Professor Linda Bartoshuk of Yale University first published her groundbreaking work, dividing the population into so-called supertasters, normal tasters and non-tasters, back in the 1990s. But it has taken the world of wine a while to catch up with the implications.
The tongue belongs to Toffee, click on photo to go to her Pawster page.
With colleagues she identified a substance called PROP (6-n-propylthiouracil, a thyroid medication) that can help identify which of us has an abnormally high or low number of taste buds (which are found on fungiform papillae) on our tongue. Roughly a quarter of the population seem genetically programmed to have a markedly high number of taste buds, about a half have an average number, and another quarter have relatively few.
Because PROP is a prescription drug and there are ethical issues concerned with exposing the public to such a test and achieving their "informed consent," Bartoshuk has devised a simple way of measuring the density of your own taste buds. Her suggested method is to swab the front of your tongue with food coloring and then press a plastic (paper gets messy, apparently) ring-binder reinforcer on to it. If you can count more than 25 colored spots on the ring, you are a supertaster, apparently.
I was unexpectedly given a proper PROP test at the Institute of Masters of Wine Sixth Symposium held in Napa Valley last summer. The opening session was moderated by Tim Hanni, MW, a Californian musician and sometime employee of Beringer who has always been interested in questions of taste. It was he who first introduced many of us to the concept of umami, the fifth, monosodium glutamate-like taste we are now supposed to add to sweetness, sourness, saltiness and bitterness -- although I have to say that I very rarely find it in wine.
Hanni gave out little strips of paper that had apparently been impregnated with PROP. The 250-odd of us in the room were to put these on our tongues and record whether we tasted almost unbearable bitterness, mild bitterness or nothing at all. This supposedly indicates whether we are supertasters ("hypertaster" would be a more accurate and less emotive term), normal tasters or hypo (low) tasters. And duly, about a quarter fell into each of the extreme categories with about a half experiencing mild bitterness and therefore classified as normal tasters.
I would have been a bit upset to discover I was a non-taster, but I was also rather disappointed to find that my paper strip tasted horribly bitter, indicating that perhaps I was a hypertaster.
And apparently women are far more likely than men to be hypertasters: 35 percent of American Caucasian females tested by Bartoshuk as opposed to 15 percent of American Caucasian males qualified. There also seems to be a particularly high incidence of hypertasters among Asians.
In a brief report on the symposium that ran on my Web site jancisrobinson.com I mentioned all this en passant, thinking that readers deserved to know if my palate was deformed and in what direction. One reader contacted one of the symposium speakers, Michael O'Mahony, professor of food science and technology at UC Davis, for more information and he replied, "The test that Tim gave does not really diagnose tasters versus hypertasters. It is a lot more complicated than that and the test was completely biased. You can tell Jancis that she is probably a normal taster."
This was good news, and I reported it on my site, but too late it seems. Fellow wine writers were already reacting.
Mark Squires' bulletin board on www.erobertparker.com started a thread on whether biology determined tasting ability, initiated by someone who seemed to understand the issues and pointed out it was quite brave of me to admit to being anything other than normal. But that misleading prefix "super" does a lot of damage. Robert Parker himself jumped in early to declare that he couldn't abide spicy food in any form. (I like it, incidentally.) Then another American wine writer, my old friend Matt Kramer, who must have read this particular thread (though not my own account as he confidently reported that I had painted my tongue with blue coloring) dashed off a column for that well-known oenophiles' gazette, the New York Sun, making me the prime perpetrator of "an almost desperate attempt by some of today's wine tasting potentates to bolster their credibility by suggesting a physical superiority."
This was the last thing I was attempting. But on reflection I do think it is as well for those of us concerned with wine -- whether producing words about wine or wines themselves -- to realize that people taste things in very different ways. And it would probably be helpful for consumers if wine critics were to take the test and come clean about where they stand. Perhaps I am a hypertaster, and perhaps this explains much of what I don't like about particularly alcoholic wines. I would say I have a good tolerance of tannin and acidity, however -- I really enjoy young, tannic wines and, especially, acidity. So I'm not too sure where this leaves us. It could however explain my apparent distaste for the new genre of controversial wines from Chateau Pavie in St-Emilion, which are certainly chock-full of everything. I would describe them as uncomfortably exaggerated but they presumably taste just right to other palates.
Jamie Goode, in his extremely accessible book "Wine Science" (Mitchell Beazley, 2005), addresses some of these issues and asks Gary Pickering, a professor of oenology at Brock University in Canada, whether hypertasters are at an advantage when it comes to wine tasting. "I would speculate that supertasters probably enjoy wine less than the rest of us," the professor is reported as saying. "They experience astringency, acidity, bitterness, and heat (from alcohol) more intensely, and this combination may make wine -- or some wine styles -- relatively unappealing."
The full article, from which this post was excerpted, appeared on page G - 9 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Jancis Robinson is a London-based, internationally known wine journalist, book author and educator. Visit her Web site at jancisrobinson.com and e-mail her at wine@sfchronicle.com.
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