The Emotions of Wine

Emotions are the "center of gravity" of our existence. They are the basis of our daily activities, they influence and direct decisions and behaviors towards certain experiences, which are themselves emotional.

But what are Emotions and how are they related to Wine? What is the difference between emotion and feeling?

Antonio Damasio (2003) defines Emotions as psycho-somatic perceptions of the state of our body modified by interactions with external stimuli, detected by our senses. The mental level recording of Emotions produces neural maps which, integrated with data from other areas of the brain (eg: memories of previous experiences) create the mental phenomena that we call Feelings.

So Experiences generate Emotions and their neural reworking creates Feelings.

Starting from this precise definition provided by Antonio Damasio, it is easy to understand why Food and Wine are able to activate physiological, neural, somatic and psychic responses at the basis of our Emotions (King and Meiselman, 2010) and why the hedonic component in consumption plays a fundamental role.

In a nutshell, the relevance of eating and drinking for human beings positions correlated daily experiences (visual, olfactory and gustatory) at the basis of our emotional state and this explains the very close positive correlation between Food/Wine and Emotions.

In tasting, the perceptual-sensory experience (sight smell taste) results in a combo of emotions. People are not used to describe tastes and taste experiences through "emotional feeling" to describe the experience as hedonic, they stop at the sensory experience. Equally few people (wine experts) are able to judge the product from a technical/organoleptic perspective, that is, to reconvert the emotional state into physical/organoleptic parameters of the product.

However, we all feel and perceive emotions that, although difficult to describe, place us (experts and non-experts) on the same level in approaching the wine product.

Operating on this level, through "emotional feeling" we are thus potentially able to define the organoleptic/emotional profile of the wine, which comes closest to describe the product, in the unit of time.

If everything is clear up to now, some questions arise spontaneously: What and how many are the emotions? Are we able to describe them and connect them to wine tasting?