The paradox of wine tasting in the "TOTALLY BLIND TASTING" experiment.

photo credit:Mihai Colfescu

For wine enthusiasts and wine lovers, tasting is a familiar, instinctive, and seemingly obvious act we take for granted.

Wine is one of the most complex sensory products that we consume because it demands all our senses: sight, smell, taste, and touch, relatively at the same time. It is a real challenge for our nerve cells to process such a large amount of information, perceived through our different sensory channels at the same time.

During a sensory evaluation or even during a tasting, their protocol follows several steps in a certain sequence. The taster looks first at the wine, then analyzes the nose, and then confirms its impressions in the mouth. When such an eye-nose-mouth sequence is performed, the multitude of olfactory, gustatory, tactile, and retronasal sensations are conditioned by the first evaluation, the visual one.

Faced with a multisensory explosion, our brain needs to rank and sort sensory information. The first hierarchy is determined by our wine-tasting protocol and habits, so sight is the first sense to intervene, followed by smell, taste, and touch. Man is a visual animal that primarily bases his decisions on the visual information that reaches him. While vision loss is considered a disability just like hearing loss, loss of taste or smell is not considered a disability.

In every wine tasting, the first time we appreciate the color and the appearance of the wine is determined by the clarity and brilliance, thus we taste the wine for the first time with our eyes.

The brain is a predictive and statistical machine that uses information from past and present experiences to predict and anticipate the future. This anticipation phenomenon is all the more effective as the first information that reaches our brain is visual information. As a result, our brains become conditioned to visual details such as the color and appearance of wine. The brain tries to predict and anticipate the taste of the wine based on this valuable information by recalling the memory of other wines. Moreover, the color creates an immediate prejudice related to wine, because it makes a connection between color and aromas by recalling other aromas, which it has memorized and associated with various wines. As much as a white wine has a greener color spectrum, with greenish-yellow shades, we tend to associate this color with flavors of lemon, or raw fruit.

When visual information such as color conflicts with olfactory information, the spectrum of aromas, sight has the final say. A simple example is how we describe a white wine made from a red variety, for example, a white vinified Zinfandel, to which we attribute aromas and tastes specific to a white wine and not aromas and tastes specific to a red variety.

Thus we will not use descriptors of red fruits, currants, or raspberries, to characterize this white wine, but we will describe it with descriptors such as white fruits and honey. This effect manifests itself in all our daily tasting judgments: red fruit descriptors are limited to red wine, and we use floral or white fruit descriptors for white wines. The influence of color extends to color intensity: the darker the color of the wine, the more intensely aromatic the wine will be perceived to be.

In conclusion, when we taste wine, visual information can completely change our olfactory and gustatory organoleptic perception of it.

Totally Blind Tasting aims to completely cancel sight in the sensory evaluation or tasting of wine.

"Totally Blind Tasting", the experimental event carried out by the WineUp Fair in Transylvania team, presented by Ioana Bidian, aims to voluntarily cancel vision during the sensory evaluation or tasting of wine, to divert the vision and allow the brain to rebalance the different sensory channels and increase the receptivity of the olfactory and gustatory centers. The experiment starts from the premise that in the face of the uncertainty of color and appearance, smell, taste, and tactile sense will guide us in evaluating the wine.

The conclusions of this experiment event were drawn after careful observation of the participants, the responses given during the tasting and the feedback received after the events ended.

First of all, there was a reluctance to participate in such an event, most participants asked for more data and clarification before signing up for the event. Before the start of the event, many of the participants told us that they felt a sense of discomfort, an exit from their comfort zone. There have been questions asked before the start of the event to eliminate feelings of discomfort and gain confidence in the event moderator. They wanted to make sure that there would be no situations in which the wines presented were of poor quality or samples that would affect their health.

Interestingly, such a relatively simple and fun experience turned into an uncomfortable situation for some participants, who were unable to complete the entire event and gave up on keeping their vision blocked. All of them mentioned that the situations that affected them a lot were related to the perception of the movements of those around them and mainly of those who poured the wine into the glasses, and then the positioning in the tasting space raised problems for them.

An interesting association came from the description of olfactory and gustatory notes, described as a spectrum of colors and not as aromas, for white wines with high acidity the participants described the wine with words like "green" and "raw green", for oaked wines they "yellow" "intense yellow" notes were described, "cherry" "intense purple" notes were defined for red wines. All were mentioned as tasting notes and not as wine colors.

An interesting effect of obscuring the view in the tasting was the verbalization of the impressions about the wine, the lack of connection between sight and the olfactory and gustatory profile, which determined the insecurity of the participants manifested especially through contradictory descriptions of the same wine.

The taste profile of some wines led to their classification in another color category, there were white and rosé wines that were perceived as red wines.

All the participants became impatient to taste each wine "blind" to get to taste the wines as quickly as possible and without obscuring the vision. At the end of each tasting session, the participants had the freedom to look at the real color of the wine and started a second classic analytical tasting of each wine, they were surprised by the fact that tasting the same wines they found them much more aromatic and much more balanced.

Tasting events featured unfiltered red wines or barrel samples that either had a matte appearance, were cloudy, or had various natural particles and precipitates, but were quality wines. Although they were appreciated by the participants during the "blind" tasting, the tendency was to reject these wines at the time of the tasting without obscuring the vision. Participants mentioned that if they had not tasted and appreciated them before, they would not have tasted them when they saw their appearance, and in a restaurant, they would have rejected them.

The subsequent presentation of the labels and the story of the producer and each wine led to a total change in the perception of the wine so that wines that in the case of the "blind" tasting and the classic tasting were not necessarily to the liking of the participants, after finding out the producer and of wine production technology were accepted and even enjoyed by the participants.

How can we explain all these reactions? First of all, we must understand that sight is a sense that has a great weight on all our actions and decisions. The sense of sight is so dominant that it inhibits the other senses and monopolizes the information that will be used by our brains to make decisions and judgments.

If you want to learn more about wines and the senses, how they work, and how you can educate your senses, we invite you to purchase WineUp Academy's Wine Evaluation and Tasting Techniques course.