The Inside Story from Italian Wine Merchants

The Blank Palate Debunked

Dogma of human nature informs questions of taste

Finishing up Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate:  The Modern Denial of Human Nature last night, I couldn’t help but think about how Pinker’s rebuttal of the dogma of human nature known as The Blank Slate applies to our palates and wine.

The claim of The Blank Slate is the idea that the mind has no innate traits and that it is literally an empty tablet on which society, the environment and the individual can develop a “new” person with no historical or hereditary ties.  Steven Pinker uses 444 pages of text (footnotes not included) to debunk The Blank Slate, but to deflate The Blank Palate, all I needed was to I recall a presentation made by my wine theory mentor, Tim Hanni MW, at an Masters of Wine Seminar at Napa Valley’s Villagio several years ago.  (I’ve heard Tim’s speech a few times, and it ignites the crowd every time.)  Tim has poured years of research into understanding how our individual biology—from the number of taste buds on our tongues, to whether or not our moms had morning sickness, to whether we perceive a difference in real and artificial sugar—determines what we like in wine, as well as what we don’t.

I then thought of the oft-used phrase “an acquired taste.”  Food and wine professionals talk about “beginner” palates and whether foie gras or sardines are too edgy in flavor (or in concept), or whether mature wines with waning fruit can be fully appreciated by the food or wine novice.  For example, just last week during a tasting panel for The Sommelier Journal, Steve Olson called out a few wine educators (yours truly included) for using the terms “entry-level,” “beginner,” “uninitiated” to reference consumers and “accessible,” “approachable” and “easier to understand” to reference wines.  I think these words are valid in the context of attempting to communicate wine styles given the nebulous terminology of wine, but Steve posed the question, “Don’t people know when they like what they taste, regardless their experience in wine?”  Sure, they do, but I’d also argue that most of us can name a handful of foods we wouldn’t touch when young (one of mine was liver) that we relish today and vice versa (keep the soda away, please).

My experience as a sommelier and as a person leads me to believe that people’s tastes do change, and as tastes change, so do the foods and wines people enjoy. We may be products of our own biology, but we know that aging changes that biology. We get older, and Pop Rocks lose their zing.

So, let’s combine these various concepts.  While we can certainly acquire tastes throughout life, we do seem to have genetically wired preferences.  Mike Steinberger’s three article series in Slate Magazine elaborates on the process of discovering his tasting heredity versus his tasting reality, and it gives further credence to my suggestion that we’re more than blank palates.  Perusing the subject might help all who drink wine—regardless how deep or varied their tasting experience—better understand why they like certain wine styles, but there’s more to wine appreciation than our physical attributes, like our ability to smell and variety in experience.  After reading up on a few of these philosophies, the results begin to blur like I’ve had three glasses of high-octane red without one bite of dinner.  Nonetheless, there’s no question in my mind that The Blank Palate does not exist.  What does your experience tell you?