Circle Chair Meg Maker takes notes from a recent research paper and explores why narrative and imagery might make more of an impact in wine tasting than facts and figures.
Wine enthusiasts who want to become better tasters should abandon their keyboards and pick up their crayons. That’s the conclusion of researchers Kathryn Latour and John Deighton in their 2018 Harvard Business School Working Paper, Learning to Become a Taste Expert.
Conventional wine education takes a structured, systematic approach that relies on tasting grids and formal lexicons to help novices build foundational skills. These tools help cultivate what the researchers call “an analytic mindset,” and they get learners off to a strong start.
But once they’ve attained basic mastery, learners need different tools to make the leap to expertise. That was the authors’ theory after qualitative interviews with ten Master Sommeliers. These somms reported that they use imagery, storytelling, and other non-verbal processing to identify patterns, to arrive at what the authors call a wine’s “holistic gist.” Their expertise is not “simply a matter of more analytical processing and a more extensive vocabulary.” It’s something more like instinct.
But how does a student of wine become an “instinctual” taster? How can they acquire such holistic skills, breaking out of rule-based methods and instead following intuition?
Latour and Deighton suspected they needed different tools that helped them understand a wine more comprehensively. They cited evidence that doodling can enhance creativity, problem-solving, and memory, and theorized that students could use that tactic to make sense of what they’re tasting as a story or image rather than a collection of factual attributes.
To test their theory, they divided learners into two groups. One continued to use the tasting protocols they’d been trained on (the grid and aroma wheel). The other used crayon on paper to draw abstract shapes representing each wine. (The authors include an example drawing in their Appendix.)
The study showed that drawing helped with both retention and recall. Drawing allowed students to internalize the wine’s attributes and view them more comprehensively: “the shape drawing task resulted in enthusiasts becoming more ‘transported’ into their tasting experience which led to more accuracy in memory identification.” The exercise helped them process the experience independent of vocabulary and rules.
The researchers concluded, “holistic learning is facilitated by attending to experience as a narrative event and by using imagery.” But they also discovered that sequence matters. Learners needed to master basic skills before the holistic stage can begin.
What do these results suggest for wine communicators who have an educational focus? Specifically, how might we better reach people in that middle stage of learning? I can think of three things to try:
– Encourage people to try the drawing exercise with a wine they’re tasting. Suggest they use shape, color, and gesture to describe a wine in their own nonverbal terms.
– Use illustration in your articles to explain the shape and contour of the wine. Or simply describe the wine as a visual idea using your own words rather then standard tasting terms.
– Lean more heavily to narrative and imagery than facts and figures. Help readers understand why the wine matters and where it fits in the pantheon of wines like it.
A key takeaway of this paper is that wine tasting expertise can be “trained” to a point, but beyond that, a taster must learn their own strategies to get inside a wine, make it their own, and form their own sense of the wine’s “holistic gist.”
Latour, Kathryn A. and John A. Deighton 2018. Learning to Become a Taste Expert, Harvard Business School Working Paper 18-107. Direct download link
Photo illustration: Meg Maker