OUR SENSUS GUIDE US
Drinking good wine with good food in good company in beautiful surroundings, with
soft background music must be one of life’s most civilized pleasures.
We are often not aware of how the non-edible items associated with eating and
drinking (tableware items such as the plates, cutlery, glasses, bottles and condiment
containers) or even environmental factors – lighting and background music, affects
people’s perception of not only the food, but definitely the wine as well.
Latest evidence and studies demonstrating the importance of these variables on the
consumer’s behavioural response to, and sensory perception of a variety of food and
wines. Forks, knives and spoons have been in widespread use for almost 200
years. Traditionally, it was made from a wide variety of different materials such as
wood, bone, iron or brass. Nowadays it is mainly stainless steel, silver, plastic or
wood (chopsticks). During a research on spoons plated with seven different metals:
Gold, silver, zinc, copper, tin, chrome and stainless steel, identical in terms of their
shape, size, and weight, and the visual differences between the spoons were not
apparent to the participants (who were blindfolded throughout this study), results
revealed that spoons plated with different metals tasted distinctly different. In
particular, the gold and chrome spoons were rated the least metallic, least bitter, and
least strong tasting of all the spoons. By contrast, the zinc and copper spoons were
rated as having the strongest, most bitter, and most metallic taste, and were also the
only spoons that were rated as tasting significantly less sweet.
The size and weight has an influence on the way we interpret the taste and quality of
food, heavier cutlery are associated with quality food. The colour of the plates also
has an influence of how people taste, in a study the same strawberry mousse was
presented on a white plate and a black plate. People perceived it to taste better on
the white plate, sweeter or tastier than on the black plate, yet the mousse was
exactly the same!
Far more research has been conducted on the perceptual and hedonic
consequences of serving wine in different glasses, than on other elements of the
tableware. It was demonstrated that a Pinot Noir and Syrah were more like by a
trained panel when tasted from a blue wine glass than a traditional clear wine glass,
under normal white light illumination.
It is true that different glass-shapes release different amount of volatile organic
compounds from the wine, the wine is also directed to different parts of the tongue
as a function of the shape of the glass. Where participants were blindfolded, they
did not experience differences in the wine, resulting in the fact that people are
consciously aware of the kind of glass they are drinking from in order to transfer the
attributes of the glass of wine.
The environment in which people eat or drink is known to influence many aspects of
consumption behaviour from what people choose to order to how much they are
willing to pay and how quickly they eat or drink. The smell, lighting and colour
(white, blue, red and green) has an effect on people’s perception of the flavour of a
wine. A Riesling (white wine) served to participants in a blue and green room
lighting, perceived the wine to taste spicier and fruitier, while the same Riesling
served in red lighting perceived the wine to taste nearly 50% sweeter. The same
wine was served in an opaque black wine glass, lighting not affecting the colour of
the wine itself, nevertheless, people reported liking the wine more, and were willing
to pay even 50% more for it, when they tasted it under the blue and red light rather
than green or white lights. Interestingly enough, even if they are expert tasters of
wine, they can give you the most interesting descriptions of the fruitiness and spices
of the wine, they can see the colour of the white wines, but when the same wine was
coloured the next day, the descriptions of the wine suddenly change completely!
We do not see with our eyes alone; we need light so that our eyes may form images
of objects – and a brain to interpret the meanings of the nerve impulses. One should
never rush into colour appraisal of a wine any more than you would bypass the
visual aspects of food presentation.
Similarly our response to smell can influence learning, memory, sexual or emotional
behaviour. For example, perfume does all sorts of things to people – why? Is it real,
or imagined? For smells to reach the receptors, the brain, they must pass through
18mm of mucous membrane. Researchers believe that only 20 percent of any
available odour actually enters the nose, and of this amount only two per cent
passes through the mucous membrane to make contact with the sensitive receptors.
Unless we concentrate and make maximum use of this limited smell resource, our
natural gift of smell sensitivity and power will be wasted. Incidentally, the most
important tactile sense when assessing aroma of wine is the temperature. Wine that
is too cold will have a ‘shy’ nose or no nose at all.
Taste technically applies to the five basic tastes of sugar, sour, salt, umami and
bitter. We should actually use the word ‘assessment’ rather than ‘taste’. Taste is a
very limited sense due to the physiological makeup of the taste receptors. What we
really receive in our mouths is an overall flavour impression. The surface of the
tongue, soft palate, lips, gums and cheeks are covered with four types of papillae,
this is the roughness of the tongue’s surface. Unlike the smell, sight and hearing
receptors, which as primary sensory cells combine the functions of receiving and
sending, the taste receptors are not neurons sending their own messages to the
brain; they function only as receivers. In other words, the other sensory receptors
pick up the signal, be it sight, hearing or smell, and the receptor sends that message,
with taste, the receptor has to hook onto a neuron and send its message.
What about our ‘feelings’? The touch or tactile sense is the least understood when it
comes to the evaluation of food or beverages. This sense covers the important
factors of vibration (as in sparkling wines), rough (often associated with the intensity
of the tannins present in red wines), smooth, temperature – cold, warm, hot; as in
peppery and alcoholic. The tactile sense is more important than the taste sense.
Auditory stimuli can also affect the environment and influence people’s consumption
behaviour and preference ratings as well as food and wine’s flavour. When music is
used to set up a particular ethnic context in a restaurant, it can make food flavours
appear more authentic: in a study, serving oysters with sounds of crushing waves on
rocks and seagulls in the background, tasted better to the participants as when they
heard ordinary music in the background. In another research, done in a supermarket
where people bought their wines, it revealed that when they played accordion music,
people bought more French wines and when they played German Oompha music
people bought more German wines!
The human brain is simply the most marvellous organ in the known universe! No
matter how much we learn, we can never learn it all and there are so many
discoveries of sensus waiting to guide us on this exciting and complex journey! We
at Restaurant Mosaic invite you to come and experience our offering of ‘stimuli’…..
Santé