You might think that the stronger a wine, the more intense it tastes, but according to Spanish researchers, it's actually weaker wines that have the best flavour.
Neuroscientist Ram Frost and his colleagues from the Basque Centre of Cognition, Brain and Language in Donostia-San Sebastian, wrote in the journal Plos One: "Over the last few decades, wine makers have been producing wines with a higher alcohol content, assuming that they are more appreciated by consumers.
"To test this hypothesis, we used functional magnetic imaging to compare reactions of human subjects to different types of wine, focusing on brain regions critical for flavor processing and food reward."
Frost and his team used fMRI - a brain imaging technique - to measure the brain activity in 21 "inexperienced wine consumers" who drank wine on a regular basis but not more than once per week.
Participants were asked to taste samples of different red wines, one strong and one weak. The scan showed there was stronger brain activity when participants drank the weaker wines, compared to the stronger ones.
Frost said: "This suggests that contrary to the common intuition regarding high-alcohol content wines - and thus contrary to the expected prediction - at least in our study, these wines induce weaker activation relative to the low-alcohol content ones."
The study didn't reveal any part of the brain where stronger wines cause more activity.
Despite causing more brain activity, Frost doesn't believe the weaker wines contain more flavour, but that instead people pay more attention to the flavour when the alcohol content is lower. "The low-alcohol content wines induced a greater attentional orienting and exploration of the sensory attributes of wines relatively to high-alcohol content wines," he said.
Frost argues that his study proves that high alcohol wines "often lack finesse...and overshadow the subtle flavours and aromas that the wine could exude."
"Lower alcohol content wines have a better chance to induce greater sensitivity to the overall flavour expressed by the wine," he said.
(via Telegraph)
