When’s the last time you exercised your noggin?

Drink Wine and Exercise Your Brain: Say What?

When’s the last time you exercised your noggin? New research uncovered that tasting wine is more complex and more fully engages your brain’s gray matter than a complicated math problem, according to Dr. Gordon Shepherd from the Yale School of Medicine.

Taste is not only determined by one’s taste buds, but also engages the taster’s sense of smell. Sniffing and analyzing a wine before drinking requires extreme control over one of the largest muscles in the body: the brain.

When someone takes a sip of wine and swirls it around their mouth, the tongue’s thousands of taste and odor receptors are immediately put to work. Although the real work out is for the brain. Dr. Shepherd, after five years of study on how the human brain processes flavor, claims the brain controls the taste of any wine. Since every person’s brain is different, their perception of the taste of a wine also differs. Ultimately, wine tasting is a more subjective experience than originally understood.

The brain uses previous experiences, memories, emotions, the environment, knowledge, saliva composition, age, gender and many other factors that all play a role in determining how a drinker experiences a wine.

For example, when I take a sip of merlot, I might be reminded of a good night out with friends, which will positively affect the wine’s taste when deciding whether I like it or not. I’m more likely to enjoy the taste over a wine that reminds me of a bad night or that I’ve heard my friends complain about in the past.

Just as Dr. Shepherd states in his new book, Neuroenology: How The Brain Creates The Taste of Wine: “The taste is not in the wine; the taste is created by the brain of the wine taster.”

Get your friends together and share your love of wine – who knows, it could be contagious! Make sure to check out Direct Cellars for all your wine needs. They select premium wines from around the world that are delivered to your doorstep each month below retail price. PLUS, they include tasting notes detailing the who, how and where each wine was crafted.