This summary essay by Charles Spence on the varieties of empirical research into the psychology of wine tasting is informative. But the inferences drawn from some of this research are often driven by unwarranted assumptions.
Regarding the influence of wine glasses on the taste and aroma of wine, Spence writes:
The research clearly shows that if the taster does not know which wine glass they are evaluating a wine in/from, either because they have been blindfolded while the glassware is agitated under the taster's nose or because the glass in which the taster evaluates the wine is different from the glass in which the wine has been allowed to breathe the glassware seems to make little difference to the taster's experience. However, as soon as the latter become aware of the nature of the glass from which they are tasting, the glassware can suddenly make a huge difference to the tasting experience.
So far so good. But then he writes:
What such results suggest is that the influence of the wine glass is more psychological than physico-chemical in origin.
But there is a rival explanation for what is going on in these cases. Once tasters become aware of the nature of the glass they are using, they focus their attention on what the glass does to the taste of the wine. The effect is apparently too small to matter much until we focus on it. But this doesn't rule out a physico-chemical effect. It suggests that detection of the physico-chemical effect depends on how we focus our attention.
The basic problem is conceptual. There is an assumption that we should be able to strictly demarcate psychological from physical effects. But it is difficult to establish a sharp distinction between them. Our psychology and our taste and aroma mechanisms work together.
Later when the essay turns to the effect of music on taste, the same questionable distinction pops up. Spence writes
Elsewhere, one finds descriptions such as the following from James John, Director of the Bath Wine School, talking about tasting Chardonnay while listening to Mozart's Laudate Dominum: "[…] Just as the sonant complexity is doubled, the gustatory effects of ripe fruit on toasted vanilla explode on the palate and the appreciation of both is taken to an entirely new level" (quoted in Sachse-Weinert, 2012).
As the research shows, there is a plethora of evidence that music affects what you taste. But then he goes on:
At the same time, however, Sachse-Weinert's (2012) quote might also make one wonder how much of what goes on in, and is written about, the world of wine is some kind of social construction based on expectations rather than necessarily reflecting a genuine perceptual effect. The results of blind tastings (see Spence, 2010c, for a review), together with the extensive literature on the absence of sensory threshold changes in expert wine-tasters (see Spence, 2019c; Spence & Wang, 2019) certainly do suggest that higher-level cognitive/conceptual constructs, together with the associated mental imagery concerning what one is expected to taste/ experience play a major part in the wine-tasting experience, especially for the experts.
Well of course wine expertise is a "social-construction based on expectations." What else would you learn through wine education other than "higher-level cognitive/conceptual constructs" that are created through social interaction? That is the whole point of learning theory. The fact that it doesn't change sensory thresholds is interesting but thresholds are only one aspect of sensation. What theory gives you, in addition to a vocabulary for talking about wine, is an ability to direct very focused attention to aspects of a wine that you didn't notice before you learned the theory.
Perception is dependent on attention, and attention is influenced by the concepts that structure our experience.
"Cognitive/conceptual constructs" are about how we carve up reality. All of us can perceive a tree and make some vague distinctions between types of trees. By contrast an arborist will perceive a whole lot more of the tree than our casual observations will capture. Wine is no different. The idea that we can make a hard distinction between the perceptual and the cognitive is a myth that philosophy gave up well over 300 yrs ago. Scientists need to catch up.
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