Why does wine taste good?

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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 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 Nintz.

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, 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'd 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 chiraz every now and again that's right and that's why we've come to the australian wine research institute in adelaide a 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're probably thinking 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 would 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 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 Tippy Hedron.

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?

Can a $10 wine seem like a $1,000 wine if you change the bottle or wear a blindfold?

We're joined by a Nobel Prize winner in physics, a flavour chemist, a sensory winner.

A Nobel Prize winning physics.

We are 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 Nobel Prize physics, a chemiman, and

we are joined by a Nobel Prize winner in physics, a flavour chemist, a sensory and consumer scientist and the composer of Australia's favourite song about wine.

And also another one about the Pope which will definitely not be aired so close to Christmas 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 latache from Burgundy.

Patricia Williamson from the Australian Wine Research Institute and I'm a censoring 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 they 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 Patricia, 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 mold 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 optimise 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.

Hi, 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 were talking about cosmology.

Why are you here now?

Well, anyone who follows me on Twitter knows my handle is Cosmic Pinot.

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 at Christmas in Australia, it's an important part of the Australian Christmas, isn't it?

I think so.

Christmas in Australia is a very different experience from a European Christmas.

Not now, though.

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 roses.

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 he be writing Rose in the Rain after this?

Yeah, maybe.

Yeah, it'll be a haiku.

Well, I think we should go inside eventually.

We'll get into this.

Oh, none of us have been attacked by a magpie.

I'm sorry.

I'm looking forward to it.

I mean, really, does this mean that we could could start growing wine in Oldham?

I think 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 Mango, 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, 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, I get it.

Chemically, are those chemicals the same as the chemicals from pencil shavings?

Or is it just a, it reminds us of that sensational flavour?

A lot of those flavours in wine are actually the same chemicals 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 a 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

for the listeners.

We have some vials here with sort of a

yeah, a substance in.

One of us will survive the whole show, but which one will it be?

Welcome to our Christmas murder mystery.

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, 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 Neal makes Pinot as well.

And we've had some great fun fake fights on Instagram about my antipathy towards Pinot.

But it says, there are Pinot I like, but I reckon the majority of Pinot 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.

Oh, no.

But I bet I love yours, Brian.

Yeah, we just didn't have the good ones.

Oh, if you don't like Sam Neal's, then we're in trouble.

Yeah.

I actually don't, actually.

No, it's two paddocks, right?

I actually do think I like Sam's.

Yeah, okay, well, then maybe we're in object.

There is a flavour.

By the way, we should have a fight.

There's something that people often describe as a farmyardy kind of thing in Pinot, don't they?

Which is a particular.

Which bit of the farmyard?

Yeah.

I was trying to steer things up.

we have another thing to try and smell here beta ianone 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

i can't either

i got a bit of that 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 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 mean 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 will really pick up very very different things?

Yeah, so beta unone is the one that we normally see in demonstrations that about half of people can't see it.

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 flavor 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 attached to a very special highly sensitive detector which is the human nose.

And we separated out all the flavor 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've got it, Brian.

Did you get it?

Yeah, I can get it.

It smells like pepper to me.

Yeah.

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.

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, 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?

Megan, we should we're talking about all these complex chemicals in wine, but could you just to start at the beginning?

Could you go through wine in order?

I mean, 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 12-15% 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 tastes 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 the.

I think we should give this a try because

you've got your nose clamps on.

So, we have nose clamps on.

Instructions, I've never used one of these before.

Oh, you've got to instruct me.

So, you're sorry?

I just, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I just, it's of those things instinctual.

It's so wide.

So if you're listening to...

So you can't

break through.

Oh, that's brilliant.

Brian, you're sound like Frank Sidebottom.

And if you're listening to Sidebottom, who's it?

It's a man with a Papier mache 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 and then tasting the wine.

I love the idea that you need to...

You can simulate a nose clamp by also holding your nostrils.

The innovation.

I just think that people can do it.

That's Joe, the first whack.

I like the fact, yeah, instinctually, you still, even though you've got a nose clap on, you still go...

I'm not getting as much scent for some reason.

And when you take it off, the explosure of flavours comes to you.

That's really interesting.

Absolutely no fruit at all.

So this is red wine, by the way.

So it's if you're at home, you can have a little 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, like, going, 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

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 as that 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.

You know, I certainly find it harder to enjoy a musical than a lot of people would.

Although a lot of people don't enjoy musical, so I have that in common.

But so I don't have a complicated relationship with it at all, and it hasn't gone very examined.

I think I like the high alcohol content in a lot of Shiraz's.

I really like the pepperiness.

I was interested to find that I could smell that peppery.

I really like peppery dry Australian Shirazas and because I've been brought up on them and my family of publicans and stuff and we 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 it 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 wanted 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 charez, 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 inexorably 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.

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, if 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 drinking or 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.

So, 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 flavour, 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 of 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, and that will make it really hard to mimic.

Which is 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, 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 whole lot of brains working on the topic.

So watch this pace.

There's been a group that shown that when people were tasting wine and they had brain scan, 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 eight six one, the white one, and then the six seven zero, and you're gonna 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, no, no, no.

That sounded a joke.

You know what?

Every show eventually there's a point where we realize we need to 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 attributes.

So, for example, we have citrus, lemon, red fruit, dark fruit, tropical fruit, apples, stone fruits, floral, herbaceous, like grasses, 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 experimental time?

Yeah, yeah.

I should not do that.

So, let's

all select and then run through what we sing.

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?

While you're tasting, I can talk about the cognitive neuroscientists.

They have been interested in uncovering the various brain areas and all the networks involved in your brain, involved with wine appreciation.

And there is a neuroenologist 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.

I'm getting mineral.

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.

The tropical fruit for me was overwhelming when I...

smelled 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 week

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 the wine that i said was a rose but is indeed red where we have the same 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 winy isn't it?

It's got a wine.

I wonder if the reason I like big musly peppery chirazas 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 you it's not your favourite.

It's a lot more 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.

Oh so we we all all three of us agree on what I've got grassiness but yeah I don't know.

It's not like that cut grassiness.

There's still I do think there's some berries in there of some description.

I didn't get those.

I will tell you, I'll get you out of your misery.

They were the same wine, just colored with antocyanins.

She 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 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 filling 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, we 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 being

trying to go,

where are those spices and things like that?

Did you get that?

My first instinct was, I'm such an idiot.

This is, it's just minerals and citrus again.

Like, I just

exactly know.

Then I overrode it.

That was exactly what happened to me.

So, you're precisely all things are actually a fear

of not appearing to be knowledgeable, which is quite an interesting thing, isn't it?

Because that is definitely

this one.

I'm trying to pin it into the options that I know.

Oh, so you had to pre-wile and 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.

Yeah.

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, 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 realising with that, to me personally, anyway, that that was, yeah, I got

all of the normal things of like, yeah, it's just not red that I like very much.

Yeah, I remember Tim, I thought, I'm such an idiot, it just smells like tropical fruit, it can't.

Yeah, yeah,

so there must be something else here.

That's what I thought, actually.

And the next week, we're going to be doing a show about male ego.

So I just thought, I'll just what was it?

What was the grapevine?

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 food.

But the whole 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 Menge was talking about, once you bottle the wine and you sell it, it's still going to keep changing.

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 that what they perceive of the taste might be something completely different but they believe they like the taste for all those reasons of it reminds me a bit about the conversation of blind listening to a million dollar musical instrument so you 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 that 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 theater theatres is the other thing like the 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 it 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 your partner's 40th and it was the best night of your life, and that tastes 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.

Because I've never gone, hang on a minute, I thought I was reading the Brothers Karamazo.

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.

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 have no idea who it is.

A 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 beat-knit 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 hemorrhage cider.

With the shots of Bailey's and blackcurrant, it looked horrible.

What was the one from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that was like having your Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster?

Pancalactic 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, which that must separate, that would separate them, wouldn't it?

You just get like off-milk and alcohol, which is a great Dr.

Philgood song.

Jim Hentaway said that learn from my mistake, never make a kidney pie martini.

Now here's a little test.

This is from Luigi.

I'm thinking it was Bucks Fizz, but I'm still making my mind up.

Now, the test there is, how well did Bucks Fizz do as a pop band in Australia for people to get their reference?

You're English, right?

Yeah, so one English.

Yeah.

No, no, you just got it anyway.

Oh, well, someone got it.

So that's so.

Anyway, we've just been doing a little scientific test on the success of Bucksfees 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 open, let it out.

It sounds recognized.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

Happy Christmas.

Thank you.

In the infinite pony cage,

in the infinite ponky cage.

Till 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 a holder, Charles Dickens.

Do you know how many children they have?

Five.

Double it.

No, ten?

It's ten.

Chuck E.

D.

Listen to our special festive episode, Christmas with Charles Dickens, available now on BBC Sounds.

Just search for You're Dead to Me.

Oh, and Happy Christmas.

See you in the new year for a new series.

Bye!

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