The Odor of Colors: Can Wine Experts and Novices

10 11 Abstract Recently, several papers have investigated color12 induced olfactory biases in wine tasting. In particular, 13 Morrot et al. (Brain and Language, 79, 309–320, 2001) 14 reported that visual information mostly drove wine descrip15 tion and that odor information was relatively unimportant in 16 wine tasting. The present paper aims to study the 17 relationship between the color of wine and its odor through 18 a different approach. We hypothesize that people have 19 stable mental representations of the aroma of the three wine 20 color categories (red, white, and rosé) and that visual 21 information is not a necessary clue to correctly categorize 22 wines by color. In order to explore this issue, we adopted 23 two complementary approaches. In the first one, we 24 presented 18 wines (six reds, six whites, and six rosés) in 25 dark glasses to our participants who were asked to smell the 26 wines and categorize them into three categories: “red 27 wine,” “white wine,” or “rosé wine.” Because we expected 28 categorization performance to be affected by participants’ 29 expertise, we used two groups of participants corresponding 30 to wine experts and wine novices. The second approach 31 was designed in order to verify whether the most salient 32 perceptual differences among samples were correlated with 33 the output of the ternary sorting task. Using the same 18 34 wines, we asked a third panel composed of trained 35 assessors to perform a wine description, a free sorting task 36 based on wines’ odor similarity, and finally, the same 37 ternary sorting task carried out by experts and novices. We 38 found that experts and novices were able to correctly 39 identify red and white wines but not rosé wines. Contrary to 40 our expectations, experts and novices performed at the 41 same level. Trained panelists also categorized accurately 42 white wines and red wines but not rosé wines. From a more 43 perceptual point of view, the free sorting task yielded 44 virtually the same result. Finally, in terms of wine 45 description, again, a clear segmentation was obtained 46 between white and red wines. White wines were described 47 by yellow or orange odorant sources, while the red wines 48 were described by dark odorant sources. In the light of our 49 results, cognitive mechanisms potentially involved in the 50 organization of sensory knowledge and wine categorization 51 are also discussed.