Over recent decades, cognitive psychology has made a significant contribution to our understanding of wine-tasting phenomena. At the most fundamental level the discipline's contribution has made us aware that even an apparently 'simple' judgment, such as noting that a wine's odour reflects over-ripe fruit, involves not just our nose but sophisticated cognitive processing. With its information-processing model of how people interact with their surrounding world, and its methodologies and theories regarding how we perceive, conceptualise, remember, image, make judgments, and communicate our experiences, cognitive psychology has markedly advanced our understanding of wine tasting and wine tasters. This review highlights notable wine sensory research outcomes that make evident the importance of a taster's cognitive processes in their wine analysis and appreciation. These include data providing evidence for colour-flavour perceptual bias, prototypical thinking, knowledge-based wine judgments, the close links between olfactory memory, autobiographical memory and emotion, and the notion of wine expertise. Further, it will be argued that such data demonstrate how a consensus model, still dominant in much wine sensory analysis, is limited at best and inappropriate for sensory analysis of complex products such as wine in many contexts. Critical to this argument is appreciating that differences amongst tasters, reflecting each individual's physiology, experience and knowledge, are valid data in themselves rather than 'error in the machine' as they were conceptualised within traditional consensus models of sensory analysis. The article terminates with reference to a promise for even greater understanding of wine tasting phenomena that the future offers by links between cognitive psychology's behavioural data and recent technological advances in neuropsychology and neurophysiology (e.g., cerebral imaging techniques).Key words: Wine; sensory; tasting; cognition; psychology
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IntroductionHow extensively is our brain involved when we taste a wine? What lets us appreciate the flavours and textures of this complex beverage? And how does the bouquet of a fine wine effortlessly evoke distant memories and emotions? The aim of this brief review is to highlight both historically important and selected, recent research reminding us that wine is as cerebral as it is sensual.The scientific literature provides in-depth knowledge about 'tasting'; i.e., the visual, gustatory (taste), olfactory (smell by nose; aroma by retro-nasal olfaction), and trigeminal (mouth-feel) sensory systems involved when we experience food stimuli (Doty, 2015). The notion that these multiple sensory inputs combine centrally to produce what we call flavour (Auvray & Spence, 2008;Jinks & Laing, 2001) has also received scholarly attention. In contrast, the specific cognitive processes and emotional experiences associated with such sensory phenomena have been relatively neglected by the food science communi...