The knowing nose: the role of knowledge in wine expertise

Abstract

Wine expertise refers here to a superior ability to discriminate between, recognize and describe different wines. Previous studies give only limited support to the possibility that such expertise relies on inherently superior sensory abilities. Instead, research suggests that it relies heavily on explicit knowledge about wine. The experiments reported here were designed to increase understanding of some of the cognitive processes involved, using approaches employed to investigate expert performance in other domains. The first two experiments compared recall for wine-related words by experts and novices under both intentional (Experiment 1) and incidental (Experiment 2) conditions. Experts recalled more words than novices, but in the intentional condition, they did so only when the words were grouped so as to form possible descriptions of actual wines (Varietal), but not when meaningless combinations of words (Shuffled) were used. The final two experiments tested the ability of novices to produce descriptions of wines that would enable them later to match their own descriptions to the wines. Five dissimilar white wines were used in Experiment 3 with three groups of subjects. The groups were given either a long list of wine descriptors, short lists of variety-relevant descriptors or no list (Control group). Matching performance was best in the short-list condition where it was well above chance level. However, when five wines of the same variety were used (Experiment 4) novice performance did not differ between the control and short-list conditions. Overall, the results suggest that expert and novice performances differ partly because novices lack the vocabulary and the knowledge of varietal types that experts employ in such tasks.