Taking wine tasting to a new level - measuring brain reactions with functional magnetic imaging

Wine tasting has now gone to a whole new level as scientists use brain imagining to try and work out what styles people really do like. And some initial research suggests that despite a trend towards increased alcohol content it is wines with a lower alcohol level that consumers prefer.
Spanish researchers from the Basque Centre of Cognition, Brain and Language in Donostia-San Sebastian this month published in the on-line journal PLOS ONE their paper What Can the Brain Teach Us about Winemaking? An fMRI Study of Alcohol Level Preferences. It notes how, over the last few decades, wine makers have been producing wines with a higher alcohol content, assuming that they are more appreciated by consumers. To test this hypothesis, they used functional magnetic imaging to compare reactions of human subjects to different types of wine, focusing on brain regions critical for flavor processing and food reward. Participants were presented with carefully matched pairs of high- and low-alcohol content red wines, without informing them of any of the wine attributes.

As the abstract of the article puts it, they concluded:

Contrary to expectation, significantly greater activation was found for low-alcohol than for high-alcohol content wines in brain regions that are sensitive to taste intensity, including the insula as well as the cerebellum. Wines were closely matched for all physical attributes except for alcohol content, thus we interpret the preferential response to the low-alcohol content wines as arising from top-down modulation due to the low alcohol content wines inducing greater attentional exploration of aromas and flavours. The findings raise intriguing possibilities for objectively testing hypotheses regarding methods of producing a highly complex product such as wine.