Tag Archive for 'science'

Order effects, and linguistic fluency

Published on October 7, 2012 in Tasting and taste. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

I thought that subject line would get your attention :)

In you have an hour or so to spare, take a look at this lecture by Antonia Mantonakis entitled “Does a wine’s name influence consumer taste perception?”  It also covers other influences on taste perception that have nothing to do with the wine itself.

So, to my list of factors that explain why wine tastes the way it does, it seems we can add the following two:

  1. Order effects
    I mentioned in my earlier list that the previous wine tasted affects how the current one is perceived, but Antonia found more general order effects.  In short sequences of  up to 3 wines, consumers show a preference for the first one.    But for longer sequences, up to 5 wines, the last one is preferred.   This research is briefly referred to in the video, but I could not find a publicly accessible research article to link to.
  2. Linguistic fluency
    Two winery names were made up, one of which was easier to pronounce than the other, but in other respects they were the same. In contrast to how linguistic fluency (ease of reading and pronunciation) affects perception of more basic consumer goods, it was found that a wine associated with the less fluent name tasted better.   More details in the video and this article.  I am sure I have heard it said many times that wines with simple names have an advantage in the market, but maybe that idea came about by the invalid extension of results from other product categories.

I’d like to emphasise that these results refer to reported perceptions.  There is admittedly the issue of whether people say what they really think about a wine, or say what they think they should be saying.  It might even vary from experiment to experiment, but MR scan evidence and a clever experimental design suggest that people at least sometimes say what they really think they perceive.

The final thing I would like to comment on is perhaps the most surprising, at least for those who fancy themselves as wine experts. The subjects in the experiments mentioned in the two points listed above were divided into two categories: those who knew more about wine, and those who knew less. Guess which group was more influenced by the order and linguistic fluency. It was the more knowledgable one!

Wine scoring

Published on January 17, 2012 in Tasting and taste. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Debating the merits of scoring is a well-worn topic on wine blogs and forums, but this nicely argued contribution on John M Kelly’s blog ”notes from the winemaker” offers an original perspective. Do read it for yourself, but basically John describes the lengths it would be necessary to go to in order to make an objective assessment of a wine.  Of course, no critic works like this, and their scores are essentially subjective.

After reading it, something else occurred to me.  If wines were scored with the rigour described in John’s blog post, the scores would still most likely be meaningless to the consumer, possibly more so than the scores of today’s critics.  Why?  Because all the factors that are so important in drinking and enjoying wine are removed in order to get a reliable assessment, and no one actually drinks wine in laboratory conditions.  An even more fundamental objection lies in the definition of what makes one wine better than another.  It is one thing to make that definition explicit as suggested by John, but it would be impossible to get one that everybody would agree with.

To the extent that there is any agreement at all about what makes a good wine, the most common definition you hear these days is “one that has a sense of place”.  What procedure would you use to measure that?

Temperature variation in wine cellars

Published on September 3, 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , .

The above diagram is taken from p303 of David MacKay’s book Sustainable Energy – without the hot air.  It shows how temperature in the ground varies with depth and time of year if the surface temperature varies as a sine function with a minimum of 3°C and maximum of 6ºC.  You can see the surface variation by reading off the temperatures from the horizontal slice through the diagram at depth 0.  Further into the ground, at depth 2 for example, you can see that the temperature is colder, varies in the range 10-13ºC, and the minimum temperature lags behind the surface temperature by about 5 months.  Mor rapid temperature variations, within a day and from day to day, are ignored, but these would be very small at almost any depth.  The correspondence between depths 0, 1, 2, 3 and depths in meters depends on the ground material; examples from MacKay are given in the table below.

            Granite          Damp sandy soils
or concrete		       Dry or peaty soils
Depth 0   0.0m   0.0m   0.0m
Depth 1   3.0m   2.6m   1.3m
Depth 2   6.0m   5.2m   2.6m
Depth 3   9.0m   7.8m   3.9m

Of course, this would be a good predictor of temperature variations in your wine only if you had a few bottle buried outside, and perhaps in some commercial cellars.  Domestic cellars are usually directly below houses, and thus have surface temperatures that are both higher and more constant than those assumed in the diagram, and there are not metres of earth or rock between the cellar and the house.  But even then, the diagram does perhaps give some idea of the cooling effect from cellar walls.  If you are keener than me you could try doing calculations more relevant to wine cellars – MacKay gives you some equations you could use at a starting point.  Or you could just put a thermometer in your cellar.

Another wine application of these calculations would be to predict the temperature of vine roots at various depths.  I have no idea how important root temperature is to the vine, but if it is you now know where to get the equations.

Finally, a big thank you to David MacKay for allowing his material to be used under a Creative Commons licence.  See the website for details, but amongst other things it allows you to download the book free of charge.  I admit I have by no means read it all, but it looks well written and very interesting.