Do Women make better wine critics than men?

 

Research has indicated that about 35% of women and only 15% of men are “supertasters”.

 

Firstly what is a supertaster?

 

A ’supertaster’ is the term given to someone who is particularly sensitive to different tastes, especially bitter tastes.

If you are a supertaster you’ll have a higher number of taste buds (papillae) on your tongue.

This allows you to easily distinguish between different tastes. Foods may taste more intense to you, and you may be particularly sensitive to the bitter tastes in food and drinks such as coffee, cabbage and grapefruit.

This sensitivity to bitter tastes is not just down to a high number of taste buds.

Scientists have discovered that some people carry a form of the taste bud gene that makes their taste buds more sensitive to the bitter taste of the substance 6-n-propylthiouracil (also known as PROP).

If you carry this gene, and you have a high number of taste buds on your tongue, you are likely to be a supertaster.

 

Ok, you’re a woman and a supertaster, are you a better wine critc?

 

Keep in mind that wine criticism, more than other forms, relies almost entirely on perceived — and largely unprovable — credibility. What credentials exist are either highly technical, such as winemaking, or patently self-promoting, such as the transparently trumped-up Master of Wine designation. (The name alone is a giveaway to its priestly pretensions.)

This sounds good, doesn’t it? Being a supertaster would seem an incontestable boon, like an acrobat being double-jointed. Not so fast. The problem with having a lot of taste buds is that taste sensations are intensified to the point of pain.

Supertasters, Professor Bartoshuk reports, typically dislike spicy foods, which irritate, as do fatty foods, which literally weigh upon the touch sensors in the fungiform papillae. (Supertasters also have more sensitive touch receptors in their tongues.)

 

Conclusion.

 

 

Because they have more taste buds, supertasters find certain foods bitter that normal tasters do not and thus negatively evaluate them. This might indicate that supertasters actually make poor candidates for being wine critics with respect to taste.

The paradox could be resolved by concluding that supertasters do, in fact, make good candidates for being wine critics provided that they obtain a special sort of gustatory education.

 

This resolution depends upon the separation of personal and critical taste and the assumption that critical taste is educable.

 

Woman supertasters possess delicacy of taste, but that is not sufficient to enable them to become ideal  wine critics. In order to become ideal wine critics they need to undertake a gustatory education teaching them to correctly use fourth-level Taste language. With such an education, the supertaster would fulfill the necessary and sufficient conditions for being an ideal critic.

 

So maybe the question should be, can you teach woman about wine?