The art and science of wine tasting | Qian Janice Wang

0:03You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. It's wild to think about, but it turns out that no two people taste wine the same way. And science is starting to show us why. There are actually two ways of thinking about complexity when it comes to wine or food. There's first the chemical complexity, right? That's the stuff that's in the glass. And then there's a concept called psychological complexity, where, you know, complexity is not really in the wine, but it's in the mind of the drinker. That's food science researcher Chen Janice Wong.

0:40In her talk, she explores why experts and beginners experience complexity so differently, revealing that what makes a wine great may have less to do with what's in the glass and more to do with what's happening in your brain. They were just told, here are six red wines. I would like you to taste them. and people made some ratings. Do you think that people could actually tell in a blind tasting which were blends and which were single varieties? Coming up right after a short break.

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3:20And now, our TED Talk of the day. So, I would like everyone to close their eyes, just for a second, and imagine that you're holding a glass of wine. And really imagine that experience. Take the wine, swirl the wine, smell it, and take a sip.

3:43Now, imagine that someone next to you leans over and says, that was a really complex wine. Okay, what do they mean by that? What exactly does complexity mean? It's a term that we use a lot in the world of wine. Wine critics use it, right? When I write a tasting note, I sometimes use complexity. But I will tell you an industry secret. If you ask 10 different people, what does complexity mean? You might get 10 different answers. So today I want to explore this idea of complexity to show that actually when it comes to smell and taste, we can get a lot of complex cognitive ideas that usually is reserved for the realm of art.

4:33So a very small art history introduction first, and then we'll get to the good stuff, which is the wine. So in psychology, we often see this curve, this Berlin curve, that explains the relationship between complexity and liking. And the idea here is that it's an upside-down U-curve, so if something is too simple, people don't like it. On the other hand, if something is too complex, people also don't like it. So there's a sweet spot in the middle, like an ideal complexity. I made some audio clips to demonstrate this idea. So here's a simple one.

5:16So maybe if you're into very modern music, you might think that was really good. Otherwise, you might find that a bit boring. So here's another one with a little bit more complexity.

5:29These are my original compositions, by the way. And here's a third example where there's a lot of complexity.

5:38So how many people like that one? Oh, okay, we have a few in the audience. Very nice, very nice. But I wanted to demonstrate the point, right? When you have too much complexity, often people don't like it. But is that true in the world of wine? I chose one quote from a famous wine critic, Matt Kramer. And let's see what he said about complexity. The greatest standard used in assessing the quality of wine is complexity. The more times you can return to a glass of wine and find something different, either the bouquet or the taste, the more complex the wine. The greatest wines are not so much overpowering as they are seemingly limitless.

6:23So this is a very beautiful quote, right? Very artistic. And you start thinking, okay, so what exactly is complexity? I work as a researcher, I'm a scientist. in my work I need to try to define what wine critics say right this is a very vague idea so how do I exactly go in and investigate this concept and the approach I took I will demonstrate a little bit today there are actually two ways of thinking about complexity when it comes to wine or food there's first the chemical complexity right that's the stuff that's in the glass what are the chemical molecules in the wine. And then there's a concept called psychological complexity, where complexity is not really in the wine, but it's in the mind of the drinker.

7:11And I will show two different studies. The first one, we investigate the idea of chemical complexity, is complexity in the glass. And in the second study, we'll look at psychological complexity, is complexity in the mind of the drinker. So let's look at the first one. This was a study I conducted at the University of Oxford some years ago. And the idea was, okay, if I have two wines and I make a 50-50 blend, surely the blend should chemically be more complex, right, than the individuals. So here we took three wines, single grape variety from the same producer, and then I made 50-50 blends of these three wines for a total of six.

7:56When someone came to the lab to do the study, they were presented with six wines. They were not told which one was which, right? We didn't tell them at all about which are blends, which are single variety. They were just told, here are six red wines, I would like you to taste them. And people made some ratings. For example, they had to guess whether the wine was a blend or not. They had to name the flavors, and then they evaluated the wine based on things like liking, familiarity, complexity, flavor intensity, quality, and willingness to pay. So I want you all to just take a moment and think. Do you think that people could actually tell in a blind tasting which were blends and which were single varieties?

8:37So maybe hands up how many people think yes, they can tell the difference? Okay, maybe one or two or three. Most people think no. So I'm going to tell you something that was a very surprising finding. Because I had around 80 people in this study. There were some people who knew nothing about wine. They just worked in departments and they wanted to come for free wine. And we had some other people who had different wine certifications. I was running the Oxford Blind Tasting Society. So I kind of also got people in society to come do the study. So the surprising finding was, if you looked at everybody overall, people couldn't tell blends from single varieties.

9:15But the fun thing was that actually it was the beginners, the people who didn't know that much about wine, who actually could guess blends are not higher than chance. Very surprising. It was the beginners who did better. I don't know why, but that was one of the surprising findings. Another finding we found was that the blends were not rated as more complex than the single varieties. This was maybe also a little bit surprising. What it showed is that chemical complexity in the glass does not necessarily equal perceived complexity when people are rating the wine. A final surprising finding from this study was that there was actually one thing that could explain people's complexity rating.

10:02It wasn't whether it was a blend or not, it was how much oak they could taste in the wine. So people who wrote things like vanilla or spice or cinnamon, writing those words in the flavor was actually predictive of higher complexity and also more willingness to pay. So at the end of the story it seems like chemical complexity doesn't really equal perceived complexity but if you put your wine oak people are going to think it's more complex and they might like it more. So that was the first study. For the second one I'm going to go back to this idea of psychological complexity. So, you know, is beauty in the eye of the beholder, or is complexity in the mouth, I guess, of the taster?

10:53And here I wanted to introduce a different concept, which is this idea of time. Complexity, when you're tasting something, there can be two different ways of defining it. You can have static complexity, This is at any moment in time. How many different flavors do you perceive? Or there's an idea of dynamic complexity, which is imagine, go back to your imagination, you're tasting the wine in your mind. If you pay attention to how the wine is evolving in the mouth over time, you can actually follow how it changes. So I also made some audio clips to demonstrate this idea. The first one is the static complexity.

11:38So standard, major, triad, nothing complex. And this is complex. The second one is dynamic complexity.

11:53So when I run these studies, I use music a lot as a way to demonstrate these concepts. Because everyone knows that music is something that evolves over time, right? So you can listen to it change. and the same thing can be applied to flavor. So for this study, I really needed to find some wines that are very complex. Because we're in Portugal, but also because I love Madeira, it's my favorite fortified wine, we ran a study with Madeira wines at different aging points because it's a well-known fact, at least in the wine world, that the older the wine, the older the Madeira specifically, the more complex it gets.

12:33This is what everyone in the wine trade believes, but we wanted to see if this is actually true. So for this study, I worked with Justino's Winery, and we had Madeira samples that are 3, 10, or 20 years old, aged in barrel. Again, people got six glasses. These glasses look different from the other study. Why are they black? So the reason why they're black is if anyone has had Madeira or port before, I'm in Portugal after all, as the wine ages, the color will change. So if we used clear glasses here, people could just notice by the color how old the wine might be. So to eliminate that factor, we used black glasses here.

13:17So we really made this study where people had no idea exactly what they were tasting. They were told it was a Madeira tasting. And for the study, we had both novices and experts. This time I had about 70 novices and 30 experts come do the study so I could also compare between them. Now, the first thing they had to do is just taste the wine and rate how complex they think the wine is. On a simple scale, 1 to 9, how complex they think this wine is. And the results were quite interesting. On the horizontal axis, we have the three different aging groups. So 3 years, 10 years, 20 years. The green line represents the novice, so the people who don't know that much about wine.

13:57You can see that there's a slight upwards curve, right? So people kind of think as the wine gets older, it gets more complex. Actually, this is not statistically significant. But if you look at the novices in the orange line, the curve is much more steep. And here we can actually see that for experts, in a blind tasting with black glasses where they couldn't see the color, they actually do consistently rate older wines as more complex. So in other words, there is something to this idea that as the wine ages, it gets more complex. The second thing that we asked people to do, and this will take maybe a little bit more explanation, is that we asked them to do a test that we call T-Cata, temporal check all that apply.

14:47What happened was that as people were tasting the wine, they had eight different descriptors, that sounds like a crazy video game, that they had to check for every descriptor they were perceiving at any moment in time. So imagine holding the wine in your mouth for 30 seconds. For each second, you had to tick all the descriptors. Like, do I taste caramel now? Do I taste orange zest now? So it was a constant ticking action. And the reason why we did this kind of crazy game is to really measure, as you're holding the wine in your mouth, how do the flavors change over time? And also, people spit the wine out at some point, but we kept on measuring the aftertaste.

15:31So we had this measurement of both the in-mouth sensation and also what happened afterwards. For the novices, the curves don't really deviate from each other so much. They all kind of follow each other. And this says something about how novices perceive the flavor evolution. whereas experts are able to clearly differentiate the three wines for the novices it's much more of a similar experience. And this brings up to a point that when it comes to complexity it's not just what's in the glass but also what's in the mind of the drinker. Novices and experts have different mental experiences and they have different concepts of what creativity means.

16:14So to go back to my Berlin curve in the beginning one of the questions that still remain in the world of wine is whether more complexity equals better. We know that for music, too much complexity might not result in more preference but in the world of wine we actually haven't found evidence that too much complexity is bad. So maybe it depends on the mind of the beholder. So my last message to everyone is the next time you drink something, you eat something, just take some time to slow down and stop and think about how the flavors are evolving over time. Thank you very much.

16:56That was Chen Janice Wong speaking at TEDxNova in Portugal in 2025. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonsika Sungmarnivong. This episode was mixed by Lucy Little. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

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