The Art and Science of Wine Tasting | Qian Janice Wang | TED

0:04 So I would like everyone to close their eyes,

0:08 just for a second, and imagine that you're holding a glass of wine.

0:13 And really imagine that experience.

0:16 Take the wine, swirl the wine, smell it, and take a sip.

0:23 Now imagine that someone next to you leans over and says, "Mm,

0:29 that was a really complex wine." OK, what did they mean by that?

0:34 What exactly does complexity mean?

0:37 It's a term that we use a lot in the world of wine.

0:41 Wine critics use it, right?

0:43 When I write a tasting note, I sometimes use complexity.

0:47 But I will tell you an industry secret.

0:51 If you ask 10 different people,

0:53 "What does complexity mean," you might get 10 different answers.

0:58 So today I want to explore this idea of complexity to show that actually,

1:03 when it comes to smell and taste, we can get a lot of complex cognitive ideas

1:10 that usually are reserved for the realm of art.

1:13 So a very small art history introduction first,

1:16 and then we'll get to the good stuff, which is the wine.

1:19 So in psychology, we often see this curve, this Berlyne curve, that explains

1:25 the relationship between complexity and liking.

1:30 And the idea here is that it's an upside-down U curve,

1:34 so if something is too simple, people don't like it.

1:38 On the other hand, if something is too complex, people also don't like it.

1:42 So there's a sweet spot in the middle, like an ideal complexity.

1:47 I made some audio clips to demonstrate this idea.

1:51 So here's a simple one.

1:54 (Music note) So maybe if you're into very modern music,

1:58 you might think that was really good.

2:00 Otherwise you might find that a bit boring.

2:02 So here's another one with a little bit more complexity.

2:05 (Musical tune) These are my original compositions, by the way.

2:11 And here's a third example where there's a lot of complexity.

2:15 (Musical tune) So how many people like that one?

2:20 OK, we have a few in the audience.

2:22 Very nice, very nice.

2:24 But I wanted to demonstrate the point, right?

2:27 When you have too much complexity, often people don't like it.

2:31 But is that true in the world of wine?

2:34 I chose one quote from a famous wine critic,

2:38 Matt Kramer, and let's see what he said about complexity.

2:42 "The greatest standard used in assessing the quality of wine is complexity.

2:47 The more times you can return to a glass of wine and find something different,

2:53 either the bouquet or the taste, the more complex the wine.

2:57 The greatest wines are not so much overpowering as they

3:01 are seemingly limitless." So this is a very beautiful quote, right?

3:05 Very artistic.

3:06 And you start thinking, OK, so what exactly is complexity?

3:10 I work as a researcher, I'm a scientist.

3:14 In my work, I need to try to define what one critic says, right?

3:20 This is a very vague idea.

3:21 So how do I exactly go in and investigate this concept?

3:26 And the approach I took, I will demonstrate a little bit today.

3:30 There are actually two ways of thinking about

3:33 complexity when it comes to wine or food.

3:36 There's, first, chemical complexity, right?

3:38 That's the stuff that's in the glass.

3:40 What are the chemical molecules in the wine?

3:43 And then there's a concept called psychological complexity,

3:46 where complexity is not really in the wine, but it's in the mind of the drinker.

3:51 And I will show two different studies.

3:53 The first one: we investigate the idea

3:56 of chemical complexity— it's complexity in the glass.

4:00 And in the second study, we'll look at psychological complexity.

4:03 It's complexity in the mind of the drinker.

4:06 So let's look at the first one.

4:08 This was a study I conducted at the University of Oxford some years ago.

4:13 And the idea was, OK, if I have two wines and I make a 50/50 blend,

4:19 surely the blend should chemically be more complex, right, than the individuals.

4:25 So here we took three wines, single grape variety from the same producer,

4:31 and then I made 50/50 blends of these three wines for a total of six.

4:36 It looks something like this.

4:38 When someone came to the lab to do the study,

4:40 they were presented with six wines.

4:42 They were not told which one was which, right?

4:45 We didn't tell them at all about which are blends, which are single variety.

4:48 They were just told, here are six red wines, I would like you to taste them.

4:52 And people made some ratings.

4:54 For example, they had to guess whether the wine was a blend or not.

4:58 They had to name the flavours and then

5:01 they evaluated the wine based on things like liking,

5:03 familiarity, complexity, flavour, intensity, quality and willingness to pay.

5:09 So I want you all to just take a moment and think.

5:13 Do you think that people could actually tell,

5:15 in a blind tasting, which were blends and which were single varieties?

5:19 So maybe hands up, how many people think yes, they can tell the difference?

5:23 OK, maybe one or two or three.

5:26 Most people think no.

5:27 So I'm going to tell you something that was a very surprising finding.

5:31 Because I had around 80 people in this study,

5:34 there were some people who knew nothing about wine,

5:36 they just worked in the department and they wanted to come for free wine.

5:39 And we had some other people who had different wine certifications.

5:44 I was running the Oxford Blind Tasting Society,

5:46 so I kind of also got people in society to come do the study.

5:49 So the surprising finding was, if you looked at everybody overall,

5:54 people couldn't tell blends from single varieties.

5:57 But the fun thing was that actually it was the beginners,

6:01 the people who didn't know that much about wine,

6:03 who actually could guess blends or not higher than chance.

6:07 Very surprising.

6:08 It was the beginners who did better.

6:10 I don't know why, but that was one of the surprising findings.

6:13 Another finding we found was that the blends were

6:18 not rated as more complex than the single varieties.

6:23 This was maybe also a little bit surprising.

6:25 What it showed is that chemical complexity in the glass does

6:30 not necessarily equal perceived complexity when people are rating the wine.

6:35 A final surprising finding from this study was that there

6:40 was actually one thing that could explain people's complexity rating.

6:45 It wasn't whether it was a blend or not.

6:47 It was how much oak they could taste in the wine.

6:50 So people who wrote things like vanilla or spice or cinnamon,

6:56 writing those words in the flavor was actually predictive

7:01 of higher complexity and also more willingness to pay.

7:06 So at the end of the story,

7:08 it seems like chemical complexity doesn't really equal perceived complexity,

7:13 but if you put your wine in oak,

7:14 people are going to think it’s more complex, and they might like it more.

7:18 So that was the first study.

7:20 For the second one, I'm going to go

7:22 back to this idea of psychological complexity.

7:25 So, you know, it's beauty in the eye of the beholder.

7:29 Or is complexity in the mouth, I guess, of the taster?

7:35 And here, I wanted to introduce a different concept, which is this idea of time.

7:41 Complexity, when you're tasting something,

7:43 there can be two different ways of defining it.

7:46 You can have static complexity.

7:48 This is at any moment in time,

7:50 you know, how many different flavors do you perceive?

7:54 Or there's an idea of dynamic complexity,

7:56 which is, imagine, go back to your imagination.

8:00 You're tasting the wine in your mind.

8:02 If you pay attention to how the wine is evolving in the mouth over time,

8:08 you can actually follow how it changes.

8:11 So I also made some audio clips to demonstrate this idea.

8:15 The first one is a static complexity.

8:18 (Music note) So standard major triad, nothing complex.

8:25 And— it's complex.

8:26 The second one is dynamic complexity.

8:29 (Musical tune) So when I run these studies,

8:38 I use music a lot as a way to demonstrate these concepts

8:41 because everyone knows that music is something that evolves over time, right?

8:45 So you can listen to a change and the same thing can be applied to flavor.

8:50 So for this study, I really needed to find some wines that are very complex.

8:56 Because we're in Portugal, but also because I love Madeira,

8:59 it's my favorite fortified wine,

9:01 we ran a study with Madeira wines at different aging points,

9:06 because it's a well-known fact, at least in the wine world,

9:10 that the older the wine, the older the Madeira,

9:13 specifically, the more complex it gets.

9:15 This is what everyone in the wine trade believes,

9:18 but we wanted to see if this is actually true.

9:21 So for this study, I worked with Justino’s Winery,

9:25 and we had Madeira samples that are three, 10 or 20 years old, aged in barrel.

9:31 Again, the study looked something like this.

9:34 People got six glasses, and you might think,

9:37 OK, these glasses look different from the other study.

9:40 Why are they black?

9:41 So the reason why they're black is,

9:42 if anyone has had Madeira or port before, I'm in Portugal after all.

9:48 As the wine ages, the color will change.

9:51 So if we used clear glasses here,

9:54 people could just notice by the color how old the wine might be.

9:59 So to eliminate that factor, we used black glasses here.

10:02 You can also see that they have randomized three-digit numbers.

10:05 So we really made this study where people

10:08 had no idea exactly what they were tasting.

10:10 They were told it was Madeira tasting.

10:13 And for the study, we had both novices and experts.

10:17 This time I had about 70 novices and 30 experts come do the study,

10:21 so I could also compare between them.

10:23 Now, the first thing they had to do is just taste

10:26 the wine and rate how complex they think the wine is.

10:30 On a simple scale, one to nine, how complex they think this wine is.

10:33 And the results were quite interesting.

10:35 So on this graph, I tried to make it simple.

10:38 On the horizontal axis, we have the three different aging groups.

10:42 So three years, 10 years, 20 years.

10:45 The green line represents the novice— the people

10:47 who don’t know that much about wine.

10:49 You can see that there's a slight upwards curve, right?

10:53 So people kind of think as the wine gets older, it gets more complex.

10:57 Actually, this is not statistically significant.

11:01 But if you look at the...

11:03 [experts] in the orange line, right, the curve is much more steep.

11:06 And here we can actually see that for experts, in a blind tasting,

11:11 with black glasses where they couldn't see the color,

11:14 they actually do consistently rate older wines as more complex.

11:20 So in other words, there is something to this idea that as the wine ages,

11:24 it gets more complex, as we can see here.

11:27 The second thing that we asked people to do,

11:30 and this will take maybe a little bit more explanation,

11:33 is that we asked them to do a test that we call TCATA,

11:38 temporal check all that apply.

11:41 What happened was that as people were tasting the wine,

11:44 they had eight different descriptors— that sounds

11:47 like a crazy video game— that they

11:50 had to check for every descriptor they were perceiving at any moment in time.

11:55 So imagine holding the wine in your mouth for 30 seconds.

11:58 For each second, you had to tick all the descriptors like,

12:01 do I taste caramel now?

12:03 Do I taste orange zest now?

12:05 So it was a constant ticking action.

12:08 And the reason why we did this kind of crazy game is to really measure,

12:13 as you're holding the wine in your mouth, how do the flavours change over time?

12:17 And also people spit the wine out at some point,

12:22 but we kept on measuring the aftertaste.

12:24 So we had this measurement of both

12:27 the in-mouth sensation and also what happened afterwards.

12:31 And the reason why I'm explaining is because I'm going to show

12:35 a crazy video trying to demonstrate what happened with the wines.

12:39 So let me just talk you through it really quickly.

12:41 What you're about to see is the temporal trajectory

12:45 of how the wines change in the mouth over time.

12:50 The simple way to interpret this graph is if you’re closer to, for example,

12:54 orange zest in the middle, the closer the line gets to orange zest,

12:58 the more you taste orange zest.

13:00 The closer the line gets to bitter, the more you taste bitter.

13:04 I'm going to illustrate the trajectory of three different wines.

13:08 Tinta Negra is the grape variety, and they’re aged three, 10 and 20 years.

13:12 Basically, the darker the line, the more aged it gets.

13:15 So I'm going to start the video.

13:17 Basically for every two seconds,

13:19 the lines will move in this space, in this flavor space.

13:24 Every two seconds equals 15 seconds in real time of evolution in the mouth.

13:28 And this is the result of experts.

13:30 So let me play the video, and then we can walk through it.

13:33 (Video) So you can see that the three curves are different, right?

13:51 Especially the dark one in the middle, for the 20 years.

13:54 The flavor evolution is a little bit different from the other two.

13:58 And now, if you compare that with how the novices do it,...

14:05 the curves don't really deviate from each other so much.

14:10 They all kind of follow each other.

14:12 And this says something about how novices perceive the flavor evolution.

14:17 Whereas experts are able to clearly differentiate the three lines,

14:21 for the novices, it's much more of a similar experience.

14:25 And this brings up [the] point that when it comes to complexity,

14:30 it's not just what's in the glass, but also what's in the mind of the drinker.

14:34 Novices and experts have different mental experiences,

14:36 and they have different concepts of what [complexity] means.

14:40 So to go back to my Berlyne curve in the beginning,

14:44 one of the questions that still remain in the world

14:48 of wine is whether more complexity equals better.

14:52 We know that for music, too much complexity might not result in more preference.

14:57 But in the world of wine,

14:58 we actually haven't found evidence that too much complexity is bad.

15:02 So maybe it depends on the mind of the beholder.

15:05 So my last message to everyone is,

15:08 the next time you drink something, you eat something,

15:11 just take some time to slow down and stop

15:15 and think about how the flavors are evolving over time.

15:17 Thank you very much.