Brainy ones get best out of wine

Rome, May 29: Wine-tasting takes more than a perfect palate and a fruity vocabulary — you have to use your brains.

That’s the finding of a study undertaken by a team of researchers at a Rome hospital.


"We wanted to find out whether there was a difference at brain level between a trained and an untrained person drinking wine," said Gisela Hagberg, a Swedish bio-physicist, at the study’s presentation at the Wine Academy in Rome on Tuesday.


"What we found is that the training does not just educate your palate, it also affects how your brain responds to the taste of wine." Researchers conducted brain scans on seven sommeliers and seven casual drinkers while they sampled wines.


The scans showed strong activity in the amygdala, a part of the brain that reacts to sensations of pleasure, in both groups. But the sommeliers also displayed a burst of activity in parts of their frontal cortexes, an area of the brain used for thinking, while the amateurs showed no reaction there at all.
"Both groups were asked to pay close attention to what they were drinking, so it’s not that the control subjects weren’t thinking," said Hagberg.


The difference appears to be that while both groups’ brains processed the sensory aspects of drinking, the taste of wine triggered a rational, even intellectual response in the experts.

Andrea Sturniolo, one of the sommeliers who participated in the experiment at the Santa Lucia research hospital, was thrilled with the results.


"This proves the reasoning, the intellectual effort that goes into breaking down the many tastes of a wine and assessing its full flavour," he said.

"It’s not that sommeliers are superior beings of course, it’s all in the training and the experience."

Bureau Report