In the Name of Good Taste

Perched on a bluff high above Highway 96 in Summerland, B.C., the office windows at the Pacific Agri-food Research Centre (PARC) all face south. The view, enhanced by the curve of the cliff making it's way along Lake Okanagan, stretches beyond the vineyards on Skaha Bench. This is the core of B.C. wine country, and what Dr. Margaret Cliff's work is about. Much of her research here is focussed on the use of sensory evaluation to explore the concepts and functions of taste, wine and wine quality.

Cliff makes a special point of bringing the spectacular view to my attention while we stand in her office, before descending into the labs on the floor below. This PARC facility is one of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's 19 research centres spread across the country. It is in these labs that researchers are furthering the science of winemaking and some, like Cliff, the science of wine tasting, as well.

Dr. Cliff got into the field in 1980, when she was hired as a technician at Agriculture and Agri-food Canada in Summerland. Hired to assist in evaluating new and existing grape cultivars, Cliff quickly realized that she lacked the necessary enological expertise and so enrolled in the MSc program at the University of California-Davis. Cliff was exposed to the field of sensory evaluation at Davis and, inspired, went on to the University of Missouri and earned her PhD in the field. She has been running the Sensory Lab at PARC since 1992, where she specializes in the development and application of new sensory methodologies and the objective assessment of food quality. In 1998, Cliff co-published the article, "Evaluation of Wine Competition Judge Performance Using Principal Component Similarity Analysis," which examines the use of a new kind of data analysis to plot and track the way that judges taste, and subsequently score, wines in competition. (It is perhaps poetic that I am only able to arrange this meeting with Cliff in person because I happen to be in the area for the Canadian Wine Awards.)

"In science, everything is challenged," Cliff explains, "What are you doing? How are you doing it? How well?" Because wine tasting is seen as conceptual more than cognitive (though Cliff argues it is both), these questions are not regularly posed. "The wine world is on the fringe of science," she continues, "very rarely are the professionals challenged." Cliff's work is an intellectual exercise, using numbers as a means of quantifying the nebulous notions of ‘palate' and ‘expertise.'

In her 1998 analysis of wine competition judge performance, Cliff gathered data from two panels of judges: a first panel consisting of five international judges, all with strong competition experience, and a second panel consisting of 21 winemakers, many of whom had judged before and all of whom were professional winemakers. One thing that stands out in her article is how judges with the same backgrounds tend to evaluate wines similarly, assigning a similar range of points to each of the eight criteria they were asked to score. And while ‘judging style' and the terms of quality assessment are similar within each panel, these factors are distinctly different between the two panels. Cliff assures me that this merely has to do with the skills of the trade. While professional judges are used to focussing on competition criteria, winemakers are more used to approaching wine in terms of putting it out for consumers to enjoy. The difference, in fact, is why competitions work. "We can accept judges are different, and we can honour it, and respect it, and disregard it. Because [in a competition] we don't rely on a single assessment." The whole competition process is built to get that integrated response, to get beyond the impressions of individual palates and reach a mean assessment of quality. The more broad and diverse the judges' backgrounds are, the more ‘fair' the results.

"But," I venture naively, "if wine quality is something that can be clearly quantified - this is good, this is bad - how does that conceptual element of wine tasting fit in?" It's simple, according to Cliff, because it all goes back to how we experience wine. Competitions are valuable, but they can only tell you which is the best between a specific collection of wines. They don't tell you anything about how you will feel, and therefore what you will taste and smell, when you drink the wines yourself.

It is common knowledge that our perception of taste is actually a combination of our senses of taste and smell, derived of signals from both our mouth and our nose. What is less known, even by the scientific community, is the physiology of how we smell. "The nose is not one-to-one like the mouth," explains Cliff, referring to the thousands of sensory organs (which most of us just call taste buds) in our mouths that detect salty and sweet and send those messages directly to our brain. The path of smell from our noses to our brains is far less straightforward and the understanding of it is still in its infancy. Moreover, our experience of smell once it gets to the brain is still largely a mystery. "Taste is affected by what goes on in the mind, on the subconscious level... The field of food science is just getting into emotions; how the emotions of fear, pleasure and even anxiety impact your senses."

The relationship between emotion and our senses isn't all that surprising once you think about it: what is comfort food if not a combination of taste and smell that transports you into a better state of mind? That these senses can trigger memory seems straightforward enough; but the reverse, that memory and emotion can alter our perception of what we smell or taste, is something most of us might generally not consider. But as consumers, Cliff points out, the emotional context of wine consumption is one of the most important factors in whether or not we will like what we are drinking. "The wine world is associated with pleasure, but that is not how everyone is approaching wine." Think of the less-than-great sparkler you drank at a celebration and adored; or your favourite bottle of merlot that was ruined because you used it one evening to drown your sorrows. The emotional context of any wine-drinking experience stays with us and directly tempers our sensual response to that wine in the future.

"[This is where] the human body goes beyond machines," says Cliff, "because they can never tell you what is a good wine, and what is bad, high quality or low quality, pleasant or unpleasant, [in part because] there is no room for emotion." Cliff goes on, her enthusiasm for the subject infectious. The topic flows from the lab, to the vineyard, and back, weaving sensory science with psychology. This is the future of our understanding of taste and Dr. Margaret Cliff and her research are leading the way.

 

Read profiles of more influential people in the B.C. wine world: 

Bernie Hadley Beauregard

John Simes 

Val Tait