cup is a container. Theoretically, it should not affect the taste of the beverage in it. However, what people usually call “taste” is not the five basic tastes of sour, sweet, bitter, salty and fresh in the scientific sense, but the synthesis of the brain’s sensory experience of appearance, color, taste, smell and taste. In the process of comprehensive experience, the influence of psychological factors can not be ignored. For example, when drinking wine, the ancients said “grape wine luminous cup”, which is roughly a combination of wine and luminous cup, which will give people a better experience. In tea tasting, the function of tea set is put to a higher level. The so-called “instrument is the father of tea” – the importance of tea set is juxtaposed with water as the “mother of tea”.
exquisite cups are naturally pleasing to the eye and bring pleasant visual and psychological experience. So does the cup have an impact on the perception of taste?
in France, the standard wine cup requires that the height of the cup body is twice the diameter, and this French standard is also consistent with the international standard. But is this shape really the most reasonable? French standards and international standards are mainly based on tradition and custom, and there is no scientific basis. There is a university in Germany called Neustadt. Their brewing department is very famous. German wine lovers generally use wider cups than French and international standard cups. Wine professors at this university studied the influence of cup shape and size on aroma perception.
of course, the most components in wine are water and alcohol, but those “trace components” determine the flavor and taste of wine. The types and amounts of various trace components in different wines are different. The aroma smelled during wine tasting is determined by the volatile molecules. How much a substance can volatilize is mainly determined by temperature and its content in wine, and the area in contact with air also has a certain influence. For example, white wine is characterized by many and ester molecules. When enough ester molecules volatilize into the air and are sucked into the nose, people smell the fragrance of fruit. If there are many alcohol molecules at the same time, it will interfere with the aroma of these ester molecules. The volatilization of ester molecules is not affected by temperature – that is, they volatilize quickly at low temperature. The volatilization of alcohol molecules slows down with the decrease of temperature. Therefore, white wine is suitable for drinking at low temperature – alcohol molecules volatilize less, while ester molecules can volatilize fully, which is convenient to experience the fruit fragrance of white wine. And it is suitable to use a cup with small capacity and high cup foot. In this way, when holding the cup, the temperature of the hand can not be transmitted to the cup body to increase the wine temperature, and the small capacity can also avoid the temperature rise caused by not drinking for a long time.
red wine is another case. There are not so many ester molecules, and the flavor is mainly determined by alcohol molecules and volatile polyphenols. Both will volatilize at higher temperature, so red wine doesn’t care about the increase of temperature. Higher temperature is conducive to the release of these flavor molecules. In addition to volatile polyphenols, there are many non-volatile polyphenols in wine. Polyphenols often have a bitter taste, which can be alleviated by their oxidation in the air. Therefore, using a cup with large capacity but small mouth is convenient to shake the wine in it, which is not only conducive to the volatilization of flavor substances, but also conducive to the full contact of polyphenols in the wine with the air, which can be oxidized to reduce the bitter taste.
in fact, the volatilization of flavor substances in wine is much more complex than this. For example, in a cup, the volatilized molecules diffuse from bottom to top, and different kinds of molecules have different diffusion rates. In other words, the type and number of aroma molecules may be different at different heights above the wine in the cup. After sniffing once, how long does it take for the cup to emit enough to smell the same aroma again? These questions seem boring, and scholars at Neustadt university are really interested. They used gas chromatography to detect molecules at different temperatures, poured into the cup at different times and at different heights above the wine in the cup, and identified more than 40 compounds.
in order to explore the “taste of the cup”, Neustadt scholars trained a group of people to identify ten representative volatile molecules in wine and evaluate the intensity, such as “butter flavor”, “flower flavor”, etc. Then, ten cups with different body, height and edge were selected and poured into the same wine to let them smell the intensity of different aroma substances.
these people can really smell the smell difference caused by different cups. In different cups, the intensity of various volatile components smelled by the same wine is different. Increasing the height of the cup body or the diameter of the cup mouth will increase the smell. What subverts the traditional perception is that the slender cup suitable for white wine is also better than the cup with large body and small mouth, which is generally considered “suitable for red wine”.
as a scientific exploration, these studies are very interesting. However, these results may not have much guiding significance for most people – most people’s perception of wine flavor may be far from experiencing this subtle difference. So, don’t worry about what cup to use. Just drink happily.