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The Biology, 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 Biology 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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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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If this article spoke to you, you might look into Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions and The Concise Guide to Wine and Blind Tasting.

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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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What Is Beethoven’s 9th Out of 100?

A wine in a glass, with a scoring sheet beside it
 A great wine is a lot more than a figure.

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

A wine rating is a summary of the appraisal of a wine by one or more critics—most famously Robert Parker, whose 100-point scale came to dominate the wine world from the 1970s until his retirement in 2019. Other systems remain in use, while many websites now invite wine lovers to contribute their own ‘community ratings’.

In theory, a numerical score merely supplements a tasting note. In practice, the tasting note—if it even exists—is often ignored, and the wine reduced to a single headline number.

This has obvious advantages. Ratings convey information clearly and simply, especially to novices. Assuming the tasting has been conducted under rigorously blind conditions, they reflect quality rather than price or reputation. They encourage producers to improve, and reward those who do. Wines awarded more than 90 points are considerably easier to sell, while those in the high nineties can become cult wines almost overnight. Château Tirecul la Gravière, in Monbazillac, became an overnight sensation after Robert Parker awarded 100 points to its 1995 Cuvée Madame.

Yet ratings can be criticised on three grounds: concept, procedure, and consequences.

The first objection, then, is conceptual. However objective or scientific a score may appear, it remains an expression of human judgement.

Consider these two reviews of the same wine:

  1. The greatest Cantenac Brown I have ever tasted, the 2010 is one for the ages.
  2. V, v sweet, And alcoholic. And a bit drying on the end—a sort of right-bank Margaux. What’s the point?

The first is from Robert Parker. The second, Jancis Robinson.

What is Beethoven’s Ninth out of 100?

What is the Sistine Chapel out of 100?

How much do you love your partner out of 100?

A great wine, too, is more than an object of measurement. It is the expression of a place, a season, and the care and attention of those who made it. It can certainly be judged, but not reduced to a single number.

Scoring wines might be compared to ranking contestants in a beauty pageant. Like the contenders in the pageant, the wines are often very young, and scores cannot fully account for the delights and disappointments that are yet to come. In any case, the prettiest boy or girl is probably not on the stage but sitting at home buried in War and Peace. Many of the most hallowed producers shun competitions, mainly, I think, because they have little to gain and much to lose. Artisan winemakers, who make the most soulful wines, do not have the time or means to enter competitions.

The second objection is procedural. Competition scores are influenced not only by personal preferences and prejudices, but also by the context and conditions of the tasting, and, in a panel, by the group dynamics, with junior judges exquisitely sensitive to every ‘um’ and ‘aah’ from the more distinguished panel chair. The outcome of this process might be of existential import to the producer, who has toiled for a year, indeed, several years, to make his or her wine, but in fact reflects no more than a few seconds of tasting with no or very little time for discussion and debate.

There is also a financial incentive to dish out medals, which invite further paid entries and increase sales of medal stickers. As a result, there has been a devaluation of wine scores over the years—so that many wineries would now hesitate to publicise a score below 90.

The third objection concerns consequences. The highest-rated wines often become objects of speculation, traded like financial assets rather than uncorked and enjoyed around a table. 

More subtly, ratings favour wines that make an immediate impression on a fatigued palate: concentrated, powerful, and rich in fruit, oak, and tannin. More restrained wines—those that whisper rather than shout and speak more faithfully of place—are liable to be undervalued. This contributed significantly to the homogenisation—or ‘Parkerization’—of wine styles during the late twentieth century.

Wine ratings have played an important role in the rise of wine culture, but their grip seems to be loosening, if not quite fading, as consumers become more experienced and knowledgeable—and as wine scores tend asymptotically towards 100.

To me, a score of 98 is a signal for caution.

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If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy my book The Concise Guide to Wine and Blind Tasting, which explores not only how to taste wine, but why it matters. Practical yet thoughtful, it will help you taste with greater confidence—and greater pleasure.

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The Long History of One of Wine’s Greatest Ideas

Vincent van Gogh's The Red Vineyard (1888).
Vincent van Gogh’s The Red Vineyard (1888). The finest wines have many stories to tell.

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

Most people think terroir means soil. Others think it means climate. Everyone agrees the concept is French. Everyone is only partly right.

Terroir is the entire relationship between a vine and its environment, including even the animals and people within it. Climate, geology, topography, soil microorganisms, plants and insects, centuries of accumulated know-how, and the choices of the grower and winemaker are only some of the things that contribute to the character of a wine. Terroir is not any one of these things but the interaction between them. The whole is much greater than the sum of its parts.

It took humanity thousands of years to arrive at this deceptively simple idea.

The first winemakers, in the South Caucasus some eight thousand years ago, left no written record. But they almost certainly understood that some vineyards produced better wines than others.

What we can be sure of is that, by the time of Homer (eighth century BCE), certain wines had already become famous. In the Odyssey, Odysseus carries the priest Maron’s Ismarian wine, so rich and fragrant that it has to be diluted with twenty parts water—and, even then, fills the room with perfume. Indeed, it is potent enough to bring down the Cyclops Polyphemus. Homer assumes his audience will recognise the wine’s reputation. Long before anyone understood why some places produced extraordinary wines, the Greeks already knew that they did.

In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle’s friend and student Theophrastus asked a new question: why? In his two great botanical works, Enquiry into Plants and On the Causes of Plants, he seeks not merely to describe plants but to explain them. ‘There are as many kinds of grapes as there are kinds of soil,’ he observes. It is a simple but revealing remark. For perhaps the first time, someone was looking beyond the reputation of a vineyard and, like Master Aristotle, asking about causes.

The Romans carried the idea further. Virgil famously wrote, Bacchus amat colles—’Bacchus loves the hills’—suggesting that vines do their best on well-drained slopes. Writing in the first century CE, Pliny the Elder argued that when a vine is transplanted, ‘it changes its character so completely owing to the difference of soil and climate that it is never recognised as the same.’ His conclusion is strikingly modern: ‘It is a fact that the soil matters more than the vine.’

Yet the Romans also contributed something even more enduring than practical viticulture. They spoke of the genius loci: the spirit of the place. A great vineyard possessed a character that everyone knew, but no one could fully explain. It was more than its soil, more than its climate, more than the skill of the grower. It had a spirit of its own.

Modern science has transformed our understanding of wine. We can analyse soils, study climates, sequence vine genomes, and measure almost every aspect of a vineyard. Yet in so doing we sometimes forget what the ancients grasped intuitively. A great vineyard, like any balanced ecosystem, is more than the sum of its measurable parts.

As a blind taster, I encounter this truth every time I lift a glass. A Chablis should not taste like a Napa Chardonnay, nor a Mosel Riesling like one from Clare Valley. The finest wines carry unmistakable traces of where they come from—even of the eucalyptus of Coonawarra and the garrigue of Provence. Their place speaks through them.

For this reason, I have never been fond of heavy-handed oak. Oak has its place, and in skilful hands it can add harmony and complexity. But when it overwhelms a wine, it drowns out many of the very signals that blind tasters rely upon and wine lovers cherish. Instead of hearing the voice of the vineyard—the genius loci—we hear only the barrel from another place.

Perhaps that is the deepest meaning of terroir. It is not merely a list of soils, climates, or slopes. It is the elusive way in which a place leaves its signature upon a wine. The highest calling of a winemaker is not to silence that voice, but to listen for it—and let it speak.

Sources: Homer, Odyssey 9.208–211; Theophrastus, Enquiry into Plants 3.11 and On the Causes of Plants; Virgil, Georgics 2.113; Pliny the Elder, Natural History 14.4–5, 17.3–8.

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