Abstract
Over the last few decades, wine makers have been producing wines with a higher alcohol content, assuming that they are more appreciated by consumers. To test this hypothesis, we used functional magnetic imaging to compare reactions of human subjects to different types of wine, focusing on brain regions critical for flavor processing and food reward. Participants were presented with carefully matched pairs of high- and low-alcohol content red wines, without informing them of any of the wine attributes. Contrary to expectation, significantly greater activation was found for low-alcohol than for high-alcohol content wines in brain regions that are sensitive to taste intensity, including the insula as well as the cerebellum. Wines were closely matched for all physical attributes except for alcohol content, thus we interpret the preferential response to the low-alcohol content wines as arising from top-down modulation due to the low alcohol content wines inducing greater attentional exploration of aromas and flavours. The findings raise intriguing possibilities for objectively testing hypotheses regarding methods of producing a highly complex product such as wine.
Highlights
Today’s globalization offers wine consumers an impressive variety of wines coming from almost anywhere in the world
Significant differential activation was found for the two types of wines in the right insula and the cerebellum, brain regions implicated in taste and flavor processing [4]
The quality of the fMRI data of each individual subject was explored using the Artifact Repair toolbox (Gabrieli Cognitive NeuroScience Lab; http:// cibsr.stanford.edu/tools/ArtRepair/ArtRepair.htm). From this analysis three participants whose fMRI data exhibited more than 40% of the scan-to-scan motion estimation higher than 1 mm, were excluded from following statistical analysis
Summary
Today’s globalization offers wine consumers an impressive variety of wines coming from almost anywhere in the world. Many wine producers (at least in “new world styles”) seem to follow this trend, probably assuming that such wines are, on the average, more appreciated by wine consumers This hidden common assumption has never been systematically investigated empirically. The low- and high-alcohol content wines were selected and matched given a series of parameters that are known to affect aroma and flavor. These include: wine region (all wines in the study were red Spanish coming from Rioja, Navarra, and Cataluña), grape variety, vintage, and overall quality in term of marketing price. Significant differential activation was found for the two types of wines in the right insula and the cerebellum, brain regions implicated in taste and flavor processing [4]
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