Tim Hanni’s revolutionary ideas make it OK, once and for all, to drink the wine you like.
I have big feet. Size 10. Because of this, it’s sometimes hard to find shoes I like. It’s a matter of style and comfort I’ve been aware of since ninth grade.
I’m also a hypersensitive taster. Because of this, it’s sometimes hard to find wines I like. It’s a matter of style and comfort I’ve only recently discovered.
What’s a hypersensitive taster? It’s one of four taste sensitivity categories—hypersensitive, sensitive, sweet and tolerant—that consumers fall into. “It’s all about how human beings interpret the universe through the sensory stimulus that we receive,” explains Tim Hanni, MW, COPIA’s (ahem) director of applied psycho sensory studies and CEO of Napa Seasoning Company. (Note to self: Never let scientists with a sense of humor invent their own job title.) Put more simply, Hanni has spent decades studying the different ways we perceive, process and interpret taste and flavor information, among other things—and, it turns out, knowing what type of taster you are can take much of the mystery out of trying and buying wines you’ll enjoy.
The road to discovery
It all started, remembers the former chef, “when I was studying for the master of wine [Hanni was one of the first two people in the United States to pass the test, in 1990]. I signed up for a writing course, because [the test is] all in essay, and I have a terrible time getting thoughts on paper. But I signed up for the wrong class. I thought it was a general writing seminar for communications people, but it turned out to be for electronic engineers.
“I went anyway, and it was sort of my seminal moment. They really emphasized the rigor behind knowing the words you’re using, defining them and making sure that, if you’re working with groups or preparing a product for market, everybody agrees on what the words mean.
“I started to apply this discipline to questions like: What does ‘taste’ mean versus ‘flavor’?’ and ‘How come if you can’t smell, then you can’t taste—since taste and smell aren’t the same?’ I also wanted to define seemingly simple things like ‘aroma’ and ‘bouquet.’
“So my research had to do with: What do these words really mean? And how come, when we’re tasting the same exact thing, we’re perceiving it so completely differently? I started to look at the whole wine and food pairing thing—all the contradictions, all the confusion, all the differing opinions and points of view. I wanted to know why there’s all this dysfunction and dissonance in the wine industry.”
Hanni sought out collaborators in the scientific community from outside the wine industry, because, as he explains, “I became increasingly aware that, if you’re already emotionally into the value system of the wine industry, it’s very difficult to separate yourself psychologically [from it].”
Hanni learned from studies conducted by Yale University’s Dr. Linda Bartoshuk, an expert in the genetic variation in taste, and collaboration with Dr. Charles Wysocki at Monell Senses Center, UC Davis’ Dr. Michael O’Mahony, a professor and sensory scientist, and Dr. Rie Ishii, a sensory research associate.
“There’s an inner circle of scientists and researchers whom I have the honor of working with,” says Hanni. “I’m an idiot. I don’t know what I’m doing. I just know there’s something cool about this that goes a very long way to explain why there are such differing points of view about wine quality and wine-and-food matching.”
Bartoshuk’s research, in particular, became an important reference point for Hanni, which he’s since expanded upon. In the 1990s, she coined the term “supertaster,” in reference to individuals who have both a high number of tastebuds and heightened sensitivity to certain flavor aspects (particularly bitterness).
“Dr. Bartoshuk has done a study about the correlation between the number of tastebuds someone has and their ability to discern certain flavor compounds at different intensities,” he says. “From there, I began to incorporate other elements and, most important, factor the psychological component into the equation for why we like what we like.
“I started with blanket, declarative statements like: Men have different tastes than women; People should trust their own palate; We all have different tastes; and throwaway statements like, As our tastes or palates mature….
“It’s always something about our palates, but what?”
Open mouth, insert foot
“There can be a huge difference in the number of tastebuds from person to person,” says Hanni. “I’ve known of research subjects with as few as 11 tastebuds per square centimeter and with as many as 1,100 tastebuds per square centimeter.”
Obviously, discrepancies this wide are bound to create differences of opinion. Hanni confirms, “There’s a significant difference in taste discrimination between individuals—the ability to taste something or not, the intensity with which different things are sensed or not.”
So who’s right? A “tolerant” taster like my husband, who seeks out bold, hot, intense wines; or hypersensitive me, who prefers delicacy, balance and finesse? According to Hanni, we both are. Ready for his favorite analogy? “You have a certain size foot,” he says. “It’s not good or bad, it’s just what size your foot is. Imagine trying to sell or buy shoes without knowing this simple anatomical fact—it would quickly become a frustrating and intimidating experience. It’s the same with your palate: It simply is what it is.” And, as a consumer, it’s always better to know what you’re looking for.
Of course, it’s not quite that simple, because no matter how much you’d like to, you can’t go barefoot every day. “You might wear shoes that hurt if the payoff is worth it,” Hanni continues, “and sometimes we wear uncomfortable shoes if it’s appropriate for a certain occasion. But that fact is, you’re still a size 8. Your foot hasn’t changed, just your willingness to temporarily sacrifice comfort for something greater.”
What actually changes, clarifies Hanni, is us. “One of the things we tend to think about wine is that there’s a natural progression to drier, stronger tasting wines,” he explains. “There’s some sort of aspiration that, ‘Sweet wines are “starter wines,” and when you grow up…’
“But your foot doesn’t ‘grow up,’ and your palate—that is, your ‘taste sensitivity’—doesn’t change very much either. What’s changing is psychological. The big breakthrough for us has been understanding the way that your personal memories contribute to your taste preferences.”
So, for example, if you spent your honeymoon in Italy and came to love the local wines as much for their place in your memories as for their flavors, then it won’t matter what wines you typically prefer. You will, when appropriate, seek out and appreciate those Italian varietals as a way to reconnect with the trip. And, in the words of Stuart Smalley, “That’s OK.”
Just answer the questions
So how do you know what type of taster you are? Ask—or, more accurately, tell—the Budometer.
It may sound like an outlandish Austin Powers prop, but the budometer is actually a short online survey (www.budometer.com), designed by Hanni, that can identify a person’s palate proclivities based on simple, multiple-choice questions. Once you’ve completed the test, you’ll be given the results for which sensitivity group you belong in and then directed to an overview category with suggestions of wine varietals and winegrowing regions that match your stated preferences.
Why should you want to know? Hanni explains: “Do you remember when people used to get their colors done for fashion? Based on your hair and eye color, and your skin tone, you were classified as a season, which corresponded to certain colors that would best flatter you. It was effective and it solved a real problem.
“Now imagine getting your buds done and discovering you’re a sweet taster, or whatever. It’s amazing the shift in people when they’re given some guideline that will help them ask for something they’re going to like. It puts the consumer back in control.”
And that’s the key, he says. “The wine industry is giving away millions of wine consumption opportunities everyday because of our own ignorance,” he says. “Research has shown that, if you’re an overwhelmed wine buyer, you’re only spending 11 percent of the dollars—but you’re 23 percent of the market.
“I can guarantee that the overwhelmed group maps to hypersensitive and sweet tasters, and we’ve overwhelmed them by providing useless information—and, even worse, misinformation—that, for example, when you have this food, you can’t have [a wine] you like. When you go to this steakhouse, ‘Sorry, we took all the wines you like off the list.’
“If you start to think about how the wine industry operates, it literally becomes insanity: ‘I’m sorry, we took anything larger than a size 7 off the shelves, because your foot should be smaller.’ That’s what we’re doing!”
With budometer results in hand, says Hanni, confused consumers will be more able to navigate the overwhelming choices of supermarket wine aisles and restaurant wine lists. “My partner, John Stallcup, and I are actually the holder of one of the largest wine consumer studies ever conducted—7,000 respondents—and one of the things we put into those questions were certain markers for bitter sensitivity [which strongly corresponds to sweet and hypersensitive tasters]. The results clearly show the more sensitive you are as a taster, the less wine you consume. What we’re doing, in effect, is looking at any and all information so that everybody can find a community where they fit and significantly expand enjoyment and consumption.”
Putting it to the test
In March, Hanni was part of a team that organized and hosted the Lodi International Wine Awards, a “collaboration between wine experts and sensory scientists” reads the website.
“It was pretty radical from a number of standpoints,” says Hanni. “We tested and photographed all the judges’ tongues, then we grouped them into three categories [hypersensitive, sensitive and tolerant], and every panel had equal representation. We were able to track the results both collectively and by sensitivity. It was fascinating to see how much dissention there really was. There were only four wines out of 529 that all three tasting categories agreed on for gold medals.”
In addition to balancing the panels for palate type, the Lodi awards also debuted a new judging methodology, designed to eliminate the pre-decision discussions and debates that can sometimes sway votes. “Very typically in wine judging, dominant personalities will persevere,” says Hanni.
In Lodi, though, each judge had his or her own table with wine glasses. They weren’t allowed to take notes or write anything down; they weren’t allowed to “score” the wines, debate or argue (to reduce the mental fatigue associated with describing and scoring wines in the traditional manner). They were allowed to take as long as they needed, with whatever their method was, and arrange the wine in order of preference from first to last along “rank-rating strips.” Then a clerk recorded the placings. It was completely statistical.
“In the modern world, there really aren’t bad wines like there used to be,” says Hanni. “There are different wines, and typicity and delicacy tend to get pushed aside by sheer power and aggressiveness, which are preference traits of the tolerant taster.
“In reference to sweet wines, I found it interesting that the hypersensitive judges didn’t give high ratings to the very aromatic wines,” he continues. “These were wines you might think would be highly rated by people who like sweet wines—but it seems to be more like walking into a room full of lilies and being overwhelmed by them.
“And as the sweet wines became fortified, the preference by the hypersensitive tasters also fell off but increased for tolerant tasters. Alcohol has sensations of hot and burning to a hypersensitive person but of sweet to tolerant tasters, which explains why there are such arguments about things like high alcohol in wines.
“We also learned through these judgings that the hypersensitive judges are the ones who pick out the flaws in the wines. About 90 percent of all the flaws were flagged by hypersensitive tasters.” (The remaining 10 percent were flagged by sensitive tasters.)
An outside opinion
Traci Dutton is sommelier at the Culinary Institute of America in St. Helena. She’s responsible for overseeing the wine list and training waitstaff for the CIA’s Wine Spectator Greystone Restaurant; she also contributes to wine-related education for culinary students and conducts educational classes and seminars for clients and the public. Dutton is also a respected judge who served on a tasting panel at the Lodi competition.
As part of her participation, she had her tastebuds analyzed and was declared a hypersensitive taster. “It wasn’t really a surprise, but it definitely makes a difference to me to have it confirmed,” she says.
“When Tim confirmed my hypersensitivity, I admit, I panicked a little. I thought no one would take me seriously anymore, given where I live and what my job is. I mean, I taste a lot of wine—and I live in the Napa Valley, for God’s sake—if I can’t appreciate full-bodied Cabernets, I should just move!” she laughs. “But over the years, I’ve developed an understanding and appreciation for many wines that are outside my taster type.”
More important than her own preferences, though, is the dialog her newfound understanding of palate sensitivity has opened with her waitstaff, students and customers. “It’s freed me to tell people they’re not unsophisticated wine drinkers, they’re just drinking the wrong types of wines,” she says, before echoing Hanni’s concerns: “Consumers are being mistreated by an industry that assumes there’s a ‘right’ choice.”
Who’s to blame?
“I wish I could figure out how it all started that ‘sweet’ means ‘low class,’” Dutton continues, “because that’s definitely the perception: Somehow, sweet wine denotes a lack of sophistication.
“I remember when I was younger and living in New York City, my boyfriend and I would save up for an occasional dinner at a really nice restaurant,” says Dutton. “This goes back to the willingness to wear certain shoes for certain social occasions: I was learning about wine back then, and so part of our budget was knowing how much we would spend on a bottle of wine for the evening. And I remember thinking, even then, that, ‘I’m not going to spend $100 on a white wine.’” A decision in near complete opposition to her own palate.
But, says Hanni, “One of the most flawed assumptions we make about American and Asian consumers concerns their preference for sweet wines. For tens of thousands of years and up to relatively recent times, if you had wine in France or Italy, it was sweet.
“The French would celebrate when the wine was sweet. And as the wine has become dry over the past 40 to 50 years, wine consumption in France has dropped 50 percent. We hear over and over again in wine circles that we should be like the French or the Italians, who consume wine this certain way. But in both countries, if you look back over the last 45 years, wine consumption in both countries has dropped 50 percent. So as wine has become drier, it’s no longer an everyday beverage.
“We jump to all these wrong conclusions, and it’s always about making the consumer stupid for what they do. And yet all the rationales are highly flawed. In France and Italy, when Champagne started to go dry, they invented the Champagne cocktail, which is Champagne with a cube of sugar.
“I can disprove every aspect of wine and food matching,” he continues. “Let’s take a classic example: Champagne with oysters. They say the wine cuts through the acidity and blah blah blah…. But when that actually came about as a thing to do, the average sweetness in Champagnes was 6 percent sugar—twice as sweet as White Zinfandel is today.
“Imagine an industry running on completely false assumptions of what the history of its product is—that’s the wine industry today. I actually did an assessment for one of the largest restaurant chains in the United States, which sells more wine than any other restaurant chain does,” he notes. “They found that, the more wine training they gave their waitstaff, the less wine they sold. It was a direct correlation—and, it turned out, the wine education was a source of fear and intimidation that had shut the staff down at the table.”
Free your mind
Despite his passion for self-determined wine choices, Hanni’s also quick to say, “If people feel they have the answer to wine and food pairing, they should be respected,” he says, “because it’s fun to go through your brain and pick out matches. This isn’t necessarily a call to stop doing that. If you think there’s something specific to do—conventional wisdom or something you personally subscribe to in wine and food—then just do that.
“But if you’re like most people, you’ve either become a wine-and-food anarchist: ‘I’ll just have whatever I want. Leave me alone,’ or you’re looking for a different way but conventional wisdom is just too confusing.
“I just think everyone in the industry should learn how to recognize the markers of sensitivity and tolerance—and respect them. It’s really such a simple solution.”
And now that we can test palates and sort critics, wine writers and winemakers by their taster type, it creates the opportunity to really sort through all the diverse opinions and try to make sense of why people choose the wines they choose.
“We have Robert Parker, but what about the voice for hypersensitive tasters?” asks Hanni. “Two of my favorite sensitive writers are Jancis Robinson and Andrea Immer; they represent a great alternate perspective to the 100-point system. And that’s where the real work and opportunity is: getting away from the assumption that wine has to be dry to be good, or that it needs to go with a certain food to be good:
‘Welcome to my shoe store. This is a high-scoring shoe, regardless of whether it fits your foot or not. Just shove it on there and shut up. …Or come back when your foot matures and becomes more sophisticated.’
“A lot of us would be going barefoot.”
A plea for peace
“If anything can come of all this, I’d like it to be that, when people talk to each other about wine, they’re less opinionated and kinder,” says Dutton. “People can be really mean when they don’t like a wine; it somehow becomes the wine’s fault.
“There’s so much good wine out there, but there are also a lot of people who tear it apart out of ignorance or meanness—or because they think they’re supposed to. We all need to be more open-minded. …Then again, I guess we could say that about a lot of things. Life is hard enough, and wine is supposed to make us happy. Why be mean about wine?”
So from here on out, we’ll have no more of snooty waitstaff, retailers, critics or friends telling us what wine to drink with what food. We’ll all have the strength of character to drink what we truly enjoy…maybe even wiggle our toes in delight.
But even when that day comes, it still won’t be OK to wear sandals with black socks.
