Taste bud tales

Wines & Vines, June, 2003 by Tim Patterson

True or false: On the whole, women have better palates than men.

Chances are you answered true. Both in the wine industry and the general population, most people share a vague consensus--maybe a hunch--that women have keener tasting and sniffing abilities. But what exactly gives them the edge? Is it better raw sensory equipment, or better language skills, more capacity to give that elusive aroma a name? Is the female advantage an evolutionary legacy from eons of handling the kitchen chores or an artifact of short-term socialization, in which little girls sharpen their senses through doll clothes and tea parties while little boys sharpen sticks?

If this gap is objective, can men catch up? Evidence suggests that with patient effort, males can master the art of doing dishes. But can they ever hold their own as wine tasters? Turns out there is a wealth of sensory research bearing on these questions, most of it done in the last decade. "When I started here 10 years ago," says Pamela Dalton, a sensory researcher at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, "I was almost embarrassed to say there was no lab evidence that women were more sensitive. It was silly, because we know women are more sensitive.

I'm pleased to say I no longer have to say that--I can provide the evidence.

Surprisingly enough, virtually none of this research directly involves wine, a product without peer for its complex mix of flavors and aromas. Undeterred, here's a report from the frontiers of science.

Make Way For The Super-Tasters

One piece of research that has gotten popular exposure is the phenomenon of "super-tasters." Yale Medical School researcher Linda Bartoshuk started by discovering that people had widely different sensitivities to tasting bitterness--from a small piece of paper laced with PROP (6-n-propylthiouracil, a thyroid medication). She went on to divide the world into super-tasters, tasters and nontasters. Super-tasters make up roughly 25% of the population, tasters 50%, nontasters 25%.

Varying responses to PROP bitterness are mirrored in reactions to sourness, sweetness and the capsaicin burn of hot peppers. "Super-tasters live in a neon food world," Bartoshuk says, "nontasters in a pastel food world." And sure enough, super-tasters do have more fungiform papillae, the structures that house taste bud receptors.

Women are over-represented among super-tasters: the lucky 25% of the population includes 35% of the women and 15% of the men. (Sadly, Bartoshuk herself is a nontaster.) Gender also shows up in preferences; female super-tasters dislike sweet and fat (at least in high concentrations), but male super-tasters eat them up.

And yes kids, you can do this at home. Bartoshuk's stripped-down version of the laboratory test involves swabbing the tongue with blue food coloring and peering in with a flashlight. Against the blue-dyed tongue, the papillae remain pink; super-tasters show a carpet of pink, nontasters pink polka dots on a field of blue. (Wouldn't it be fun to have Robert Parker over for dinner, and just before the brandy, break out the Q-tips, the food coloring and the flashlight?)

Taste preferences also come into play. In her studies of food cravings, Marcie Pelchat, another Monell researcher, concludes that women are more likely than men to crave sweet foods, though the particular targets of satisfaction differ from culture to culture (no, it's not always chocolate). Bartoshuk's research also suggests that tasters are much less fond of ethyl alcohol than nontasters, a finding that may have implications for the study of alcoholism. All these varying sensitivities and propensities--for sugar, alcohol and bitterness--could well correlate with how wine is perceived.

It's All In The Nose

Most tasting isn't about taste itself--sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami--but about smell. The flavors enshrined in tasting notes are mainly perceived through aspiration into the retronasal cavity above the mouth and behind the nose. "Most variability in flavor is due to smell," Pelchat says. "The tremendous variety in fruit flavors is in the aromas, not the taste--there's lust some sweet, maybe some sour. It's the same for differences between meats or grains." And since olfaction (sense of smell) is more likely to go on the fritz than taste--through disease, injury or just plain aging--it's important to know who might have the better sniffers.

Pamela Dalton and her co-researchers discovered that women of childbearing age were particularly adept at learning to notice low-threshold odors. With repeated exposure to a variety of smells, they quickly got better and better at detecting something different (compared to clean air) and at recognizing and naming that something. By contrast, men just didn't pick it up, nor did premenarche girls and post-menopausal women. In other experiments, women did better at spotting a target odor against a background of other aromas, a setting more like real-world experience. Dalton's logical speculation was that the variance was hormonal; subsequent research has suggested (without full statistical rigor) that post-menopausal women on hormone replacement therapy come right back up to speed.