Interpreting Taste

Jonah Lehrer spotlights a wine connoisseur whose tasting talents did not survive a blindfold. His take-out:

[O]ur sensations require interpretation. When we take a sip of wine, we don't taste the wine first, and the cheapness or redness second. We taste everything all at once, in a single gulp of thiswineisred, or thiswineisexpensive. As a result, the wine "experts" sincerely believed that the white wine [mixed with food coloring] was red, or that Lafite was actually Troplong-Mondot. Such mistakes are inevitable: Our brain has been designed to believe itself, wired so that our prejudices feel like facts, our opinions indistinguishable from the actual sensation. If we think a wine is cheap, it will taste cheap. And if we think we are tasting a grand cru, then we will taste a grand cru.

2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan