Wine, Art, Thrillers & Music: Smells Like Beethoven, Sounds Like A Forgery
A current article from The Economist provokes some intriguing questions about wine tasting, synaesthesia and environmental influences on perception of taste and quality.
It’s one of my favorite topics. In one of my best-selling thrillers, Daughter of God, my heroine was an art expert with an uncanny ability to detect forged paintings. Her secret weapon: she was a synaesthete and every painting created music in her head. And forgeries were discordant.
But back to wine and Beethoven
Using the word “note” to describe an odour may be more than just metaphor — From The Economist
“THAT some people make weird associations between the senses has been acknowledged for over a century. The condition has even been given a name: synaesthesia. Odd as it may seem to those not so gifted, synaesthetes insist that spoken sounds and the symbols which represent them give rise to specific colours or that individual musical notes have their own hues.
“Yet there may be a little of this cross-modal association in everyone. Most people agree that loud sounds are “brighter” than soft ones. Likewise, low-pitched sounds are reminiscent of large objects and high-pitched ones evoke smallness. Anne-Sylvie Crisinel and Charles Spence of Oxford University think something similar is true between sound and smell.”
First popularized by Richard Cytowic’s book, The Man Who Tasted Shapes, synaesthesia is theorized to be the results of non-typical brain development in infants.The theory goes that as most brains develop, perception sorts itself out into distinct senses: smell, touch, hearing etc. Jumping that track creates synaesthesia.
But, it seems that some level of sensory comingling persists in all of us. Just think about the words sharp and flat and how they can apply to music, shapes and tastes.
A more recent book adds to Cytowic’s work: Tasting the Universe: People Who See Colors in Words and Rainbows in Symphonies.
SYNAESTHESIA & WINE TASTING
Professional wine tasters and academics who study the perception of taste and smell have long know qualitatively that the environment in which wine is tasted can affect the perception of quality and other characteristics.
As The Economist article points out, cross-sensory perceptions have a significant impact on taste perceptions. Using scent vials from a teaching kit used in wine-tasting:
“Sweet and sour smells were rated as higher-pitched, smoky and woody ones as lower-pitched. Blackberry and raspberry were very piano. Vanilla had elements of both piano and woodwind. Musk was strongly brass. It is not immediately clear why people employ their musical senses in this way to help their assessment of a smell. But gone are the days when science assumed each sense worked in isolation.”
The real wine tasting take-away from The Economist piece can be found in an experiment where volunteers tasted toffee while listening to different types of music (read the entire Economist article for details.
“Volunteers rated the toffee eaten during low-pitched music as more bitter than that consumed during the high-pitched rendition. The toffee was, of course, identical. It was the sound that tasted different.“
Now, think about what the outcome might be like for tasting wine. Sounds like a fun Ph.D. thesis to me, only exploring the other senses to get an idea of the overall synaesthetic component of wine tasting.
A final thought holds huge complications for the 100-point system, wine critics and almost every other rating scheme: individual intensity and variety of residual synaesthesia combined with environmental factors just add infinite variations to basic genetic differences in taste and smell.
