Tasting wine makes you smarter
Say wine, snacks or haute cuisine and the gourmands of online food magazine FavorFlav know where to drink, how to eat it and what to cook. This time our chefs tell you how wine makes you smarter.
Knowing all prime numbers up to a thousand by heart, speaking three languages fluently, and always winning at Trivial Pursuit: let me guess, you are a wine lover. Because tasting wine makes you – demonstrably – smarter. This is described by neuroscientist Gordon Shepherd 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 just taking a sip and swallowing,’ he says. ‘You hold the wine in your mouth, let it swirl around all your taste buds, and only then do you swallow it.’ Apparently, that is just as complicated for the brain as solving a complex math problem.
Do I smell caramel or cork?
But when it comes to perceiving and recognizing flavors, your brain really kicks into high gear. Because your brain has to translate all those molecules into flavors and then compare that rapidly with scents that have been perceived before. ‘Wait a minute, is that tangerine? Caramel? Cigars? Or... cork?’ Shepherd makes it even more complicated: he compares it to perceiving colors. ‘The objects we see have no color but they reflect light. When our eyes catch that light, it is translated into a color. In the same way, wine molecules have no taste or smell, but they activate our brains to make that perception.’ Wow. Complicated. You need to drink quite a bit of wine to be able to note that down.
Wine against heart attack, diabetes, dementia
A study from Frontiers in Human Neuroscience comes to similar conclusions: wine experts 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 affected by diseases, for example, Alzheimer's. Other benefits of drinking wine: it keeps your mouth healthy, as wine has antibacterial properties that wash away dirt in your mouth. Also, three to four glasses of alcohol per week stimulate the production of serotonin and endorphins, the happiness chemicals in your brain that also get a boost from chocolate. And then red wine would help against fatigue, bladder infections, and skin aging, and from the book by wine expert Harold Hamersma, Wine Journey Through My Body, it appears that moderate alcohol consumption lowers the risk of heart attacks, diabetes, and dementia.
Text: FavorFlav
