How do we deal with personal preference in food and wine?
By Jamie Goode | 25th November 2024
Head downtown in a big city and walk around. Take a look at the spread of restaurants. They vary widely, in terms of both style and price. Enter one, and unless you go to a high-end place with a tasting menu, there will likely be another series of choices to be made as you order food.
On one level this reflects the diversity in gastronomy that we enjoy. Most of us don’t want to eat the same thing every meal, and often our choices are led by mood and seeking diversity as much as, if not more than, they are led by our preferences.
It’s clear from food retail, too, that we seek diversity in what we eat. Many of us are lucky in that when we shop for food we go to a retailer (or a range of specialized retailers) with well stocked shelves opening up multiple gastronomic possibilities on a daily basis.
Of course, some are gastronomically more adventurous than others. I had an uncle who, when he visited, was prepared a separate, simpler meat-and-two-veg meal because he didn’t like my dad’s ‘foreign’ cooking (dad used to cook almost exclusively Indian and Chinese food). And I remember one of our friend’s kids who would only eat chips. Then there are the hideous Brit-dominated seaside resorts in Spain where many restaurants boast a ‘British chef’ catering for the gastronomically cautious Brits abroad.
There are different origins of gastronomic preferences. First, we have the ethical preferences: someone prefers not to eat meat; another might only eat meat where the animal has been treated well; another might not care how the animals are raised. Second we have the aversions, where someone genuinely doesn’t like some flavour or food item: they find the taste unpleasant. Then we have health considerations, where someone has an allergic reaction or intolerance. Fourthly, related to this are issues relating to a special diet, where someone might be avoiding certain foods because they are calorific, or thought to be unhealthy, or they might seek out an item because it is rich in vitamins, nutrients or protein. Fifth, we have the gastronomic adventurers who want to try something different or new. Sixth, we have the cultural gastorians who want to explore traditional, historical or regional cuisine, and who strive for something authentic. Finally, there’s the issue of fashion: some choose to eat certain things because they are deemed to be cool or in vogue.
An important distinction to make is that between choice and preference. What I choose to eat is not always what I prefer to eat. I might not be able to access my preference: for example, it might be too expensive, or geographically unavailable, so I settle for something that is possible. Or the offer to me, such as the menu in a restaurant, might not make clear exactly what it is I’m ordering, so when I choose what I think will be my preference, it might not be my choice. It’s worth remembering that this is especially true for wine where there are just so many different products, all of which are packaged very similarly, and which can differ in flavour significantly even though the words on the label might be very similar. And the customer can only buy what is in front of them. No list or store shelf is anywhere close to comprehensive, so a choice must be made from a restricted selection, and your preference may very well not be available. We also need to mention choice paralysis: faced with what seems like too many choices, it’s really hard to decide and so we sometimes just give up and choose almost randomly.
In wine, we make little room for individual differences when we discuss and rate wines as professionals. Wine shops and restaurants offer a wide variety of wines to choose from, but I see very little discussion of how we should consider individual preferences when we write about wine. Critics issue a set of scores and behave as if they think these ratings are normative, as do wine competitions.
The other extreme is the notion that preference for food and drink is rooted in hard-wired biological differences, and so some people advocate doing a test of these differences before pointing them towards things that they will be programmed to like. This is a simplistic take on perception, because it ignores the reality we experience in preference – that it is highly malleable, distinctly cultural, and we from our shared experience and general agreement about the properties of food and wine
Whole cultures can develop preferences. This is evidence that we do indeed learn what to like in many instances. Some preferences are immediate: everyone likes fat, salt and sugar and umami in their food (although not alone, perhaps with the exception of sugar). But we are also able to explore novel food sources. As humans moved around they encountered natural foods that were new to them, and the sense of flavour allows us to explore those new foods, learning quickly which are good and which are to be avoided, and this is not always through the initial taste.
Tastes change with time, especially as we grow up. I like foods now that I avoided as a child, with perhaps the best example being cheese. I now enjoy cheeses with strong flavours that I’d have hated as a young adult.
Tastes can be local. Travel to another culture and they will have a traditional gastronomy based on local products, and some of these preferences are for things not just unfamiliar to visitors, but for foods and drinks that visitors initially find aversive.
There’s a lot of psychology in taste. Personally, I’d be unable to eat insects, but in many cultures these are prized as a food source. Reality TV often uses the idea that some things, whilst having good nutrient value, are aversive to most people, and represent a psychological barrier that viewers can strongly identify with. Can you eat a kangaroo penis, or will you have to leave the jungle?
You can develop aversions after a bad experience with a certain food or drink.
This all boils down to what our sense of flavour is for. And there’s a distinction that needs to me made here between smell, and smell as part of the sense of flavour. We can’t taste something without also smelling it (flavour is multimodal, and what we put in our mouths is also smelled retronasally), but we can smell without tasting. So smell has different roles. For example, we might smell smoke, and in one context it can be pleasant (sitting around a fire with friends) while in another it can be alarming (something is on fire!). We might use smell to warn us of an unsuitable environment (think of highly aversive smells warning us of microbiological danger). Flavour is there to encourage us to eat (we get a strong reward) and also to choose what we eat, steering us towards things that are nutritious. It’s strongly moderated by our internal state, because it’s good to eat when we are hungry, but we don’t want to over-eat or under-eat because this can cause problems in the long term.
The most boring question you can ask someone about a wine you have just poured to them is ‘do you like it?’ It’s much more interesting to ask them, ‘what do you experience in this wine?’ Then we can have an interesting discussion independent of deciding whether or not we liked the wine.
Preferences are different from perceived properties. You and I may sit down with a dark coloured red wine and agree that it was made from ripe fruit, it has a sweet fruit profile, it is more black fruits than red fruits, and it has some spice and vanilla notes from some oak. Then, you might say that you really like this wine, and I might say that while I appreciate that it’s a well made example of its style, it’s not really my preference.
Preference is also malleable and depends on the occasion. There’s the famous anecdote of the holiday wine – perhaps a cheap rosé that delivered so much joy while sitting by the pool or at a cliff-top restaurant in the Mediterranean that someone eagerly sought it out on their return home, only to find that under grey autumnal skies, the wine had little to offer.
As we drink wine it changes us. There’s also the question of whether the pleasure a wine delivers on first sip remains after repeated exposure. In a quick taste of five different wines, you might have a preference for one, only to find that after the first few sips, or first few glasses, the wine isn’t so appealing. For example, a rich, sweetly fruited red wine that tastes really nice initially, only for the cracks to show shortly after, as repeated interrogation of the glass prompts the realization that some of that deliciousness is down to residual sugar and oak substitutes. Once you realize your palate has been seduced by winemaking trickery, suddenly you find one of the other five wines, makeup-less and not as showy, is your actual preference.