The Wine Savant: A Guide to the New Wine Culture by Michael Steinberger Read Free Book Online

reacted the same way to PROP; all of them found it bitter, but a minority found it excruciatingly so. Intrigued, she began studying the tongue anatomy of these individuals and found that they tended to have much denser concentrations of fungiform papillae, the structures at the end of the tongue that house our taste buds. Nor were they sensitive only to bitterness; they seemed to experience much more heightened taste sensations in general. Bartoshuk and her Yale colleagues dubbed these individuals supertasters, a name that clearly implied that they possessed not just sensitive palates but superior ones.
    But that just ain’t so. The term supertaster is really a misnomer —there is no evidence that these individuals are better tasters. In fact, when it comes to wine, being a supertaster is probably more of a liability than anything else. To begin with, supertasters do not particularly enjoy the flavor of alcohol and often complain that it leaves a burning sensation in their mouths. They are also sensitive to astringency and acidity, which can be equally problematic as wine goes. In his book The Science of Wine , the British wine writer Jamie Goode highlighted the work of Gary Pickering, a professor of oenology at Canada’s Brock University. Pickering had been investigating the relationship between PROP sensitivity and wine appreciation and believed that being a supertaster was no blessing. “I would speculate that supertasters probably enjoy wine less than the rest of us,” Pickering told Goode. “They experience astringency, acidity, bitterness, and heat (from alcohol) more intensely, and this combination may make wine—or some wine styles—relatively unappealing.”
    However, even engaging in this kind of speculation gives the supertaster idea more weight than it deserves. When it comes to understanding sensory perception, we are literally at the tip of the tongue. We know that fungiform papillae are a reliable indicator of sensitivity to the five basic taste sensations; people with very dense concentrations of these structures are more sensitive to bitter, sour, sweet, salty, and savory (umami) flavors than people with average or subaverage concentrations. But while fungiform papillae have been studied exhaustively, much less is known about the papillae on the side of the tongue (foliate papillae) and those toward the back of it (circumvallate papillae), except that we know they also affect how tastes and textures are perceived.
    As for the genetic dimension, TAS2R38, the gene associated with being a supertaster, is one of thirty-five bitter receptor genes that have been identified thus far; there may be others. There appears to be little, if any, correlation between PROP/PTC sensitivity and sensitivity to other bitter compounds. Whether the TAS2R38 genotype is indicative of overall taste sensitivity has generated considerable debate; it might be, and it might not be. Most people who show extreme sensitivity to PROP have the two dominant alleles for TAS2R38, but that is not true in all cases. Meanwhile, scientists have identified receptors for sweetness and umami but have no idea which chemical stimuli, like PROP and PTC with bitterness, can reliably test these receptors. Sourness and saltiness are largely uncharted territory. For all these reasons, and also because the concept has been so often misunderstood and misrepresented in the media, many geneticists are reluctant even to use the term supertaster .
    Beyond all this, we know that the nose wields much more influence over our flavor perceptions than the tongue. And beyond all that , we know that our gustatory preferences are determined by a wide variety of factors, most of which have nothing to do with our physiological attributes. The key distinction here is between perceptions and preferences. We may be hardwired to receive flavor stimuli in a certain way, but that information is immediately relayed to the brain, where it is