Taste bud tales

Wines & Vines, June, 2003 by Tim Patterson

The good news for women is they're better at sniffing the good stuff; the bad news is they're also more sensitive to funky odors from "sick" buildings and excessive perfumery. Dalton thinks what's going on is that as people (or at least the women) lower their thresholds from repeated exposure, more smell receptors are actually being sprouted. Since testing this hypothesis with electrodes in human nostrils would be a tad invasive, Dalton hopes to get results with mice.

All in all, it's pretty clear that genetic and hormonal factors make a difference in how people taste and smell, and that some of those differences are related to gender. (Clearly not all of them; everyone has individual sensory "blind spots.") Chances are there's more to be found. Existing studies have barely begun to control for a host of other demographic factors--race, ethnicity, age--where differences could also be significant. Bartoshuk's percentage breakdown of super-tasters/tasters/nontasters, for example, holds for Caucasians; Asians seem to have a higher proportion of super-tasters.

So far, no one has tested a random sample of winemakers in the laboratory. But here's an experiment to try in your head in the meantime. Imagine an alternative universe in which the buying decisions of a demographically diverse group of wine consumers were shaped by the opinions of a handful of wine writers who, from a purely biological point of view, all happened to be male Caucasians over 50. Might this matter?

How The Sexes Got This Way

The common-sense explanation of women's greater capacities is that they evolved through their long-standing role as gatekeepers of the food supply and nurturers of vulnerable infants. Men may do the hunting, but women do the cooking, and after a couple million years, it adds up.

Indeed, one school of thought in paleoanthropology holds that the onset of cooked food and shared meals changed the course of evolution. In a controversial 1999 article titled "The Raw and the Stolen," Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham and several colleagues argue that the increased availability of cooked tubers (the article refers to "plant underground storage organs "--yum!) paved the way for the emergence of homo erectus, our direct ancestor, about 1.9 million years ago.

H. erectus arrived with smaller teeth, smaller digestive guts, a reduced difference in male and female body mass and a larger brain. This upgrade in the food supply, foraged for and cooked by women, was more dependable than the meat supply from male hunting, and may have been the edible centerpiece of a new and more complex level of social organization as well. (Further research: Might today's wine buying pattern, with men tracking down the high-risk, high-prestige trophy wines and women foraging the supermarket aisles for something that goes with dinner, be a survival of this hunter/gatherer split?)

The sensory organ most likely to show gender-based evolutionary differences is the brain. If hormones are a delicate subject, brains are a tinderbox. There is a colorful and extensive history of pseudo-scientific theories about the alleged inferiority of female brains. "Superior male intellect," for example, was long attributed to their larger brains; but simple measurement shows that, relative to body mass, women's brains are slightly larger; and if size was all that mattered, whales would rule the world. Still, there is reason to believe that men and women differ in the mechanics of cognition, in how concepts are formed and particularly, in how sensory experience gets turned into language. The best known (and most over-used) concept here is the division of the brain into left and right sides, with an endless array of functional differences attributed to one or the other. The left side is said to be home to thinking that is rational, analytical and linear; the right side conducive to a more intuitive, hol istic, synthesizing mode. In broad terms, the left brain is more frequently the hub of language activity, the right brain the locus of taste.