Wine expertise reshapes the brain: Sommeliers show altered neural activity when tasting wine

Sommeliers harness their extensive training to discern and describe the nuanced features of wines. A new study published in Human Brain Mapping explores the minds of these experts, revealing that sommeliers not only exhibit structural differences in their brains compared to casual wine drinkers but also showcase unique patterns of brain activity and connectivity when evaluating wines.

This research underscores how specialized training in wine tasting doesn’t just refine the palate — it reshapes the brain itself, enhancing the integration of taste, smell, and the linguistic prowess needed to articulate the complex sensory experiences of wine.

The study was spearheaded by Manuel Carreiras, the scientific director of the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language. At the heart of the inquiry was a curiosity about how extensive training and experience — such as that of sommeliers in wine tasting — manifest in the brain.

Previous research has shown that expertise in various domains, like music, language, and sports, can lead to both functional and structural brain changes. The researchers aimed to determine whether similar neural adaptations occur in sommeliers, who possess a refined ability to identify and articulate the complex flavors and aromas of wine.

For their new study, the researchers recruited a total of 28 healthy adult volunteers for the study. These individuals were divided into two groups: one comprising trained sommeliers and the other consisting of casual, inexperienced wine consumers, ensuring a comparison between expert and novice wine tasters. Both groups were carefully matched for age, gender, and educational level to minimize potential confounding factors.

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The core of the experiment was a passive blind wine-tasting task conducted while participants underwent brain scanning using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Four Spanish wines of varying complexity (two whites and two reds) were selected for the study.

A sophisticated gustometer system was employed to deliver precise amounts of wine directly to the participants’ mouths during the MRI scans. This system allowed for controlled delivery of 0.75 ml of wine per trial, ensuring consistent tasting experiences across all sessions and participants.

The complexity of the wines was described as ranging from low to very high, based on a multitude of factors including aromatic components and perceived balance. Participants were not informed about the specifics of the wines they tasted during the MRI sessions, ensuring that their reactions were unbiased by preconceptions.

Following each fMRI session, participants engaged in a blind wine discrimination task outside the scanner. This task required them to taste and classify wines based on their complexity, mirroring the classification used during the MRI session. This behavioral component aimed to quantify the sommeliers’ superior ability to discriminate between wines of different complexities.

The researchers observed structural differences in the brain between sommeliers and casual wine drinkers. Specifically, sommeliers exhibited increased fractional anisotropy (FA) within three clusters of the right superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF) and one cluster within the left SLF. This suggests enhanced white matter integrity and connectivity in regions associated with integrating sensory, motor, and cognitive functions — including language, memory, and executive processes, which are crucial for the complex task of wine tasting.

Functional MRI analyses revealed that sommeliers and casual drinkers engaged different brain regions while tasting wines. Sommeliers showed greater activation and connectivity in the temporal areas of the brain, which are linked to processing taste and language.

This indicates that sommeliers might benefit from an automatized retrieval of lexicosemantic information (i.e., the ability to effortlessly connect sensory perceptions with the words to describe them) when tasting wines. In contrast, the control group exhibited greater activation in frontal areas, suggesting a more effortful retrieval of linguistic information during the wine tasting process.

Sommeliers also demonstrated differential activation patterns when tasting wines of high complexity compared to those with low complexity, showcasing their refined ability to discern and appreciate intricate flavor profiles. This was not observed in the casual wine drinkers, indicating that the expert tasters’ brains are finely tuned to pick up on the nuanced characteristics that define complex wines.

Behaviorally, sommeliers outperformed casual drinkers in the wine discrimination task conducted after the MRI sessions. They demonstrated a superior ability to accurately classify wines according to their complexity, which statistically confirmed the cognitive and perceptual advantages conferred by their extensive training and experience.

“The current study represents one of only a handful of experiments that have examined sommelier brain structure and function during tastings,” the researchers concluded. “Our results indicate that experience and experience in wine tasting likely modulate both the tasting and language circuits to produce superior flavor recognition abilities, as displayed by sommeliers during blind tastings.”

The study, “Sniffing out meaning: Chemosensory and semantic neural network changes in sommeliers,” was authored by Manuel Carreiras, Ileana Quiñones, H. Alexander Chen, Laura Vázquez-Araujo, Dana Small, and Ram Frost.