Is wine an emotional object? Measurements of the subjective and automatic components of emotions in a wine-tasting situation

Abstract

Wine is often described with emotional terms, such as surprising, disappointing, or pleasant. However, very little has been done to understand the role of emotions in wine tasting and characterise this link between emotions and wine. Many studies have looked at the extrinsic factors that can improve the emotional experience of tasters when discovering a wine, but few have been carried out on the emotional impact of the organoleptic characteristics of wines. The present study aims to determine if the automatic component of emotion has a measurable output (motor and physiological) when tasting wine. If so, does wine tasting induce a concomitant activation of the different components of emotion, such as subjective feelings or physiological and motor responses?Sixty-five connoisseurs tasted seven different red Bordeaux wines with different sensory properties and quality levels pre-defined by wine experts. Emotions were measured using subjective (subjective feelings measurement using self-declarative questionnaires) and automatic (physiological measurements such as skin conductance and heart rate, or motor measurements through facial expressions) methods. The results showed that there was a measurable physiological and motor emotional output in wine tasting. The results also highlighted that changes in the autonomic nervous system in a wine-tasting situation are structured around the dimensions of pleasantness and arousal. Motor measurements taken through facial expressions showed a marginally significant difference between wines providing pleasant and unpleasant emotions for the activation intensity of action units. The relationships established between these components, as well as their concomitant activation, allow us to define wine as an emotional object.