A large sample study on the influence of the multisensory environment on the wine drinking experience

By Charles Spence, Carlos Velasco, Klemens Knoeferle. Flavour, 2014

148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

BackgroundWe report on what may well be the world’s largest multisensory tasting experiment. Over a period of 4 days in May 2014, almost 3,000 people sampled a glass of red wine in a room in which the colour of the lighting and/or the music was changed repeatedly. The participants rated the wine, presented in a black tasting glass, on taste, intensity and liking scales while standing in each of four different environments over a period of 7 to 8 minutes. During the first 2 days (Experiment 1), the participants rated the wine while exposed to white lighting, red lighting, green lighting with music designed to enhance sourness and finally under red lighting paired with music associated with sweetness. During the latter 2 days of the event (Experiment 2), the same wine was rated under white lighting, green lighting, red lighting with sweet music and finally green lighting with sour music.ResultsIn Experiment 1, the wine was perceived as fresher and less intense under green lighting and sour music, as compared to any of the other three environments. On average, the participants liked the wine most under red lighting while listening to sweet music. A similar pattern of results was reported in Experiment 2.ConclusionsThese results demonstrate that the environment can exert a significant influence on the perception of wine (at least in a random sample of social drinkers). We outline a number of possible explanations for how the sensory properties of the environment might influence the perception of wine. Finally, we consider some of the implications of these results for the wine drinking experience.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Sensory Systems, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eb93e270cdb418a69b9b57023dba21fd99016bdb

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Sensory Systems

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Citations in the corpus

The influence of soundscapes on the perception and evaluation of beers (2016, background): “Furthermore, numerous studies have been conducted showing that sound can influence people’s evaluation of the taste/flavor of alcoholic beverages such as wine (North, 2012; Spence et al., 2014; Wang & Spence, 2015a), vodka (Wang & Spence, 2015b), and whisky (Velasco, Jones, King, & Spence 2013).”
On the psychological impact of food colour (2015, background): “of the product packaging [160] through to the colour of the lighting [161,162] in which food and drink are consumed on the multisensory flavour experience [1].”