The Infinite Monkey Cage - Why does wine taste good?

Episode Date: December 24, 2022

For this special Christmas episode, Brian Cox and Robin Ince visit the Australian Wine Research Institute in Adelaide to find out what science can teach us about wine. They are joined by stand-up comedian Tim Minchin, Nobel Prize winner and vineyard owner Brian Schmidt, flavour chemist Mango Parker and sensory and consumer scientist Patricia Williamson. The panel are put through their paces as they sample a variety of wines, learning the hard way that the majority of wine’s flavour isn’t down to molecular chemistry but instead the holistic experience of wine drinking: the perceived price, mood in the room and even the weight of the bottle. Producer: Caroline Steel Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem

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Know your risks. Visit heartandstroke.ca. It's Christmas! As you can hear. Yeah, it's never sounded more Christmassy than it does on the Infinite Monkey Cage today. Yeah, well, it's raining, isn't it? Yeah, it is raining. But anyway, it's probably not Christmas actually because it's unlikely the majority of the audience are listening to this at Christmas because it can be downloaded at any time so it's not actually a good introduction. Okay, fair enough. It's Christmas unless you're

listening to this episode repeated in June, in which case it's Summer Solstice or it's Whitson or it's Easter or it's Tuesday or it's the day they put that man in the wicker man and sacrifice him to ensure a good harvest of the crops. Anyway, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And this is the Infinite Monkey Barrel. Thank you very much. So this is kind of the Christmas episode.

Well, look, we're doing it as a Christmas episode. You listen to it however you want. But what we did, because it's kind of the last episode of this series as well, is we thought we would say to Brian, like the last day of school, what would you like to do monkey cage about? You can do anything at all. It's free time. And I thought it would be the normal, oh, can we do quantum entanglement?

Oh, I love Lagrangian mechanics. But he said... Wine. Yeah. So there we go. You don't get through all the existential anxiety of dealing with the terrors of the infinite spaces of the universe and its inevitable heat death,

followed by an eternity of nothing but a featureless void as a professional physicist without obviously turning to a good Shiraz every now and again. That's right, and that's why we've come to the Australian Wine Research Institute in Adelaide, a city home to some of the world's finest wines, to explore the science of wine. As the great Richard Feynman wrote, a poet once said, the whole universe is in a glass of wine. There are the things of physics, the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather,

the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth's rocks, and in its composition, we see the secrets of the universe's age and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are there in the wine? How did they come to be?

However, Feynman concludes, let us not forget ultimately what it is for let it give us one more final pleasure drink it and forget it all and also you might be able to hear that you probably think there's a weird sound in the background that weird sound is rain and the reason that we've got the weird sound of rain is brian thought it'd be a good idea as it's a Christmas special for us to go to Australia and come to Adelaide because it'll be all sunny and lovely a beautiful vineyard view through the rain but much like Stargazing Live in the UK it's cloudy and it's rainy and it's cold and my script's already extremely wet as well and hard to read and we've been told by one of our guests that frequently magpies attack you as well. So welcome to a Christmas Jeopardy episode.

I am Tippi Hedren. Brian will be playing the part of Rod Taylor. It's a reference to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. I hope you got it. Anyway, in today's show, we ask, what is wine from a molecular perspective? What is the science or indeed the alchemy of wine? How much of the experience of wine is a subjective experience? a ten dollar wine seem like a thousand dollar wine if you change the bottle or wear a blindfold we're joined by a Nobel Prize winning physics a flavor chemist

a sensory Nobel Prize winning physics we're joined by a Nobel Prize I'll tell you what the great thing is you don't even have to drink wine you merely have to think about wine and you're already intoxicated this is very noble prize physics a chemi man and we're joined by a noble prize winner in physics a flavor chemist a sensory and consumer scientist and the composer of australia's favorite song about wine and also another one about the pope which will definitely not be aired so close to christ and pre-Watershed. Anyway, they are Brian Schmidt from the Australian National University. And if I had a glass of wine at the end of time, I think I'd go for a La Tache from Burgundy. Patricia Williamson from the Australian Wine Research Institute. And I'm a sensory and consumer scientist. And the glass of wine I would drink before the end of the time would probably be champagne,

because you have to celebrate, because it's such a historical moment. Plus champagne goes with anything, even popcorn, if I'm watching from a different galaxy. And if you guys are paying, I would probably have vintage champagne. And there's someone who's never worked for the BBC before imagining that it might be pay.

I'm Mango Parker from the Australian Wine Research Institute and I have what I think is one of the best jobs in the world as a flavour chemist. The glass of wine that I would enjoy before the end of all time would have to be champagne as well because I think it would be good to finish things with a big bang. I'm Tim Minchin. I'm not from anywhere and if I had one more glass of wine before the end of time it would be an infinitely large one. And this is our panel. Now, just before we start, it is raining heavily. Are these the ideal conditions for growing wine?

Because I had imagined that in the south of Australia at this time of year we'd be in the sun. Yes, we would be in the sun. This is very unusual weather for this time of the year, which is really not great for the grapes. They are used to drier weather and all sorts of diseases can grow and moulds can great for the grapes. They are used to drier weather and all sorts of diseases can grow and moulds can grow on the grapes when it's too wet. This is why we have vineyards like this where students and researchers experiment

and try different tricks, different ways of pruning, different grape varieties to see which ones are more resistant or less to different climatic variation yeah because this is a research vineyard so that's the idea so you can optimize the wine and the harvest and so on when the weather changes that's right you can try to see different conditions and different things that you can do to the vineyard how you can prune it differently these results are passed to the winemakers in australia

can i ask you for listeners you were here with us last week in canberra at the deep space network though actually we haven't recorded it yet but according to the block universe that actual order doesn't matter so much but the question is last week we're talking about cosmology why are you here now well anyone who follows me on Twitter knows my handle is Cosmic Pino. So I am a cosmologist who also has a Pinot Noir vineyard in Canberra. And I thought a Christmas special of talking about wine sounded pretty good to me too. Is it wine first or cosmology? Is it a close tie? Does cosmology lead to wine or vice versa? So I have learned never to choose running a university.

And so both of them are first. Everyone's a winner. Tim, your song, White Wine in the Sun, is one of your iconic songs. This is what I had in mind, actually, when I suggested that we come to Adelaide. It's not quite worked out like that. But culturally, White Wine in the Sun at Christmas in Australia, it's an important part of the Australian Christmas, isn't it? I i think so christmas in australia is a very different experience from european christmas not now though not yeah it seems like maybe we're going to join you underwater but yeah i think

for us christmas is the height of summer obviously it's often very hot and you know day drinking for me is always associated with whites or rosés. And, yeah, I think my interest in wine is less scientific and more how the sort of cultural inputs we have around alcohol, as well as the alcohol itself, but the cultural inputs we have, how that changes your experience of it and how your enjoyment of wine is changed by expectations and the kind of psychosocial surrounds. Will you be writing rosé in the rain after this yeah yeah maybe yeah it'll be a haiku well i think i think we should go inside

actually we'll get into this i mean really does this mean that we could start growing wine in oldham i think the the difference here is that eventually the sun will come out here, which won't happen there. That's true. So, no. Let's go, right. With that, then, let's go inside. Right, so we've come in from the rain now,

and we are all sat around the boardroom. We have lots of members of the AWRI around us. We have a lot of wine as well. We're going to be doing various tests and a nose clip as well. So keep listening to find out what's going to happen there. And, Mangai, when we were outside, you were mentioning that you had won a prize as well in terms of flavour science. That's right.

I was lucky enough to win the gold Manfred Roltaire Prize for Excellence in Flavour Chemistry. What was the particular bit of research you were doing? That was my PhD research, which was about flavour precursors that actually develop flavour in the mouth. So for a long time, we've known that grapes produce these chemicals that have no smell or aroma or flavour of their own. smell or aroma or flavour of their own. But during the winemaking process, chemical reactions happen and those flavours are transformed and turn into those beautiful, amazing flavours that you see in your final bottle of wine. And what my research was about was that that can also happen in your mouth. So the flavour precursors can also remain in the wine and they can break apart and release those aromas in your mouth through the action of microbial enzymes. And that

also contributes to the flavour of a wine. And chemically, so you know, if you say, well, there's pencil shavings, for example, chemically, are those chemicals the same as the chemicals from pencil shavings or is it just it reminds us of that sensational flavour? that you can recognise in other places. So, for example, some Cabernets Sauvignons can have quite a strong green beans type aroma and that's due to methoxypyrazines, which are also found in green capsicums and green beans. So that makes a lot of sense. There are some other flavours that we see in wine that contribute to certain characters that come up in unexpected places.

Another example of that is a character which is beautiful, nutty, coconutty character in wine that we call wine lactone. And that was first identified in koala urine. We have it here if you want to smell it. Koala urine. It's called oak lactone. I really hope we can do a scratch and sniff card to give away the radio time. For the listeners, we have some vials here with sort of a substance in it. One of us will survive the whole show, but which one will it be?

Welcome to our Christmas murder mystery. So this is oak lactam yes it smells a little bit like bailey's irish cream that kind of coconutty smell there we've started very badly on this show in one way haven't we for the psychosomatic effects of everyone who's listening at home wrapping their presents and drinking wine we've generally strayed on a kind of urinary tract haven't we oh wow Oh, wow. That's a good pun. Thank you very much. Tim, what's the weirdest taste that you've had from wine?

I have a problem with most pinots, which is tough because the good professor here makes it. And also my friend Sam Neill makes pinots as well and we've had some great fun fake fights on instagram about my antipathy towards pinots but it says there are pinots i like but i reckon the majority of pinots i taste i really don't want to drink it and i have wondered whether there's something in most pinots that is not particularly bothersome to most people, but I freaking hate it. But I bet I love yours, Brian. Yeah, we just didn't have the good ones.

Well, if you don't like Sam Neill's, then we're in trouble. Yeah, I actually don't. No, it's two paddocks, right? I actually do think I like Sam's. Okay, well, then maybe we're in okay. There is a flavor. Either way, we should have a fight. There's something that people often describe

as a farmyard-y kind of thing in Pinot, don't they, which is a particular... Which bit of the farmyard? Yeah. I was trying to see if you think... We have another thing to try and smell here, beet or iron-on. To me, it's beautiful.

It's like violets or raspberry. I think it's really delicious. And I would just believe you. The interesting thing is that... No, I can't either. There you go. It's almost overpowering to me. Is it?

So that's down to one odorant receptor difference between the people who can smell it and the people who can't. It's a single nucleotide polymorphism that's causing you to be unable to smell that compound so that's a gene a modification of a particular gene one single nucleotide polymorphism within the gene one base within one gene for one so that's an a to a whatever yeah a g or something like that yeah so this is actually one of the rare moments where, because so often we read in the newspapers,

they found the gene for people who like Tom Cruise films or whatever it is. And it's like, and actually this really is something which is specific enough to say we can go even further than that. Yes. And this could be part of the reason that some people would enjoy a Pinot and others wouldn't. I'm getting different

ones if I swap nostrils. I must have something stuck up my nose. I've got to stop putting pencils up my nose. I think I've got a little bit of pencil lead up there. There's actually two sides to your olfactory bulb and for some people one side is a lot bigger than the other. So it could be that you are quite asymmetrical with the size of the olfactory bulb. It would fit in with everything else about me. I'm such an asymmetrical person. Are there certain wines that you will get amongst a group of people the widest variety of interpretations? Are there certain things where you would just know that if you went around a room,

people would really pick up very, very different things? Yes, so Beta-Ionone is the one that we normally see in demonstrations. There are about half of people can't see. Another one that we see that divides people as well is this rotundum, and that's the compound that has been discovered at AWRI, so we're really proud of it. Let's see who can smell it. That's very strong.

Yeah, that's very strong. It's only moderately strong for me. So that's a compound that we discovered here at the Australian Wine Research Institute. And it's a really interesting story because the winemakers came to us and they said, we sometimes get this black pepper character in our cool climate Shiraz and we love it but we want to understand where does it come from, why do we see it in some years and not others. Can you please help us understand this flavour better? So we did some research here at the Institute. We found some very peppery wines. We extracted the essence of the aroma of those wines and concentrated it a million times. Then we put it onto our gas chromatographs mass spectrometers that we attach to a very special

highly sensitive detector which is the human nose. And we separated out all the flavour components in that wine and sniffed each one individually and managed to discover that there was one region where we could smell pepper. And after much effort, we managed to identify this compound rotundone, which we also happened to find was in black peppercorns and had been overlooked. At 13,000 times higher the concentration that we found it in the wine. So you got it, Brian. Did you get it?

Yeah, I can... It smells like pepper to me. And Brian, do you get it? I get it a bit. But it's interesting when my region is into black pepper flavours and I'm never that sensitive to it and I can smell it but not very well. Because I only got the black pepper once you said black pepper flavours. And I'm never that sensitive to it. And I can smell it, but not very well. Because I only got the black pepper once you said black pepper. And it felt so far up my nose that it was as if I could tell my brain was going,

you're making this up. You know what I mean? Because that's what I find fascinating about that moment, that once you're told, very often everyone can find the flavours then. But have they found the flavours? We talked about all these complex chemicals in wine, but could you, just to start at the beginning, could you go through wine in order,

water's presumed the largest component, but just step through the components of wine? Generally, 82% to 85% of wine is actually made of water. The next biggest ingredient by mass is ethanol. I think we all know what that does, around about 12 to 15% in wine. Around about 2% of the wine is made up of sugars, glycerol, proteins, tannins, phenolics and other non-volatiles. So they're giving sweetness, texture. About 0.5% of the wine is made up of organic acids, which is very important.

People might not realise that if you make a wine basic, so you add sodium hydroxide, it's actually green, so it would look really different to the wine we see in front of us. And the acid really is very important to giving it that vibrant red colour as well as the beautiful tangy taste. And less than 0.5% of the wine is made up of volatile compounds and the volatile compounds are what give you the aroma firstly when you're smelling the wine and then once you put it in your mouth you're experiencing those volatile compounds again as they make their way to your olfactory bulb via the retronasal passage through the back of your mouth.

And for those molecules to achieve your olfactory bulb, which is all the way here between your eyes, you need airflow. So when you have a cold and that passage between your back of your throat and your nose is blocked, when you taste something, you can't feel the flavor. You can only sense the basic taste because that passage is blocked. So when we have a cold, though, because I've never thought of it before. You just say, well, I can't really taste things.

I've got a cold. But it's because it's airflow. So it's just that those compounds are not being carried around. It's a mechanical thing, it's nothing to do with your... I think we should give this a try. Nose clamp salt. You've got your nose clamp salt. So we have nose clamp salt.

Instructions, I've never used one of these before. Oh, you've got to... You seem to be a pro. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's one of those things that sticks to you, it's hard white. Put it on so you can't breathe through your nose. Oh, that's brilliant. Brian, you're sounding like Frank Sidebottom.

Who's that? You want to go with Frank Sidebottom, who was a man with a papier-mâché head? Go on, do it. So if you're listening at home and you're at Christmas and you're having a drink, so you can simulate this by just holding your nose, right, and then tasting the wine.

I love that idea that you need to, you can simulate a nose clamp by also holding your muster. It's like, good! Innovations! I just say that people can do it. That's tried the first whack. I like the fact that instinctually, even though you've got a nose clamp on, you still go, I'm not going to use much scent for some reason. And when you take it off, the exposure of flavours come to you.

That's really interesting. Absolutely no fruit at all. So this is red wine, by the way. So if you're at home, you can have a drink of the wine holding your nose and then let go of your nose and suddenly, for me anyway, all the fruit appeared. Is that what happened, Tim? Yeah, yeah, I think so.

I was just like, it's going to make my nose run, so I've got other things going on here. Because I know, Tim, you're a Shiraz drinker, aren't you? Yeah, probably, mostly. I could ask you why that is. I mean, if I was to ask you to describe the pleasure you get from wine. I don't know. That is a major question, by the way.

That is almost like saying, Tim, if I can just ask you, what is consciousness? It's the hard problem of wine preference. But when you ask the question whether knowledge damages your capacity to enjoy wine, the more you know, the harder it is to like it on a simple level, and that's the same with music, I guess. I certainly find it harder to enjoy a musical than a lot of people would although a lot of people don't enjoy musicals so I have that in

common but uh so I don't have a complicated relationship with it at all and it hasn't gone very examined I think I like a high alcohol content in a lot of charades I really like the pepperiness I was interested to find that I could smell that peppery I really like the pepperiness. I was interested to find that I could smell that pepperiness. I really like peppery, dry Australian Shirazism because I've been brought up on them and my family are publicans and stuff and I just got brought up on Australian wines. I find what I think of as the sort of dusty farminess of good European wines is an adjustment. Like I don't know what that is i call it dusty or

tastes old even when it's not old i think it's a lot to do with the culture you're brought up in but i like big robust peppery wines not exclusively but if i had to live with only one type of wine for the rest of my life it would be i think probably quite unsophisticated really muscular yeah and i want I want to talk about the alcohol content because you mentioned it there so how much of the enjoyment of wine for you and I suppose many people would think this how much is it purely taste in the way that you can enjoy food because it's the taste and how much is it that experience the social experience and the alcohol content and so on

so if i said to you here's a wonderful shiraz which is completely zero alcohol yeah would it be interesting and how do you untangle that because when you're young and you first drink wine you tend not to like it because it's something you grow into like coffee or oysters or whatever. And so I learnt to love the taste of wine as I learnt how nice it is to put a depressant into your body when you're stressed, if that's what it is. So I drink wine definitely medicinally, but my cultural association with the flavour and how nice it tastes and how it makes me feel

because of the alcohol content, I think are completely and extra extraably interwoven now. For example, I drink a bit of zero alcohol beer now and it triggers in me a sense of relaxation because it's psychosomatic as well as real. So I have looked for good zero alcohol wines and I don't think they're really there yet, are they? I mean, wine without ethanol is not wine as far as I can get.

But that's interesting. I wonder how drunk you would get if you didn't know that it was 0% wine. Because that's part of it, isn't it? You know, people, especially when you're nervous or you're in a social situation or whatever where you're trying to impress, one glass of wine can be far more intoxicating than it normally is. Yes, the zero alcohol is actually surprisingly a consumer push.

So people want it because the beer industry has had successfully produced zero alcohol beer. So now the consumers want zero alcohol wine as well, just so they can enjoy if they are in a party and have the relaxation, the cognitive relaxation, or just pretend that they are drinkers, just be part of the group but not have to deal with the consequences of the alcohol. And this has been a big push from the consumers and the industry, the Australian industry and world industry is working hardly on trying to produce no alcohol wine that

actually tastes like wine because differently from the beer alcohol is a great percentage of the wine and it's a backbone of the flavor i also think what's interesting is that it's not just the taste and this means that maybe you don't have to make a very good zero-alcohol wine to do the job that people want. What you said is it makes you part of the group and stuff. For me, there's also a ritual around alcohol, so pulling a cork or these days twisting a lid even, it still works. It's part of the ritual, the pouring from a certain weight bottle

into a certain type of glass. For example, when I try to have an alcohol-free day, I'll get ice and, you know, pour a soda into it, try and make it feel like a gin and tonic, even though I don't drink gin and tonic. The ritual of creating a drink at a certain type of day also has its own placebo effect, not just the taste. So there's lots of ways you can get away with not drinking alcohol, but the best way to get the effect of a glass of wine is to have a glass of wine with all the alcohol in it. How important is the alcohol? So chemically, so putting aside the social element of drinking alcohol, how important a component is it? Which particular flavours is it contributing to? Or is it the whole experience? No, the alcohol will contribute with some flavours, sometimes too much. When it's not

integrated in the wine, it will taste warm. You might sometimes even taste bitter. But alcohol also helps with the perception of sweetness of the wine, with the viscosity, the body of the wine. So it's not just the flavor compounds, but it's also not having the alcohol there to hold the body and the backbone of the wine. That will make it really hard to mimic the flavor. It's a fundamental part of the chemistry. Would some styles of wine lend themselves more?

So I'm thinking champagne, which you like. There I'm thinking the acidity is the backbone of the wine rather than the alcohol so do you think there would be an opportunity on champagne to do something i believe so the best examples of no alcohol wine that i've tried is just my personal research were sparkling so i think there's hope there and i'm sure if anyone's going to find out it's going to be this institute we got a lot of brains working on the topic so watch this space there's been a group that's shown that when people were tasting wine and they were they had brain scans brain image of what was happening

while they were tasting wine if they were told that their wine was expensive, the area of the brain responsible for pleasure would be more active and not the area responsible for primary tasting. So they were bypassing that and straight to the pleasure because it's expensive, I'm happy. And that's subconscious. That makes absolute sense to me because that's part of the placebo and the ritual. It's like if you go to a nice restaurant. You could definitely do that with food. You could eat exactly the same meal in two different restaurants,

but the fact that you're sitting somewhere nice and someone's brought it to you and placed it and said, sir, this is compliments of the chef or whatever, you just engage more with the eating and you meditate more on the flavours and you give it every possible chance to be really, really good. And it is. Even the weight of the plate or the bottle has been shown to influence how people perceive the quality of the food or the wine. See, now we've got quite an interesting situation because we're about to do a taste test and write tasting notes. And we've done it at

exactly the same time the Australian Wine Research Institute has its lunch break. So just in this room, there's beginning to be the smell of someone who's microwaving a cottage pie. So we've now got this kind of interesting clash of... Your task here is to smell and taste the wine 861, the white one, and then the 670. And you're going to use this iPad just to guide your tasting. I think my son just picks flavours all the time in food and out of the air. My memories are not evoked by a smell.

My taste and smell gel for me with a general sense that I'm numb. Right. That was a joke. No, there's a point where we realize it's a cry for help and i think that's very important it's just numb ah here we are so what we have on the ipad here is we have first the description for white wine we have to select the applicable aroma attribute. So, for example, we have citrus, lemon, red fruit, dark fruit, tropical fruit, apples, stone fruits, floral, herbaceous, like grasses and mints and peppers.

So we have a series of flavours that we can select on tasting the wine. So, first of all, I think we're all going to taste the white wine. I'm certainly getting tropical fruit there. Is that suggesting that? Am I ruining the experiment? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I should not do that. So let's all select and then we'll see what we see.

I love the fact that we've come up with a show where the silence is a constant necessity. Well, we can edit it, can't we? What, just to silence? Yeah. While you're tasting, I can talk about the cognitive neuroscientists. They have been interested in uncover the various brain areas and all the networks involved in your brain,

involved with wine appreciation. And there is a neurologist from Yale who claims that the overall tasting process engages the brain more than listening to music or solving a difficult maths problem. So I can see smoke coming out of those beautiful minds. Right, come on then, let's see what we got. Well, I'll be the one that I have no idea. I mean, it just tastes like white wine. It's pretty mineral to me.

There's citrusiness. I don't even eat berries because I don't like berries. So I don't know what berries taste like. I've clicked tropical fruit, floral, apple pear and herbaceous. Tropical fruit for me was overwhelming when I smelt it. See, I didn't get that. I got it more like a taste of pear, but not pear as in a pear you'd eat. A pear made for a pear sweet, like a pear drop kind of taste.

And I did get a bit of kind of flintiness as well. And just a little hint of kind of, it was like mouse wee. He's got a mouse. We're not testing you. I won't tell anybody. I feel judged. The two things I am, I'm numb and judged. So now we move on to the wine that I said was a rosé but is indeed red.

Well, we have the same choices, so from citrus all the way to flint, sea spray. I think what we've really found, Tim, is that we don't need to spend very much on wine. No. Yeah, it's very winey, isn't it? I wonder if the reason I like big, muscly, peppery Shiraz's is I'm not very sensitive to the subtleties,

so I just, you know, the musculature, like I like it assaulting me because I don't pick up on the cute stuff. And the pinot is that you were saying that it's not your favourite. It's a lot more delicate and subtle. I mean, every now and then I have a pinot that I just adore, but mostly I'm like, oh, there's something wrong with this. Right, I'll tell you what then. I've got spices and a little bit of kind of floral blossom, rosish.

That's exactly what I selected, actually. Exactly. Spices and a bit of rose. I did spices and floral and a bit of grassiness. So all three of us agree on what that is. Yeah, I don't know. It's not like that cut grassiness. I do think there's some berries in there, some description.

I didn't get those. I'll tell you. I'll get you out of your misery. I do think there are some berries in there, some description. I'll tell you. I'll get you out of your misery. They were the same wine, just colored with anthocyanins. You look red or rosé in your case. And this has been repeated many, many times. And it's practically impossible not to start automatically thinking about spices and florals and maybe berries, especially when you have the prop in front of you with all the pictures and the names of the attributes.

What happens is when you face uncertainty, which is most of the times when you're tasting wine, unless you are a super pro, the brain will start feeling the gaps of knowledge and it will start making assumptions. So color is a lot faster stimuli to be processed than olfactory stimuli. So the brain will start just by looking at the color, will already make an assumption. And for you, this is going to have to have red wine sort of flavors or aromas. And you actually see it.

And it's not wrong. It's just what your brain is doing. It's just trying to fill up the holes of information and presents you with a conclusion that makes sense. It's really interesting that because I could feel that because smelling them, I really couldn't tell the difference. I thought this isn't a red wine smelling it. But when I tasted it, I was trying to go, where are those spices and things like that? Did you get that? My first instinct was, oh, I'm such an idiot.

This is just minerals and citrus again. That's what I did. I went, oh, it's just... That's exactly... And then I overrode it. That was exactly what happened to me. So your things, both of your things are actually a fear of not appearing to be knowledgeable.

Which is quite an interesting thing, isn't it? Because that is definitely what it is. It's exactly... Yeah, yeah. This one, I'm trying to pin it into the options that I know are for red wine. Well, I'm looking at it going, it's a red wine, therefore it's got to be, and I'm looking at the varieties, I'm like, God, okay. So it's got to be some screwed up Pinot Noir.

It's the only thing it could possibly be. So then you layer that on top of it. Because we were talking about this the other day when we were drinking some red, about the fact that you would definitely always know the difference. And actually, I think now, in hindsight, we can all go can all go well actually i realized they were exactly the same but i was searching but i think there was the brain definitely you know that thing we were saying that almost seems to be a thickness there almost seems to be when you're drinking a red you can feel it on your teeth more you imagine all of these things and realizing with that to me personally

anyway that that was yeah I got I got all of those normal things of like oh yeah it's just not red that I like very much no I'm with him though I thought I'm such an idiot it just smells like tropical fruit it can't yeah so there must be something else here that's what I thought actually and the next week we're gonna be doing a show about male ego so I just thought I'll just just thought, what was the grape? This is a Chardonnay. Is it a Chardonnay? It's a lighter,

fruitier style of Chardonnay. And the more involved you are, the more knowledge you are, the less you get tricked by it because you kind of train your brain in a systematic way to look, smell and taste the wine and it kind of becomes automatic or sort of like a mechanical process.

But you can still get full. But the whole experience of wine tasting, of course, is not just the flavor of the wine. And that's why I was saying that all these interactions, it's a very complex, almost like a chaotic system where you have all the flavor compounds interacting with each other and suppressing each other or masking each other. And you have the biology of the human being, if they are going to perceive it, and how that interacts. And also you have all those cognitive interactions of color, of price,

of weight of the bottle, and even the music that is playing while you're tasting the wine has been shown to improve or make the experience less enjoyable because the mood of the music doesn't match the mood of the wine. So it's such a complex system. And I like to call it the complexities of the wine it's not just the multi-sensory aspect of the actual product but it's all those complexities of the wine which is also very interesting because it is evolving so as as manga was talking about once you you bottle the wine and you sell it it's still going to keep. And it makes it really complicated to work and to predict and to understand how people will enjoy it, what they're going to think about the quality.

But one thing that we always say when we ask consumers is that they want a wine that tastes good. And that's the main thing. I bought this wine because I like the taste. Even though what they perceive of the taste might be something completely different, but they believe they like the taste for all those reasons. It reminds me a bit about the conversation of blind listening

to a million-dollar musical instrument. So someone plays a Stradivarius, and it's very hard to double-blind properly because if the player knows that they're holding a million dollar instrument, it changes the way they play. So you have to blindfold the player and put a nose peg on them because they can smell the old wooden stuff. And you get a player to play a million dollar violin or a really good, you know, new Chinese violin or whatever. They can't necessarily tell and the people listening from behind a screen can't necessarily tell. And one's instinct is to go, well, it's what a load of crap, you know. But I've thought a lot about this stuff,

especially in our shared interests of sort of, you know, the difference between facts and narratives. And I don't think the fact that we bring agency to an old instrument because of the stories or in my case theatres is the other thing, like my knowledge of the people who have played on those stages changes my experience of being on that stage. So the narratives we bring to this stuff, I don't think you can go, well, if you take that away it means they're the same.

You're like, well, you can't take that. Close the institute at once. You can't take that away, it means they're the same. You're like, well, you can't take that. Close the institute at once. You can't take narrative away. You can't take away the fact that when you first tasted that wine from that vineyard, it was at your partner's 40th and it was the best night of your life and that taste forever tastes better to you. You shouldn't and don't need to take narrative away from experience.

See, that's why I trust books more than wine. That's why I spend my money on it. Because I've never gone, hang on a minute, I thought I was reading The Brothers Karamazov. I'm actually reading Mills and Boone, Doctor in Love. You know, they're a lot more reliable.

That's a beautiful description to end on, but we should end. Thank you very much to our fantastic panel, who were Brian Schmidt, Mango Parker, Patricia Williamson and Tim Minchin. And we also asked our audience at home a question via the internet and the

question was, what is the worst Christmas drink that you have ever had to endure? And the first answer we got was a Bloody Liz. Like a Bloody Mary, except you use up all the drinks that nobody wants. I thought it was genius, but nobody seemed to like it.

A fight ensued, things got broken, and I thought I need a new drinks cabinet, but I managed to cobble something together from the scraps. Wow. I thought that was a comment on our previous Prime Minister. Oh, Brian, don't say previous. Well, also, don't say previous Prime Minister, because this doesn't go out for a month and a half,

so I've no idea who it is. Boris Johnson. Catherine Watson said vegan eggnog. Oh, vegan, yeah. Tony has Guinness absinthe, champagne and wormwood extract. I'd say that's quite a beatnik kind of one, wouldn't you, Tim? That's all one drink. That's all one drink, yeah.

Patrick McNamara said, I think the drink my friend Mark drank was called a brain haemorrhage cider. With the shots of Baileys and Black Current, it looked horrible. What was the one from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that was like having your... Pan-galactic gargle blaster. Pan-galactic gargle blaster, yeah. Rocky Rocket says,

Homemade strawberry liqueur. Tasted awful. I didn't know if I was dead or alive. I remember being at a party and running out of mixers. Someone tried vodka and milk. That would separate them, wouldn't it? You just get off milk and alcohol, which is a great Dr Feelgood song.

Jim Hathaway said, Learn from my mistake. Never make a kidney pie martini. Wow. Now, here's a kidney pie martini. Wow. Now, here's a little test. This is from Luigi. I'm thinking it was Buck's Fizz, but I'm still making my mind up. Now, the test there is, how well did Buck's Fizz do as a pop band in Australia

for people to get their reference? You're English, right? Yeah. So, one English, yeah. No, you're not. You just got it anyway. Oh, well, someone got it. So, anyway, we've just been doing a little scientific test

on the success of Bucks fees and people's memory of them. Anyway, that is the end of the series. We'll be back with a new series in February. And remember, for a truly satisfying Christmas, do what a physicist would do. Never open your presents. Leave them in a quantum superposition of all possible presents to avoid disappointment.

Unless it sounds like a cat, then do let it out. Goodbye. Goodbye. Happy Christmas. Thank you. You're now nice again. Without your trousers in the infinite monkey cage. You're now nice again. Hi, I'm Greg Jenner and in the immortal words of Noddy Holder, it's Christmas!

So, your dead to me is back, briefly, to give you a seasonal stocking filler dedicated to Mr Christmas himself. No, not Noddy Holder, Charles Dickens. Do you know how many children they have? Five. Bye. Just search for You're Dead to Me. Oh, and happy Christmas. See you in the new year for a new series. Bye! Tax is extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply.