For most people, the taste of wine is not all that important – it simply tastes ‘nice’ or ‘not nice’. Wine lovers, those who’ve decided to pay closer attention to the sensations of their wine experiences, wines are often described in terms of fruit, flowers, herbs and other materials we are all familiar with.

This is fairly normal.

There are a few, and I fall ever-so-slightly in this area, for whom the ‘taste’ of wine actually has another dimension. In my case it is colour. I sometimes get a sensation, not from the sight, but from the smell, that a particular wine is ‘blue’ or ‘yellow’ or some other colour, but this is just a fleeting impression and not that defined or helpful.

“Synaesthesia – a condition in which the senses mix together so that sensations we normally consider separate start to intermingle. (Studies from the University of Edinburgh suggest 4% of the UK population could be affected by this blurring of the senses.)” BBC News

Imagine, therefore, those for whom this is full-blown? Would you want “girlfriends … flavoured of rhubarb and melted wine gums.” (you need to read the BBC article to understand that one)?

Imagine tasting a wine and it evoking all sorts of images, sounds, memories and feelings? Sounds exciting, and potentially uncomfortable.

Unfortunately we don’t seem to know how it happens yet, but the article on the BBC made me think. What if we could do this BACKWARDS and engineer that certain sounds or sights evoked the taste of certain wines? Is that the future of wine appreciation?

If aromas make up most of what we experience from wine, and aromas are chemical molecules (or their vibrations), and we can plug these into brains … I imagine future wine lovers like Woody Allen enjoying his Orgasmatron in Sleeper 🙂

See? I told you the science of life was going to become more important to wine lovers!

More information on Synaesthesia here