The Experience of Flavor

By Anonymous -
I found Dr. Herz's lecture to be fascinating from start to finish. I was particularly intrigued by the experience of smell and taste, as demonstrated by the jelly bean experiment. I was shocked by my inability to label the flavor of the jelly bean without smell. Now, I have experienced this phenomena before with head colds, but the instant wave of a named flavor that hit me when I released my nose was much more powerful than I expected. This got me thinking about the experience of flavor as a whole, and I started thinking about when people stop and appreciate the complexity of it. And I thought of wine tastings. According to 'A Sensory Users Manual', there are four elements to flavor, two more than Dr. Herz addressed. These are smell and taste, but also texture and sight. I agree that smell and taste are the most essential pieces, but there is some truth that the texture and appearance of the food/wine affects our experience. The feeling of a wine, like the temperature and the viscosity, plays a huge role in our detection of the different elements in it. Sight sets up an expectation of flavor, what we expect to experience with our other senses. The act of tasting wine isolates each of these. First, the taster notes the appearance of the wine. Then, they pour it into the glass and swirl it, to release the smell so the taster can take a deep inhale of it. The taster follows by holding the wine in his or her mouth, noting the body of the wine, until they swallow to taste it fully. Each aspect of flavor is given its attention, so the whole experience of the smells and the tastes is given complete attention. While this process is a little excessive for day to day life, I think we should all pause and take some time to appreciate the flavor of food and drink through these four elements.


http://www.winepros.org/wine101/sensory_guide.htm

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