultures and throughout history, people have sought occasions on which to let it all go: to drink, dance, disguise themselves, and disappear into the crowd. The Ancient Greeks personified this tendency towards dissolution in Dionysus, and in the nineteenth century Nietzsche referred to it as the Dionysian. But the impulse is older even than Dionysus—and, of course, far from dead.

Ancient Egypt

The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Heavenly Cow contains the Myth of the Destruction of Mankind. Displeased with the mounting rebelliousness of mankind, the ageing Sun God Ra sends his daughter Hathor to wreak revenge. Hathor takes the form of the bloodthirsty lioness Sekhmet and rampages up and down the Valley of the Nile, killing every man, woman, and child in sight. With mankind on the brink of extinction, Ra takes pity, and floods the fields with beer dyed red with ochre. Mistaking the beer for blood, Sekhmet drinks to intoxication and falls asleep—to arise once again in the benign form of Hathor, goddess of joy, love, and fertility.

To commemorate this episode, the Egyptians held communal Festivals of Drunkenness in mid-August, to coincide with the swelling of the Nile. Revellers drank to the point of passing out, only to be awoken by the beating of drums—mirroring the transformation of Sekhmet into Hathor. The revels, which had an important religious dimension and took place in and around temples and shrines, also included dancing and public sex, in part to imitate and propitiate the flood and fertility to come.

Ancient Greece

The word ‘orgy’, which derives, ultimately, from the Greek orgion (‘sacred rite’), entered the English language in the 1560s to mean ‘a licentious revelry’. Today, people think of an orgy as a party involving open and unrestrained sex between multiple people. But originally, orgia referred to the secret rites of Ancient Greek mystery cults such as the Dionysian Mysteries and the Cult of Cybele, which aimed, above all, at ecstatic union with the divine. The modern sense of ‘orgy’ retains only the licence, without the transcendence.

Dionysus, who, like Jesus, died and was reborn, was the god of wine, regeneration, fertility, ritual madness, ecstasy, theatre, and pleasure, among others. In certain times and places, or among certain people, he was the most important god—more important, even, than Zeus—and most fervently venerated around the time of the vernal equinox.

Let me paint you a picture of a Dionysian orgy. The procession begins at sunset, led by torchbearers followed by wine and fruit bearers, musicians, and a throng of revellers wearing masks and… well, not much else. Closing the rear is a giant phallus representing the resurrection of the twice-born god. Everyone is pushing and shoving, singing and dancing, and shouting the name of the god stirred in with ribaldry and obscenity.

Arriving at a clearing in the woods, the crowd goes wild with drinking, dancing, and every manner of sex. The god is in the wine, and to imbibe it is to be possessed by his spirit—although in the bull’s horn the booze has been interlaced with other entheogens (substances that ‘generate the divine from within’). Animals, standing in for the god, are hunted down, torn apart with bare hands, and eaten raw with the blood still warm and dripping.

This ‘Dionysian’ impulse for irrationality and chaos can be understood as a natural inversion of, and release from, the habitual ‘Apollonian’ order and restraint imposed by the state and state religion. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche recognises it as a primal and universal force:

Either through the influence of narcotic drink, of which all primitive men and peoples speak, or through the powerful coming on of spring, which drives joyfully through all of nature, that Dionysian excitement arises. As its power increases, the subjective fades into complete forgetfulness of self. In the German Middle Ages under the same power of Dionysus constantly growing hordes waltzed from place to place, singing and dancing. In that St. John’s and St. Vitus’s dancing we recognize the Bacchic chorus of the Greeks once again, and its precursors in Asia Minor, right back to Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea.

By diverting the Dionysian impulse into special rites, the orgy kept it in check, preventing it from surfacing in more insidious and perfidious ways. More than that, it sublimed it into an invigorating and liberating—and, in that much, profoundly religious—celebration of life and the life force.

The orgy permitted people to escape from their artificial and restricted social roles and regress into a more authentic state of nature which modern psychologists have come to associate with the Freudian id or unconscious. It appealed most to marginal groups, since it set aside the usual hierarchies of man over woman, master over slave, patrician over commoner, rich over poor, and citizen over foreigner. In short, it gave people a much-needed break: like modern holidays, but cheaper and more effective.

Ancient Rome

The Dionysian cult spread through the Greek colonies to Rome and beyond. In 186 BCE, the Senate severely restricted it through the Senatorial Decree concerning the Bacchanalia (Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus). According to the historian Livy, the decree led to more executions than imprisonments, with many choosing instead to commit suicide.

Illicit Bacchanalia persisted but gradually morphed into the tamer Liberalia in honour of Liber Pater (‘Free Father’), the Roman god of wine and fertility who so resembled Bacchus/Dionysus as to fold into him. As with the Dionysian cult, the Liberalia featured a giant phallus, carted through the countryside to fertilise the fields and safeguard crops—after which a virtuous matron would crown the phallus with a garland or wreath. This sort of ‘depravity’ also featured in other religious festivals such as the Lupercalia, which included naked noblemen coursing through the streets and whipping willing noblewomen with strips of goatskin.

The reign of Constantius II (337–361 CE) marked the beginning of the formal persecution of paganism by the now Christian Roman Empire. But the springtime fertility orgy survived through the tumult of the centuries, albeit in attenuated forms. At last, unable to do away with it, the Church integrated it into its calendar as Carnival—which, to this day, involves reversal of social norms and roles, licentiousness, and feasting ahead of the deprivations of Lent.

But one doesn’t have to wait for Carnival to have an orgy. In the summer of 2017, as reported in the Italian press, the police broke up a drug-fuelled gay orgy at the Vatican—the problem from the police’s perspective being more with the drugs than with the sex.

Mediaeval Europe

May Day celebrations across Europe and North America have their origins in the Roman Floralia and corresponding Celtic traditions. In mediaeval times, people danced around the gigantic phallic symbol of the Maypole before descending into the fields for wanton sex, avowedly to ‘fertilise the land’.

In the Anatomie of Abuses (1583), the puritan Philip Stubbs inveighed against these practices:

What clipping, what culling, what kissing and bussing, what smooching and slobbering one of another, what filthy groping and unclean handling is not practised in the dances … I have heard it creditably reported (and that viva voce) by men of great gravitie and reputation, that of fortie, threescore, or a hundred maides going to the wood over night, there have scaresly the third part of them returned home againe undefiled.

In 1644, the Puritans outlawed Maypoles in England, with the Long Parliament’s ordinance damning them as ‘a Heathenish vanity, generally abused to superstition and wickedness’.

Ecstasy

‘Ecstasy’ [ex stasis] literally means ‘to be or stand outside oneself’. It is a trance-like state in which consciousness of an object is so heightened that the subject dissolves or merges into the object. Einstein himself called it the ‘mystic emotion’ and spoke of it as ‘the finest emotion of which we are capable’, ‘the germ of all art and all true science’, and ‘the core of the true religious sentiment’.

More than ever before, modern society emphasises the sovereign supremacy of the ego and the ultimate separateness and responsibility of each and every one of us. From a young age, we are taught to remain in tight control of our ego or persona with the aim of projecting it as far out as possible. As a result, we have lost the art of letting go—and, indeed, may no longer even recognise the possibility—leading to a poverty or monotony of conscious experience.

Letting go can threaten the life that we have built and even the person that we have become, but it can also free us from our modern narrowness and neediness, and deliver, or re-deliver, us into a bigger and brighter world.

Man, said Balzac, dies in despair, while the spirit dies in ecstasy.

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The Psychology of Snobbery

A wine snob
The snob mistakes the appearance of discernment for discernment itself.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Why you shouldn’t be a snob, and how to avoid being one.

The protagonist of the British sitcom Keeping Up Appearances is the social-climbing Hyacinth Bucket—or ‘Bouquet’, as she insists upon being called. To give the impression that she employs domestic staff, she answers her beloved pearl-white slimline telephone with, ‘The Bouquet residence; the lady of the house speaking.’ The originally working-class Hyacinth spends most of her time trying to impress others in the hope of passing off as upper-middle-class, while looking down on anyone who does not meet her approval. This is the simple but effective recipe for five seasons of timeless British comedy.

Hyacinth is funny because her snobbery is self-defeating. Every attempt to advertise her refinement instead advertises her insecurity.

It has been claimed that the word ‘snob’ originates in the Latin sine nobilitate (‘without nobility’), used in abbreviated form—s. nob—on lists of names by Cambridge colleges, passenger ships, etc. to distinguish between titled and non-titled persons. In fact, ‘snob’ was first recorded in the late eighteenth century as a term for a shoemaker or his apprentice, although it is true that Cambridge students came to apply it to local tradespeople, townspeople, and anyone unaffiliated with the university. By the early nineteenth century, ‘snob’ had come to mean ‘a person who lacks breeding’, and then, as social structures became more fluid, ‘a social climber’. Thackeray’s Book of Snobs (1848), a compilation of satirical articles, cemented the word in the public lexicon.

At the heart of snobbery is the tendency to mistake status for value. Applied to people, this means mistaking social status for human worth; applied to things, it means mistaking prestige for quality. The snob identifies with the relevant markers of status or prestige (wealth, education, accent, address, brands, cultural tastes…), uses them to bolster his own status, and denigrates those who lack or disregard them. ‘I’m not a snob,’ said Simon Le Bon, the lead singer and lyricist of Duran Duran, in jest: ‘Ask anybody. Well, anybody who matters.’

Case Study: The Wine Snob

As a wine writer, I may sometimes pass for a snob.

In my defence, snobbery is not simply a matter of discernment, or of having high standards. A so-called wine ‘snob’ who enjoys and even insists on good wine may or may not be an actual snob, depending on the degree of his or her prejudice (from the Latin praeiudicium, ‘prior judgement’). To exercise judgement and discriminate between things is not necessarily to discriminate between people.

If wine is a case in point, this is because it can be tasted blind. Hide the label, price, producer, appellation, and vintage, and there is no longer anything to lean upon but the wine itself. Blind tasting can be wonderfully humbling as great names fall short, newcomers triumph, and prejudices dissolve in the glass. This proves the point: the more we rely on prestige indicators, the less we taste, or experience.

I’m quite happy—in fact, happiest—drinking an inexpensive or little-known wine, so long as it has a story to sing. To my worst enemy, this might be a way of being a snob while escaping the label, a meta-snobbery known as the meta-snobbery of authenticity—but let’s not get too meta.

The Psychology of Snobbery

Some sommeliers, immersed as they are in the world of wine, can place undue value on wine knowledge, to the point of deprecating their own seemingly ignorant patrons—a phenomenon lightheartedly referred to as ‘sommelier syndrome’. In mitigation, the snobby sommelier, like many a snob, is defending not only status but self-conception.

Aside from its unpleasantness to others, snobbery tends to undermine the snob, their achievements, and the interests and institutions that they represent. The Member of Parliament Jacob Rees-Mogg did himself, his party, and the UK House of Commons no favours when he compared people who had not attended a public school (fee-paying school) or Oxbridge (the universities of Oxford and Cambridge) to ‘potted plants’.

Snobbery betrays rigidity of thinking and, by extension, poor judgement, as with those British aristocrats (Unity and Diana Mitford, Lord Rothermere, the Duke of Windsor…) who, despite their elite educations, came to sympathise with Nazi ideology. The thinking, in so far as it can be called thinking, is not merely rigid but warped. Snobs pigeonhole people according to skin-deep criteria such as their birth, profession, or accent, and, on that basis, either embrace or denigrate them. Like wine snobs who ‘drink the label’, they often miss out on real value or originality. As company, they are utter bores, constantly detracting from the rich texture of life and unable to marvel at anything other than through themselves.

Inverse Snobbery

Closely related to snobbery, and presenting some of the same pitfalls, is ‘inverse snobbery’. Inverse snobbery is the disdain for those same traits that the snob might hold in high regard, combined with admiration, whether real or feigned, for the popular, the ordinary, and the commonplace—and, in this case, not just with the aim of winning an election. Inverse snobbery can be understood, in large part, as an ego defence against the status claims of others; and it is possible, indeed common, to be both a snob and an inverse snob, for instance, looking down on someone’s privileged education while boasting about one’s own working-class credentials.

Inverse snobs make the same fundamental mistake as snobs: they judge according to status rather than substance, merely reversing the signs. An expensive restaurant must be pretentious; a successful artist must have sold out; an educated person must be out of touch.

Why Snobbery May Be on the Rise

Both snobbery and inverse snobbery can be interpreted as a symptom of social insecurity. Social insecurity may be rooted in early experiences, especially feelings of shame at being different, or a sense of privilege or entitlement that, in later life, cannot be realised. Or it may result from rapid social change. For instance, after Brexit in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the US, the ebbing of influence from established, educated elites seemed to lead, on all sides, to a surge in both snobbery and inverse snobbery.

In a similar vein, some snobbery may represent a reaction to an increasingly egalitarian society, born out of a deeply ingrained human instinct that some people are better than others, that these people are more fit to dominate or rule, and that their rule tends to produce better outcomes—although, of course, one need not be a snob to share in that belief or intuition. Whatever its source, snobbery can serve as a mechanism of class surveillance and control—as can, paradoxically, inverse snobbery—entrenching existing social hierarchies and the status quo, or status quo ante.

The Way Out

In some cases, snobbery may be a manifestation of narcissism or excessive self-regard—which points to its antidote, namely, humility. Instead of looking inward, or sideways, the person of genuine taste looks outward, toward the thing itself.

Humility on its own can be hard to achieve. Taken to an extreme, or to its perfection, it approaches the dissolution of the ego, which in certain Indian traditions amounts to liberation. This requires a highly philosophical mind, or drugs.

Alternatively, it may be possible to arrive at humility indirectly through the more achievable route of empathy—including empathy towards the snob. Snobbery (‘snobbishness’), said the writer Hugh Kingsmill (d. 1949), ‘is the desire for what divides men and the inability to value what unites them.’ 

If humility corrects the relation to the self, empathy corrects the relation to others, and, indirectly, the relation to the self.

Reason, as Hume held, is but the slave of the passions: employing empathy to alleviate snobbery is, I think, an excellent example of better feeling opening out onto better thinking.

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What the Odyssey Can Teach Us About Wine—and Drinking

Odysseus pours wine for the Cyclops Polyphemus
Odysseus offers Polyphemus the wine of Maron. After a design by John Flaxman.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Wine flows through the Odyssey. Homer mentions it well over a hundred times, and even supplies the first recorded tasting note in history. He loves wine so much he sees it on the face of the sea: the famous ‘wine-dark sea’.

But wine in the Odyssey is far more than a drink, or even a poetic image. It is a measure of civilisation. How people drink, and whether they drink at all, tells us what kind of people they are.

What Odysseus Most Loves

Many people imagine that the Odyssey unfolds in straightforward chronological order, from Troy to Ithaca. In fact, most of the adventures for which it is famous—the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis—are narrated retrospectively, as Odysseus recounts them to the Phaeacians.

But before beginning his story, Odysseus tells King Alcinous and the Phaeacian court what, to him, constitutes the happiest scene imaginable:

For I say that there is no fulfilment more delightful than when joy possesses a whole people, and the banqueters in the halls sit in rows listening to a singer, while beside them the tables are laden with bread and meat, and the wine-bearer draws wine from the mixing bowl and carries it round and pours it into their cups. This seems to my mind the fairest thing there is.

This is the very scene before him. It is a revealing picture of the good life, three thousand years ago. Wine is not drunk alone, or merely for intoxication. It is shared, with food, music, conversation, and storytelling. And the adventures that Odysseus is about to relate will show what happens when those customs break down.

The Wine That Bested a Giant

Odysseus begins with the Cicones at Ismarus. After sacking their city, he orders his men to leave immediately. But they refuse. Instead, they remain on the shore slaughtering livestock and drinking wine. ‘There,’ Homer tells us, ‘much wine was drunk.’ While they are feasting, the surviving Cicones summon reinforcements. They counterattack, and Odysseus loses six men from every ship. Already, wine-drinking has become a test of self-command.

One assumes they were drinking the local wine—from what is now PGI Ismaros, in Thrace. At the heart of this wine region is the ancient town of Maroneia, named for Maron, the legendary priest of Apollo—and in later tradition, grandson of Dionysus. During the raid, Odysseus had spared Maron, together with his wife and child. In gratitude, Maron gave him gold, a silver mixing bowl, and twelve jars of an extraordinary wine.

It is here that Homer gives us the first tasting note:

He gave me twelve jars of wine, sweet and unmixed, a divine drink. No servant or maid in the house knew of it, but only [Maron] himself, his dear wife, and one housekeeper. And whenever they drank this honey-sweet red wine, he would fill one cup and pour it into twenty measures of water, and from the mixing bowl there rose a marvellous sweet fragrance: then indeed it would have been no pleasure to hold back.

Admittedly, Homer is not using the WSET tasting template. But I think the examiners would be satisfied that this is no rustic plonk.

Odysseus takes a skin of the wine when he goes to investigate the Cyclopes. The Cyclops Polyphemus, though a shepherd, is not a social or civilised creature. He has generous grapes—later tradition would place him on the volcanic slopes of Mount Etna—and milk and cheese, but no wine. So when Odysseus pours him some of Maron’s wine, he drinks it neat and is overwhelmed by it. When he asks for more, Odysseus obliges him three times, until he slumbers. That’s when the red-hot olive stake is driven into his single eye. It was not merely by his cunning that Odysseus defeated the vastly stronger Cyclops, but by wine, and by turning the monster’s own savagery against him.

The Sorceress’s Wine

Several adventures later, Odysseus and his remaining men reach the island of Circe. The sorceress welcomes a group of them into her house and feeds them a mixture of cheese, barley meal, honey, and Pramnian wine, a strong, celebrated wine of uncertain origin—interlaced with amnesic drugs. As they gulp it down, she strikes them with her wand, and they are transformed into pigs. (Circe is the original sorceress, and why Western witches and sorcerers carry a wand.)

Men surrender to their appetites, forget their homes, and become animals. Yet Homer is not preaching abstinence, but self-control. After Odysseus overcomes Circe and she restores the men, wine and feasting help lift their spirits.

Two Kinds of Feast

Much later, when back in Ithaca, Odysseus offers one of the shrewdest descriptions of drunkenness in ancient literature. In Alexander Pope’s verse translation:

And wine can of their wits the wise beguile,
Make the sage frolic, and the serious smile,
The grave in merry measures frisk about,
And many a long-repented word bring out.

For Homer, then, the question is not whether to drink, but how. For a positive model, we need only return to the Phaeacians. They mix their wine with water, pour libations to the gods, exchange gifts, eat together, listen to music, and tell stories. They welcome the shipwrecked Odysseus and create the conditions in which a stranger might tell his story. Here, wine does not obliterate memory, but facilitates its recovery. And the scene is, of course, ‘the fairest thing there is.’ Grapes have been turned into wine, ingredients into cuisine, sounds into music, strangers into guests, and experiences into stories. Only once he has recovered his story is Odysseus fit to return to Ithaca.

Ithaca, where the suitors have been occupying Odysseus’ palace, slaughtering his livestock, draining his wine stores, and feasting at his expense while competing for Penelope. Outwardly, theirs is a civilised feast. There is meat and wine, music and conversation, servants and guests. But the suitors abuse that hospitality and gorge themselves day after day. Like Polyphemus, they know how to consume but not how to live.

Homer lived almost three thousand years ago, in a world in which wine was not treated simply as another form of ‘alcohol’. It was agriculture and craftsmanship transformed into hospitality, fellowship, ritual, pleasure, and even enlightenment. But Homer was not uncritical. Wine could indeed loosen the tongue, overwhelm judgement, invite forgetfulness, lose men, and return them to animals. The same drink could accompany Odysseus’ fairest vision, while also bringing down a giant, turning his men into swine, and foreboding the demise of the suitors. Civilisation requires not the abstinence of Cyclopes, but the moderation of men.

For Homer, the opposite of drunkenness was not sobriety, but civilisation.

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How to Improve Your Blind Tasting—for Examinations, Competitions, or Simply the Love of Wine

six wine glasses on a table (wine blind tasting)
Blind tasting begins not with answers but with passion and attention.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

In Why Blind Taste Wine, I argued that blind tasting frees us from our preconceptions, obliging us to attend to the wine itself rather than the noise surrounding it. This temporary suspension of preconceptions—what the ancient Skeptics called epoché—is, I think, a pre-requisite for learning about wine.

Here I want to ask the next question: how do we become better at blind tasting?

Many people first encounter blind tasting through examinations and competitions. Others simply want to deepen their understanding of wine. Whatever your motivation, it’s all too easy to lose sight of why you embarked on the journey in the first place—not to punish yourself or put yourself through an obstacle course, but to learn more deeply about the thing you love. Blind tasting, remember, is a means, not an end in itself—not to pass examinations or conquer competitions, but to commune with the world.

There can be no shortcut to expertise. Nor is there any substitute for a long and loving relationship with wine. No examination technique, tasting grid, or mnemonic can replace years spent tasting attentively, visiting wine regions, talking to growers and vintners, reading widely, and, above all, drinking good wine in good company.

Practice is indispensable, but not all practice is equally valuable. Resist the temptation simply to reinforce your strengths. The quickest way to improve is to identify your weaknesses and work on those.

Blind tasting is less about memorising and recalling possibilities (my free crib sheets can help with that) than distinguishing between plausible alternatives. Focus on tasting and thinking accurately, not on getting it right. If you’re a good taster, you’re a good taster, and no curveball can take that away from you. Like every blind taster, I often get it wrong—but can explain why I got it wrong. Many wines, remember, are inherently misleading.

The single most important thing is to find or form a dedicated study group. Aside from the purely social aspects, the benefits of a study group include: imposing structure and discipline, sharing knowledge and experiences, shaping indistinct impressions, uncovering blind spots, and, last but not least, dividing expenses.

Beyond formal practice, immerse yourself in wine. Attend as many tastings as you can. Visit wineries and wine regions. Talk to growers, vintners, and other wine lovers. Read books, magazines, and the wine press. Every encounter adds another layer of understanding—and, in truth, we taste with our mind much more than with our palate.

I have known generations of blind tasters at Oxford, and the best among them were always those who lived and breathed wine—often, it has to be admitted, at the expense of their studies. Nothing can make up for love, or madness.

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Here I have focused on the bigger picture, partly to restore perspective and allay any anxiety. The details—examination strategies, competition tactics, tasting grids, and so on—are better left to The Concise Guide to Wine and Blind Tasting, which draws on many years of teaching, judging, competing—and, mainly, drinking.

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