Cigar Science with Rob V: Memories, wine and “cigar expertise”.

[bobbyg29-cl]

PREFACE: Thanks for all of the great comments about my last thread! Some of you gave great illustrations of how taste and odor memories are so much different than other types of memories. On the one hand, memories for vision and hearing tend to be succinct and matter-of-fact: What was the color of your first car?: “dark blue”, How did your first grade teacher’s voice sound?: “high and squeaky”. On the other hand, memories for tastes and smells tend to get wrapped up in an entire event and are often charged with emotion: What do pancakes smell like?: “well I remember I was 10 years old at my grandparents farm…..”. This is in a large part due to that fact that our everyday language is not adequate for describing tastes and smells so we end up recounting everything. You can see this if you look at some of the reviews posted here on CigarLive. In sum, odors and tastes are stored and recalled as “unitary perceptual events”, and are not readily broken apart into their components.

So, it is clear that being able to use our memories to describe and characterize the gustatory and olfactory experiences associated with smoking a cigar is not something that comes naturally to us. It is something that must be developed through practice (and possibly training). So how do we develop these skills? Or, in other words, how does one become an “expert taster”? As you would probably guess there is almost no research on this in terms of cigar smoking. So I am turning to a hobby that is similar in a lot of ways and had been well researched: wine tasting. Today, I want to stick with the topic of memory and consider what it means to be an “expert taster”.

In order to become an expert wine taster there are two different types of expertise that must be developed:
1) Perceptual expertise: experience gained through sensory exposure (i.e., tasting lots of different kinds of wine). Through trying lots and lots of types of wine a wine drinker will develop many real taste and odor memories (see Cigar Science IV) that can be used when trying a new wine. Anyone who drinks wine regularly will have this.
2) Verbal expertise: experience with describing/labeling these sensory experiences using the “wine vocabulary” (e.g., in wine seminars or courses). This type of experience essentially involves being taught to pair a particular sensation with a particular label (that we have mutually decided to be correct) much like we learn the names for different colors when we are children. This type of expertise also requires the ability to focus on one particular aspect of the wine and ignore others.

If we look at the reviews/descriptions given by wine drinkers of different levels of expertise we see some interesting differences:



Experts reviews of wines are shorter in length but contain more descriptive terms i.e., quality not quantity. Experts also spend less time describing the flavors that are absent from a wine (i.e., they don’t say things like “the Cabernet was surprisingly not very fruity”). This is presumably because they are better able to describe the flavors that are present. Experts also tend to use more precise labels than novices/intermediates who rely on more abstract descriptions e.g., “oak” instead of “wood”, “raspberry” instead of “fruity”.

But are the descriptions given by experts just a lot of hot air? Do they just randomly use terms with no consistency. The answer seems to be “no”. Lehrer (1983) found that wine experts are more consistent in their use of terms than novices and are can reliably match wines they have tasted (blindly) to descriptions of wines written by other experts. So, it seems like they have learned a vocabulary that enables them to consistently communicate taste/smell perception and have developed links in memory that pair a particular perception with the correct term.

Melcher and Schooler (1986) conducted an interesting experiment on differences between taste memories for wine drinkers of different levels of expertise. In this study, subjects were divided into 3 groups:
-Novices: drank red wine less than once/month. This groups has neither perceptual nor verbal expertise.
-Intermediates: drank red wine at least 2-3 times/month but had little or no formal wine training. This group has perceptual but not verbal expertise.
-Experts: individuals that are wine professionals or have taken multiple seminars, and on average drink red wine 10 times/month. This group has both verbal and perceptual expertise.

Subjects in each group were asked to drink a particular wine. Then half of the subjects solved crossword puzzles for 10min (the “nonverbal” group) while the other half were required to describe the wine in as much detail as possible (the “verbal” group). There were an equal number of novices, intermediates, and experts in each group. They were then presented with 4 small glasses of wine and asked to pick out the one they had tasted before (taste recognition). Here is how well they could do it:



The most striking effect that can be seen here is the huge decline in performance for intermediates when they are required to describe the wine in detail (the “verbal” group) before picking it out from the lineup. What’s happening here? Asking the intermediates to review the wine essentially wiped out their ability to recognize it later on! This is the “verbal overshadowing” effect I mentioned in Cigar Science IV. If people who do not have a good vocabulary/knowledge for describing tastes (e.g., non-experts) focus too much effort on using verbal descriptors they will interfere with their perceptual memories. When they taste the wine the second time they are essentially over-thinking, trying to match their limited verbal descriptors (e.g., “fruity”, “dry”) to each wine they taste instead of just letting the part of their brain that stores the taste memories recognize the correct wine. Remember because they are intermediates they actually had quite a bit of “perceptual expertise” but not any “verbal expertise”. On the other hand, asking novices to describe the wine seems to actually help them recognize it later on. Because they are not regular wine drinkers they have no “perceptual expertise” to interfere with. I think these findings have some interesting applications for cigar smoking…

1)What it means to be a “cigar expert”?
-As is the case with wine tasting, I think to be an expert “cigar smoker” you need to have both perceptual and verbal expertise. An “expert cigar smoker” has the ability to focus their attention on each of the different flavors in a cigar, has an extensive memory for different flavors from lots of cigar smoking (perceptual expertise), and has learned to consistently apply labels when these memories are triggered in a new cigar e.g., leather, wood, etc (verbal expertise). The main difference between cigar smoking and wine tasting is that we do not have an agreed upon standards for flavor and have no courses/training for learning how to do this. Because of this we should expect that each expert will be consistent in his/her labels but their might not be a lot of agreement between experts i.e., one expert’s “cedar” might be another expert’s “oak”. More to come on this in future posts…

2)Novice cigar smokers can benefit from doing reviews even if their labels are way off.
As the wine-tasting study described above suggests novices can improve their ability to remember and recognize different tastes by trying to describe the flavors in a cigar, even if they do a very poor job at it. When you have never experienced a particular flavor before giving it a label is like rehearsing a phone number in your head…it allows your brain to store it better for later recall.

3)Intermediate cigar smokers should not do too many reviews.
-As already been pointed out in a few threads, an in-depth review should not been done every time one smokes a cigar. The wine tasting experiment described above shows us one reason why….if you spend to much time trying to label things it will interfere with your ability to retrieve perceptual memories. For example, instead of naturally experiencing a memory of the smell of a fire from a childhood camping trip your brain will be struggling to apply the label “cedar” to something. Sometimes you should just smoke a cigar without thinking about it too much and let the taste and smell areas of your brain have at it without being interrupted by the butt-insky language centers 

4)Try to get more specific with labels when doing reviews.
-A large part of what is involved with wine expertise is moving from abstract to precise labels for flavors. I think the same is true for cigar smoking. When you are a novice a lot of cigars taste “woody” but with practice you can begin to label particular types of wood. Colin’s ICRS and the flavor charts that have been posted on Cigar Live are a big help with this as it prompts us to be more specific.

5)How can we develop cigar expertise through training?
I think we can again learn a lot from wine tasters here. In wine courses, tasters are given prototypical examples of particular flavor profiles and taste those over and over until they have developed a perceptual memory for it and can label it accurately. I think we could do the same thing with cigars. For example, I think we could pick out the best examples of “leathery”, “woody”, and “peppery” cigars that could be used to learn how to identify flavors in other cigars. Essentially, create a list of cigars that would serve as a “taster kit”. This is something I would like to pursue more (with the help of Cigar Live members) in the future.

Cheers!

Rob

[g8trbone]

Another great post Rob!!! It helps to understand what we are all trying to do as we post reviews. Thanks again!

[bobbyg29-cl]

Originally Posted by g8trbone

Another great post Rob!!! It helps to understand what we are all trying to do as we post reviews. Thanks again!

Thanks T.J...glad someone out there is still listening

[Shelby07]

Hey Rob - we're all reading. Good stuff, as usual!

[sergione-cl]

THAT WAS GREAT!!

You blew my mind. I will try to let off on the reviews cause I do them for every cigar I smoke and I like that part where it said:

instead of naturally experiencing a memory of the smell of a fire from a childhood camping trip your brain will be struggling to apply the label “cedar” to something.

Beautiful, just beautiful

[Cigarfiend1]

Great stuff Rob. Now when I got back into cigars in 2000/2001 I could sit down and really concentrate on the flavors of a cigar and describe them pretty well as well as pick them out. As for now I have a much harder time being specific when I do reviews on the flavors. This is why you will not see many reviews from me. Is this a just a lack of taste memory?