Martin Westwell

The Science of Wine Tasting

I am organising a public event in Oxford entitled "The Science of Wine Tasting". I thought that people would be really keen but when I mentioned it to a colleague she said, "Well, that'll take all then fun out of it" as if discovering why wine tastes as it does would somehow diminish the pleasure rather than add to it.

Richard Feynman, a Nobel prize winning physicist once recounted

a story about an artist friend of his. "He'll hold up a flower

and say, 'look how beautiful it is,' and I'll agree, I think. And

he says, 'you see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is,

but you as a scientist, oh, take this all apart and it becomes a

dull thing.' And I think he's kind of nutty."

Of course, both Feynman's artistic friend and my (scientific)

colleague are nutty! Everyone can enjoy a glass of wine or the beauty

of a flower, but if you understand some of the science behind it,

layers upon layers of beauty are revealed.

The bucket orchid Coryanthes, lures male bees into its slippery

bucket that has just one way out. There is a narrow tunnel that

the bee must squeeze through to escape. While the bee struggles

to get out, the orchid secretly glues two pods of pollen onto the

bee's back. The next time a bee falls into a Coryanthes' bucket,

the pods are knocked off and the plant is pollinated. This is amazing

enough, but think of the mechanisms that have evolved in the orchid

to produce such an amazing chain of events.

Darwin was fascinated by the unusual lengths to which orchids go

for pollination and in 1877 wrote a book "The Various Contrivances

by which Orchids are Fertilised by Insects". In it, he described

an orchid from Madagascar that had a narrow, foot-long nectar well

that kept the sweet liquid far out of reach of all known butterflies

and moths. From observing the beauty of the flower and considering

its structure, Darwin predict the existence of a specialized moth

with a foot-long proboscis that, like a straw, could reach the inaccessible

nectar. After Darwin's death, scientists discovered a moth with

an incredibly long proboscis that drank only from this flower, and

named it the "Predicta moth" in honor of Darwin's educated

guess.

As Feynman said about appreciating the science as well the aesthetics

of the world around us "It only adds. I don't understand how

it subtracts." I'll be adding it to my wine drinking from now

on!

- August 2004