Any experienced wine taster has likely had the experience of tasting a fruit forward wine with discernible sweetness only to find out there is very little residual sugar in the wine. In other words, we mistake fruitiness for sweetness. But it turns out this is not a mistake. This recent article by renowned flavor scientist Linda Bartoshuk in the journal Inference explains why. On a whim, I used the data we had gathered to explore a different question: which constituents were contributing to sweetness? To my amazement, flavor—retronasal perception of the volatiles—was contributing substantiall ..read more

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the first time cleared a meat product grown from animal cells for human consumption, the agency announced on Wednesday. UPSIDE Foods, a company that makes cell-cultured chicken by harvesting cells from live animals and using the cells to grow meat in stainless-steel tanks, will be able to bring its products to market once it has been inspected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), said a release from the FDA. This is actually a very important innovation. Studies have shown that beef consumption needs to be reduced by 90% in western coun ..read more

The view that wine and food lack the cognitive dimension characteristic of genuine aesthetic appreciation is getting more difficult to defend. For much of the history of aesthetics, taste and smell have been relegated to the sidelines. In contrast to vision and hearing, taste and smell were thought to be too subjective and too dependent on pleasure and emotion to warrant close aesthetic attention. But most importantly, according to the traditional view, taste and smell lacked a cognitive dimension. Our capacity for thought and reflection played little role in our appreciation of food and wine ..read more

The smell of food or wine is a remarkably efficient activator of distant memories. The particular smell of Mom’s apple pie is capable of calling forth a picture of a moment in life richer in detail than any snapshot in an album. It is extraordinary that, although I can struggle to remember my cell phone number or a friend’s name, the mere whiff of a certain scent of vanilla ice cream can cause me to vividly picture the isolated, mysterious old home on the coast of Maine where my parents would take my brother and me to find homemade ice cream. That was well over 50 years ago but the quality of ..read more

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been digging into microbiologist Malfeito-Ferreira’s literature survey on holistic wine tasting.  One of the more interesting dimensions of his discussion is his inclusion of emotions in the construction of olfactory conceptual spaces. This is of particular interest to me because I devoted Chapter Five in Beauty and the Yeast to a discussion of emotions in wine. His treatment of this topic is cursory but highly suggestiv,e and the studies he links to show a robust role for emotions in our responses to food, and by implication wine. (There is not much scie ..read more

This is a big deal. Chicken bites are made from meat grown in a laboratory. The “chicken bites”, produced by the US company Eat Just, have passed a safety review by the Singapore Food Agency and the approval could open the door to a future when all meat is produced without the killing of livestock, the company said. This is not just a whiz-bang technology designed to make someone a lot of money. The planet really needs an alternative to the mass production of livestock. Recent studies show that if we are to avoid the worst effects of climate change, beef consumption needs to be reduced by 90 ..read more

The wine industry really needs to take this seriously. For 25 years, the U.S. government’s recommended dietary guidelines for alcohol consumption have urged moderation, mentioning some possible health benefits but also recommending men limit themselves to no more than two drinks per day and women to one drink or less. Now a panel of health experts is saying that may be too much, recommending the guidelines be cut in half for men. The one drink recommendation for women will remain unchanged. You would think that such a change in policy would be based on new science. But that is not the case ..read more

I keep seeing this inference in discussions about subjectivity in wine tasting by people who should know better.  Gordon Shepherd makes it in his book Neuroenology: How the Brain Creates the Taste of Wine, and Jamie Goode makes it in his  otherwise fine book I Taste Red. Both insist that the flavor of wine is not in the wine but in the brain. The mistake is this. From the fact that the brain integrates a variety of multisensory signals in order to create flavor perceptions, it does not follow that the brain creates the flavors that we perceive. Flavor is one thing. Flavor perception ..read more

When I taste and evaluate wines, one of the most readily apparent feature of the wine is the wine’s shape and the way that shape evolves on the palate. Wines can be round, chunky, sharp, angular, contorted, flat, curvaceous, sculptured, sinuous, tapered, etc.  Wine of course is a liquid; it doesn’t literally have a shape. Nevertheless these shape words really help to characterize a wine. So what is going on here? Are these just metaphors? Perhaps. But even if they are metaphors it remains to be explained why these metaphors can be readily understood. I doubt that people with some experien ..read more

In 2013, Mark Post, a professor located in the Netherlands, created the first burger made of cultured meat. The meat is produced in a laboratory by culturing animal cells and growing strips of muscle from them. The meat is then put on a scaffold that moves in a way that stretches the muscle thus simulating the movement of a developing living animal. Apparently this concept is getting close to commercial viability. Cell-based meat (also known as cultured, cultivated, slaughter-free, cell-cultured, and clean meat) could be a common sight in supermarkets across the west in the next three years ..read more