The colour of smell

Abstract

When an expert wine taster describes a wine as rich in chocolate aromas, with a hint of tobacco and undertones of prune, it is likely that they are describing a particularly fullsome red. But new research shows that similar descriptions can be elicited for a white wine that is simply coloured red [G. Morrot et al. (2001) Brain Lang. (in press)]. First, the researchers used sophisticated lexical analysis to examine thousands of comments from expert wine testers. Words used to describe the odours of red wines tended to represent dark objects (e.g. coal, raspberry, chocolate), whereas words used for white wines mainly represented yellow or clear objects (e.g. honey, lemon, butter). Next, the researchers asked French wine-testing students to describe the odours of wines using words from the experts’ lists. Like the experts, students chose words representing dark objects to describe reds, and light objects to describe whites. However, when they were then given a white wine coloured red they described the odour of the wine using words previously used for red wines. This intriguing finding suggests that the perception of the odour of a wine is strongly influenced by visual information, and demonstrates that multisensory inputs are integrated even when subjects are focussing on a single sensory modality. HJB