The emotional response to wine consumption

Abstract

Emotion may be defined as a special perception that informs us about current body status and its modification due to internal or external stimuli and feelings such as mental representations of bodily changes, including thoughts ( Damasio, 2003). Emotions have been generally associated with products but there has been little published research on emotions related to food, and more specifically to wine. Every culture may describe its emotions in different ways and may have its own emotional lexicon, allowing feelings to be socially shared: the purpose of this research is to develop a list of emotional adjectives appropriate to the Italian culture to describe the feelings of wine consumers. By means of three studies, we selected 16 words which allow wine consumers to describe their feelings while consuming wine. The emotion terms selected could be divided into two categories: high/low arousal and high/low pleasantness. Unlike the general prevalence in the emotional lexicon of languages of words expressing unpleasant emotions, most of the 16 Italian terms focused on emotions elicited by wine consumption fall into the pleasure category.