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The Art and Science of Wine Tasting | Qian Janice Wang | TED - Video học tiếng Anh
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The Art and Science of Wine Tasting | Qian Janice Wang | TED
The Art and Science of Wine Tasting | Qian Janice Wang | TED
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0:04
So I would like everyone to close their eyes,
0:08
just for a second,
0:09
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,
0:28
"Mm, that was a really complex wine."
0:32
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,"
0:55
you might get 10 different answers.
0:58
So today I want to explore this idea of complexity
1:02
to show that actually, when it comes to smell and taste,
1:06
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,
1:22
this Berlyne curve,
1:24
that explains 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,
1:40
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)
1:56
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)
2:09
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)
2:18
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, Matt Kramer,
2:39
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
2:51
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
3:00
as they are seemingly limitless."
3:03
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,
3:15
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 complexity
3:33
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,
3:48
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 of chemical complexity --
3:58
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
4:10
at the University of Oxford some years ago.
4:13
And the idea was, OK,
4:15
if I have two wines and I make a 50/50 blend,
4:19
surely the blend should chemically be more complex, right,
4:23
than the individuals.
4:25
So here we took three wines,
4:28
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,
4:47
which are single variety.
4:48
They were just told, here are six red wines,
4:50
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
5:00
and then they evaluated the wine based on things like liking, familiarity,
5:04
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,
5:16
which were blends and which were single varieties?
5:19
So maybe hands up, how many people think
5:21
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 not rated
6:19
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
6:29
does not necessarily equal perceived complexity
6:33
when people are rating the wine.
6:35
A final surprising finding from this study
6:38
was that there was actually one thing
6:42
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
6:59
was actually predictive of higher complexity
7:03
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 back to this idea
7:23
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,
7:38
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, you know,
7:51
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)
8:20
So standard major triad, nothing complex.
8:25
And -- it's complex.
8:26
The second one is dynamic complexity.
8:29
(Musical tune)
8:35
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
8:44
that evolves over time, right?
8:45
So you can listen to a change
8:47
and the same thing can be applied to flavor.
8:50
So for this study,
8:51
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, specifically,
9:13
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
9:27
that are three, 10 or 20 years old,
9:30
aged in barrel.
9:31
Again, the study looked something like this.
9:34
People got six glasses,
9:36
and you might think, OK, these glasses look different
9:38
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,
9:46
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
9:57
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 had no idea
10:08
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 the wine
10:27
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 --
10:47
the people 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
10:54
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 ... [experts] in the orange line, right,
11:04
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,
11:21
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
11:35
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 --
11:47
that sounds like a crazy video game --
11:49
that they had to check
11:51
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
12:01
like, 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
12:11
is to really measure,
12:13
as you're holding the wine in your mouth,
12:15
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 the in-mouth sensation
12:28
and also what happened afterwards.
12:31
And the reason why I'm explaining
12:33
is because I'm going to show a crazy video
12:36
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
12:52
is if you’re closer to, for example, orange zest in the middle,
12:56
the closer the line gets to orange zest, 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,
13:09
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, the lines will move in this space,
13:22
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)
13:49
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,
14:31
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 of wine
14:48
is whether more complexity equals better.
14:52
We know that for music,
14:53
too much complexity might not result in more preference.
14:57
But in the world of wine, we actually haven't found evidence
15:00
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.
