Fill the Glasses: Tasting Wine Makes You Smarter
Know all the prime numbers up to 1,000 by heart, speak three languages fluently and always win at Trivial Pursuit: let me guess, you’re a wine lover. Because tasting wine demonstrably makes you smarter. That’s what neuroscientist Gordon Shepherd describes in his book Neuroenology.
According to Shepherd, a wine tasting stimulates your brain. How does that work? To begin with, tasting wine is already an impressive motor exercise, activating remote corners of the brain. ‘It’s not simply taking a sip and swallowing,’ he says. ‘You hold the wine in your mouth, let it move across all your taste buds and only then swallow it.’ Apparently, that’s just as complicated for the brain as solving a complex mathematical equation.
Do I smell caramel or cork?
But it’s when perceiving and identifying flavours that your brain really shifts into high gear. Your brain has to translate all those molecules into flavours and then compare them at lightning speed with scents perceived earlier. ‘Wait a minute, is that mandarin? Caramel? Cigars? Or… cork?’ Shepherd makes it even more complicated: he compares it to perceiving colours. ‘The objects we see don’t have colour, but they reflect light. When our eyes capture that light, it is translated into a colour. In the same way, wine molecules don’t have taste or smell, but they prompt our brains to create that perception.’ Wow. Complicated. You have to drink taste quite a bit of wine to be able to write it down like that.
Wine against heart attacks, diabetes and dementia
A study in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience reaches similar conclusions: oenologists generally have a better sense of smell (duh), and certain parts of their brains are larger and thicker. And it seems that these parts of the brain are not quickly damaged by diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Other benefits of drinking wine: it keeps your mouth healthy, because wine has antibacterial properties that wash away the grime in your mouth. Three to four glasses of alcohol per week also stimulate the production of serotonin and endorphins, the happy chemicals in your brain that also get a boost from chocolate. And red wine is also said to help combat fatigue, bladder infections and skin ageing; according to wine expert Harold Hamersma’s book, Wijnreis door mijn lichaam, moderate alcohol consumption reduces the risk of heart attacks, diabetes and dementia.
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- Why mixing red wine with cola is a very good idea
- Tips for the perfect wine glass
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