Wine and the Mind
January 27th, 2007 by Adrienne
Going into Cornell Professor Terry Acree’s talk on Wine and the Mind, I expected to hear a lot of pretentious wine descriptions like “fruity bouquet” and “a hint of oak.” But instead, I was very pleased to hear an informative and fun talk on the chemistry and history of wine.
To start, Prof. Acree traced the history of wine from its start as a commodity in the ancient Mediterranean (one of the three pillars — wine, grain, and olive oil — that supported ancient Greek civilization) to its development into a fine art with the advent of modern chemistry in the last 200 years. In addition to seeing the origins of wine and its development throughout the centuries, we also learned about the unique chemistry that allows wine to ferment and develop such intricate tastes.
Prof. Acree then went into some more scientific explanations of taste and smell, and how the brain works to process sensory information. He explained what is known about these processes, but also the many mysteries that still remain unexplained by science. As a researcher dealing with these issues, he had many fascinating anecdotes about various organisms that share the same smell-producing chemicals (for instance, the reproductive organ of the male fruit moth shares chemicals with a lemon; the scent gland of the European fox produces the same smell as a certain variety of American grapes, which led early colonists to name them “fox grapes” . . .).
All in all, the talk was a lot of fun, and managed to weave a lot of in-depth information — history, chemistry, and neuroscience — into an engaging talk on the popular topic of wine. As Prof. Acree closed his talk by urging us to “feed our mind,” we were able to do so at the fabulous reception afterwards — including a wine tasting hosted by the Cayuga Wine Trail and Mediterranean food catered by Aladdin’s Natural Eatery. Yum!
