How To Tell If You Are A Wine Supertaster
Supertaster. Super. Taster. It just sounds good. Blue tights and red cape good. Who wouldn’t want to be a wine supertaster?
According to Yale PhD Linda Bartoshuk, about 25% of the population are supertasters (15% male, 35% female), and those that are owe their supertaster status to a genetic lottery. We’re either born with a tongue crammed with fungiform papillae, mushroom looking blisters which house bunches of taste buds on our tongues, or we’re not. A similar amount, about a quarter of the population, are non-tasters. The rest are normal tasters.
Super tasters usually show their superness by being extremely sensitive to bitter and spicy flavors. Non tasters will show no aversion at all to bitter tastes that super tasters will gag on, and normal tasters fall somewhere in between.
How this applies to wine specifically is anyone’s guess. Does being a genetically endowed super taster make you a better wine consumer? Does being one make you a better or more reliable wine reviewer? Perhaps, but some argue that being a super taster can actually harm your ability to appreciate wine.
Whatever the case, if you’re wondering if you were one of those born a supertaster or not, you can find out (probably) by following these simple steps.
1. Take a cotton ball dipped in blue food coloring and and spread it all over the tip of your tongue. Swirl the coloring around and then spit and rinse. Dry your tongue as best you can.
2. Take a peice of paper with a .5 inch hole punched in it and press it up against the tip of your tongue.
3. Grab a camera with a macro feature and have someone take a close up shot of the exposed portion of your tongue. Most literature on this technique instructs to use a magnifying glass to count the fungiform papillae while you hold your mouth open, but that seems a little weird to me. I recommend a photo.
4. Count up the number of large, round, pinkish blister looking things that you can see in the sample space provided by the .5 inch hole.
If you count fewer than 15 papillae you are a non-taster. If you have from 15 to 35 papillae you are a normal taster. If you have over 35 papillae, go get your tongue a cape, because you’re a super taster baby!
If you have trouble determining what to count as a fungiform papillae, you’re not alone. In the picture to the left of my tongue I’ve highlighted what I think are qualifying papillae and those smaller ones which may or may not be. Good luck!
Links:
Jamie Goode’s excellent article on the subject
A Skeptic: Do Taste Buds Make the Critic?
Yale Medicine: An Education in Taste
6 Comments → “How To Tell If You Are A Wine Supertaster”
Trackbacks For This Post
-
-
6 years ago
[...] Pinotblogger: the Capozzi Winery blog » How To Tell If You Are A Wine Supertaster (tags: wine biology) [...]
Oh man, Josh, that’s got to be one of the most bizarre wine blog photos ever. It’s hilarious out of context…and it also means that I’ve “seen” your tongue up close…closer than I ever expected to, anyway.
I want to try this now, but I’m afraid to. I remember failing a literal litmus test in junior high (I didn’t taste the paper back then). Then again, I’m pretty sure I’m not a non-taster, so perhaps I should take the Fungiform Papillae challenge.
lol. It does look pretty freaky.
I dare you to take the fungiform papillae challenge!
I propose that all wine blogger should, and that we should have a big link fest talking all about who is a supertaster and who isn’t.
Who need wine blogging wednesday when we have pictures of random stranger’s papillae to look at?
Bear – it really hurts my feelings when you don’t give me props for my super photography skills. I really put my all into photographing your fungiform papillae, and you don’t even so much as mention my hard work and dedication to capturing your blue tongue before the paper dissolved. I think that being a super taster is going to your head.
Finally catching up with back blog reading… nice post, and, uh, picture. I was looking at the other illustration… is a 0.5 inch hole correct? That illustration says to use a “paper hole reinforcer”. The outside diameter of a reinforcer is certainly around 0.5 inch, but the hole itself is maybe 1/4 of an inch or so.
Found a link: http://www.shoplet.com/office/db/UNV37102.html
Hope I’m not bursting any papillae, er, bubbles… – j
El Jefe,
The differences in size of the various holes recommended is accounted for by the number of papillae that must be present.
For a .5 inch hole you need over 35 papillae for supertaster status. For a .4 I think the number is 25. I used the convention recommended by Jamie Goode in The Science of Wine for the HowTo. The confusing graphic was there mainly as a visual aid.
Good catch though, and thanks for giving me a chance to clarify.