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How Science Saved Me from Pretending to Love Wine
The fault was not in my stars, nor in myself, but in my fungiform papillae.

By Anne Fadiman

September 30, 2017

Illustration by Kati Szi

I was in my late forties when I finally admitted to myself that I would never love
wine. As other women fake orgasms, I have faked hundreds of satisfied responses to
hundreds of glassesnot a difficult feat, since my father schooled my brother and
me in the vocabulary of wine from an early age. Confronted with another Bordeaux or
Burgundy, I could toss around the terms I had learned at the dinner table
(Ptillant! Phylloxera! Jeroboam!), then painstakingly direct the wine straight
down the center of my tongue, a route that limited my palates exposure to what it
perceived as discomfiting intensity.

That admission was a sad one, because my father, the writer Clifton Fadiman, who
had died a few years earlier, loved wine more ardently than anything except words.
He judged wine contests, supplied introductions to wine catalogues, and co-wrote an
entire (eight-pound) book about wine. No other food or drink gave him as much
sensory pleasure; no other pursuit made him feel farther from the lower-middle-
class neighborhoods of immigrant Brooklyn from which he had worked so hard to
escape. Ever since he had offered me watered wine (or, rather, wined water), when I
was ten, Id believed that if I was truly my fathers daughter I would love wine,
too.

But at a certain point I realized that, although he had once written that the
palate is as educable as the mind or the body, my own palate was never going to
graduate from elementary school. Not only did it fail to relish Two-Buck Chuck; it
was equally incapable of appreciating even the greatest of wines. This home truth
was confirmed not long ago when I was invited to a mildly bibulous celebration at a
friends house. My father would have loved itfirst-rate minds, first-rate food,
enough Wasps to make him feel hed crossed the river from Brooklyn, enough Jews to
make him feel he was not an outsider looking in. And, of course, excellent wine. To
accompany the main course, glazed short ribs sous-vide, my host brought out a
Bordeaux. Before he removed the frail cork and decanted the wine, he showed me the
bottle. It was an Haut-Brion 81.

Haut-Brion is generally considered the first wine ever to receive a reviewby the
diarist Samuel Pepys, who visited Londons Royall Oak Tavern, on April 10, 1663,
and, as he noted in his journal, here drank a sort of French wine, called Ho
Bryan, that hath a good and most particular taste that I never met with. Haut-
Brion was drunk by Dryden, Swift, Defoe, and Locke. When Thomas Jefferson was the
American minister to France, he bought six cases of Haut-Brion and sent them back
to Monticello. Id often noticed its label reproduced inside The Joys of Wine, my
fathers eight-pound book, embellished with an engraving of a chteau whose towers
looked like witches hats. Just below the image were the words Premier Grand Cru
Class: one of the five finest reds produced in Bordeaux.

My fellow-guests took their first sips. Several broke out into mmmmms and aaahhhs
and little susurrations of pleasure. I later looked up tasting notes for this Haut-
Brion vintage. Other people had smelled violets, sour cherries, white pepper, blue
cheese, autumn leaves, saddle leather, iron filings, hot rocks in a cedar-panelled
sauna, and earth. They had tasted pencil shavings, sandalwood, tea leaves, plums,
green peppers, goat cheese, licorice, mint, peat, twigs, and toast.

I sniffed the wine. I couldnt smell any of those things, except earth.

I swallowed a drop. It tasted, or so I imagined, like a muddy truffle that had been
dug up moments earlier by a specially trained pig. I could tell I was in the
presence of something complicatedintelligent, smoky, subterraneanbut I could
summon only the fragile ghost of a response. When the next course arrived, half an
inch of Haut-Brion was left in my glass.

In the months that followed the dinner, I brooded about that half inch. My father
had believed that there was something actually wrong with people who did not love
what he loved. He wrote, When you find a first-rate brain, like Shaws, rejecting
wine, you have probably also found the key to certain weaknesses flawing that
first-rate brain. What weaknesses were flawing my second-rate brain? Not to
mention my second-rate character?

One day, a friend happened to mention that cilantro tastes different to different
people. I happen to abominate cilantro. I looked it up and learned that cilantro
abomination is at least partly genetic. A surge of fellow-feeling rose in me when I
found a Web site called IHateCilantro.com, on which my gustatory brethren described
the object of our mutual disaffection as tasting like old soap, dirty laundry,
paint thinner, burnt rubber, wet dog, cat piss, doll hair, damp socks, moldy shoes,
old coins, feet wrapped in bacon, and a cigarette if you ate it.

I had never eaten a cigarette, but I felt sure that if I had I would have
recognized the incontestable rightness of the comparison, as I did the others. The
toast and sandalwood lurking in a glass of Haut-Brion may have eluded me, but when
it came to cilantro I was on firm ground. Old soapyes! Moldy shoestotally! Feet
wrapped in baconamen! These were tasting notes I could get behind.

The seed of a radical new thought had been planted. What if wine was sort of like
cilantro? Though I didnt abominate wine, I certainly didnt enjoy it. Maybe my
father and I were wired differently. Maybe wine was a blind spot not because I was
morally, emotionally, intellectually, or aesthetically deficient but because I was
biologically deficient. That would get me off the hook, wouldnt it? Id be like
someone who doesnt enjoy reading not because shes uncultivated but because shes
dyslexic.

I started thinking about other foods I didnt like. Capers. Kimchi. Cloves. Pepper.
Kale. Coffee was drinkablein fact, positively deliciousonly with milk and sugar.
Seltzer required enough discreet mouth-sloshing to subdue the effervescence. And I
couldnt imagine why anyone would eat a radish unless paid. It was more like a bee
sting than a vegetable.

What did these foods have in common with the way wine tasted to me (which was to
say, sort of sour, sort of bitter, pucker-inducing, not just a taste but a
sensation)? They were all too strong. And to whom did foods taste too strong?
Supertasters.

I had come across the word when I looked up cilantro. You couldnt read an article
on taste without bumping into it. According to Linda Bartoshuk, the scientist who
coined the term, in 1991, supertasters are people for whom salt tastes saltier,
sugar tastes sweeter, pickles taste more sour, chard tastes more bitter, and
Worcestershire sauce tastes umami-er. (Umami, the so-called fifth taste, is the
meaty or savory flavor imparted by glutamate.) Their tongues have morelots more
fungiform papillae, the little mushroom-shaped bumps that house the taste buds.
Supertasters can be identified by either counting their papillae or placing on
their tongues a filter-paper disk soaked in 6-n-propylthiouracil, otherwise known
as PROP. Sensitivity to the chemical varies by gender and ethnicity, among other
factors, but everyone falls into one of three groups. To twenty-five per cent of
the U.S. population, the non-tasters, the disk tastes like nothing. To fifty per
cent, the medium tasters, it tastes bitter. To the remaining twenty-five per cent,
the supertasters, it tastes so terrible that one unfortunate consumer said his
tongue thrashed around his mouth like a hooked fish convulsing on the deck of a
boat.

One might expect that wine connoisseursthose people who confidently call a Syrah
peppery or a Pinot Noir-based champagne biscuitywould all be supertasters.
That isnt necessarily the case. Extreme taste sensitivity can be a liability. If
you experience bitterness, astringency, acidity, and alcohol (which is sensed as
heat) more intensely than an ordinary mortal, you may find it hard to enjoy wines
that are tannic or tart or have a high alcohol content. You want less. If youre a
non-taster, on the other hand, you want more. You have to clobber your palate in
order to feel youre tasting much of anything, and youre at greater risk of
becoming an alcoholic. The Goldilocks via media is happily occupied by the medium
tasters. I couldnt resurrect my father in order to ply him with PROP-impregnated
paper, but Id have bet my unabridged O.E.D. that he was a medium taster and I was
a supertaster.

Supertaster: Now there was an identity I could get used to. I was a delicate flower
whose hyper-refined sensibilities were assailed by the crude world! I was off the
hook, but not because I was dyslexic; my problem was that I read too well! I liked
wine less than my father did because my palate was superior! I resolved to confirm
my rarefied status without delay.

Not all taste scientists, I later learned, view PROP as the alpha and omega of
gustatory assessment. Although Bartoshuk found that responses to PROP correlate
strongly with papilla density, as well as with many aspects of taste perception,
others have since pointed out that it is possible to be insensitive to PROP but
have receptors that can taste many other bitter compounds; that taste sensitivity
depends on the response to a variety of stimuli; and that PROP testing ignores the
role of smell in taste perception. In any case, I couldnt find any online, so I
sent away for a strip flavored with phenylthiocarbamide, one of PROPs chemical
cousins. After it arrived, I read that PTC is poisonous. (One Web site reported
that, pound for pound, it is safer than a poison dart frog, but deadlier than
strychnine.) Although .005 milligrams would probably not have done me in, I
retreated to Plan B: counting my fungiform papillae.

It had been delightful to rencounter the word papillae. When my brother Kim and
I were in junior high school, we had entered a jingle contest sponsored by Dr
Pepper. Our collaborative offering:

Dr Pepper has a zest

Which makes it far the tastiest.
So buy a bottle, make the test!
Your papillae will do the rest.
Kim, who had a larger vocabulary than I did, was responsible for papillae. We
were astonished and outraged when we didnt win.

Making the test this time around, according to the papilla-counting guide I found
online, meant using a Q-tip to stain my tongue blue with food coloring. Its spongy
surface would allegedly absorb the dye while the papillae remained pink and
prominent. Once that was done, I was instructed to place a binder-hole
reinforcement on the middle of my tongue. My mission was to count the rosy bumps
that lay within the reinforcements six-millimetre circle: non-tasters had fewer
thanfifteen, medium tasters fifteen to thirty-five, and supertasters more than
thirty-five. Unfortunately, the mirror fogged up every time I leaned in close, and,
even when I wiped a patch clear for a few seconds, my middle-aged eyes could no
more distinguish an individual papilla than they could a neutrino. I tried reading
glasses, a magnifying glass, and a flashlight. No dice. I tried my husband. He
couldnt see anything, either. Finally, I conscripted my daughter and stuck out my
bright-blue tongue.

She counted five papillae.

Five! Oh, my God. Could I beI could hardly say it to myselfa non-taster? It
wasnt possible. I always did well on tests. Perhaps I had placed the reinforcement
in a less than optimal spot on my tongue, a sort of papillary Sahara.

I moved it toward the front. My daughter counted eighteen.

I moved it to the very center of the tip. Twenty-five.

Better. Still, not exactly what Id had in mind.

Smarting from my demotion, I decided to pay a visit to Virginia Utermohlen, a taste

researcher who had taught for many years in Cornell Universitys Division of
Nutritional Sciences. I was interested in her claim that she has saved marriages by
proving that spouses with divergent food preferences are not being fussy or
stubborn; they simply live in different perceptual universes. Id also enjoyed a
paper in which she persuasively argued that Marcel Proust could probably taste
PROP.

When I arrived in Ithaca, I wasnt sure why Utermohlen had reserved a table at a
wine-and-tapas bar. I wanted to talk about wine, not drink it. However, I was
delighted that she looked exactly the way a taste researcher should: pink-cheeked
and round, as if shed spent her life eating delicious foods. She immediately
affixed her white cloth napkin to a necklace equipped with two alligator clips, a
gift from a relative who had noticed that she ate with such enthusiasm that she
often spilled her soup. She then ordered us each a flight of five local wines from
the Finger Lakes region: a Hermann J. Wiemer Cuve Brut, a Treleaven Chardonnay, a
Charles Fournier Gold Seal Vineyards Riesling, a Hazlitt 1852 Vineyards Sauvignon
Blanc, and a Bellwether Sawmill Creek Vineyard Pinot Noir. I had told her
beforehand that wine tasted overly strong to me, and she had told me that it did to
her, too. In order to reduce its intensity, she swallowed wine down the center of
her tongue, just like me.

Soon, along with several plates of tapas, our table was occupied by a brigade of
tiny glasses. I cautiously sipped from each of them. With the exception of the
Sauvignon Blanc, they werewell, much better than I expected.

Utermohlen said, Of course they are. She explained that at this northern latitude
the growing season was shorter, the grapes developed less sugar to ferment, and the
lower sugar levels meant less alcohol. The alcohol content of these wines was
between eleven and 12.5 per cent, well below the fourteen or fifteen per cent that
is now common in California. You dont like alcohol, she said. This is your wine
country.

The Sauvignon Blanc tasted bitter. Methoxypyrazine, she said. Thats the
Cabernet signature. How do you feel about green peppers? I told her that I
preferred red and yellow ones. Of course you do, she said. The green ones have
methoxypyrazine, just like this wine.

The Pinot Noir was my favorite. Of course it is, she said. She explained that,
compared with the Cabernet, it was lighter in every way: body, flavor, tannin,
color. Pinot Noirs tend to be low in pigment because they are made from thin-
skinned grapes, but the cool climate and long winters of the Finger Lakes afford
the grape skins an especially brief opportunity to develop color, and the resulting
wines are pale and delicate. Was it possible that I preferred this anemic-looking
redperilously close to a ros, which my father had dismissed as sissyish and
vulgarto the Haut-Brion Id tasted at my friends dinner party? I had to admit
that it was sort of pleasant.

For a moment, a flicker of hope stirred within my fungiform papillae. Might these
unintimidating wines serve as training wheels? Could I eventually graduate to Haut-
Brion?

The flicker didnt last long. Sort of pleasant was unbridgeably distant from
bottled poetry (Robert Louis Stevenson), constant proof that God loves us
(Benjamin Franklin), and one of the indices of civilization (Clifton Fadiman, who
makes at least one appearance in every list of wine quotations).

After dinner, Utermohlenwho had grown even pinker, because she has an acetaldehyde
dehydrogenase deficiency, which causes her to flush when she drinks alcoholdrove
me to an ice-cream parlor where she was obviously well known. I had a large dish of
mint chocolate chip and bittersweet chocolate. She had a kiddie-sized scoop of
pumpkin in a sugar cone. We agreed that the wines had been pretty good but that the
ice cream was better. Had my father been present at Purity Ice Cream that evening,
he would not have been pleased. He once wrote that watching adults drink ice-cream
sodas gave him the same queasy feeling one gets from watching an adult playing
with a rattle in a lunatic asylum. Utermohlen would have had a good rejoinder.
Shed told me at dinner that children avoid bitter and sour flavors because they
have far more sensitive palates than adults. Their tastes change not because their
palates improve but because they deteriorate.

The next day, Utermohlen photographed my tongue with her iPhone. She wasnt
interested in a six-millimetre circle; she wanted the big picture. Its a
beautiful tongue, she said. Its exquisite. She zoomed in on the image and
showed me a forest of papillae, including many, tucked into an inch-long fissure,
that might not have been visible at home because, as she explained, fissures have a
high concentration of papillae but tend to absorb food coloring. Youve got a ton
of papillaea ton, a ton, a ton. And look at how many you have on the side! An
insane quantity. Thats why you swallow wine down the center. You are highly
sensitive.

My first realization was that Id been mispronouncing papillae for nearly half a
century. Id never heard anyone say it until that moment and had always thought the
accent was on the first syllable, not the second. No wonder Kim and I had lost the
Dr Pepper jingle contest! My second realization was that Utermohlen had just
snatched my tongue from the jaws of mediocrity.

However, she had called me merely highly sensitive; she had not used the word
supertaster. I had an inkling why after I asked if I could see her tongue. Out it
came, a very pink, very clean tongue, so extravagantly fissured that it deserved
its own topographic map. It was the tongue of an imperial supertaster. My tongue
was not in the same league. (She later confided that she can detect PROP at a
concentration of one part per billion, though she belongs to the camp of taste
experts who believe that its importance has been exaggerated. She actually prefers
the term highly sensitive taster, which encompasses the tasting cosmos beyond
PROP.)

Utermohlen confirmed her assessment by feeding me a peppermint Life Saver (which

tasted stronger to me than it would to most people) and a cup of green tea (which
tasted especially bitter). Then, after asking a battery of questions about my
flavor preferences (Do you like your chili hot? How are you with Listerine?) as
well as my fathers (Did he like Parmesan? Did he drink his coffee black?), she
drew a chart. It listed some major oral receptorsproteins that allow for the
perception of particular tastes and sensationsarrayed along a spectrum from cool
(like peppermint) to hot (like chili). All the foods I enjoyed were sensed by the
receptors on the left: the cool side (where, as it happens, low-tannin, low-oak
wines like the previous nights Pinot Noir were located). All the ones I didnt
were on the right: the hot side. My fathers favorite foods were concentrated in
the center and near right. Your father had the perfect palate for wine,
Utermohlen said. The way wine was then. Lower alcohol content, higher residual
sugar. The classic Bordeaux. He wouldnt have liked todays big reds, over on the
righttoo much alcohol burn.

Before I left, Utermohlen told me that the tongue inspection, the Life Saver and
tea tests, and the taste quiz had not been strictly necessary. Shed known the
previous night what kind of taster I was because I had been interested in only a
few things on the tapas menu (Id shuddered at the thought of the warm baby kale
with goat-cheese vinaigrette, pickled onion, and radish) but the ones Id wanted
(particularly the saffron risotto cake stuffed with Fontina) Id really wanted.
Thats what weve found with the highly sensitive tasters, she said. They have
loves and hates. Utermohlens own loves include empanadas (but not with peas),
artichokes (but not the hearts), spinach (Oh, my God), and coffee mousse
(straight from heaven). Her hatesHoly mackerel! Hate, hate, hate!include
hazelnuts, goat cheese, Brussels sprouts, peaches, and rice pudding. She dislikes
going to other peoples houses for dinner because shes afraid of encountering one
of her hates, about which the host or hostess will invariably say, The way I cook
it, youll love it. That, of course, is invariably untrue. Utermohlen left me with
the impression that the term picky eater was invented by people with fewer
papillae in order to diss people with more papillae.

A few weeks later, I spent an afternoon with Larry Marks, a scientist who studies
sensory perception at the John B. Pierce Laboratory, at Yale. Marks was a
distinguished gray-haired man who looked far too thin to be a taste researcher, and
indeed had also published work on synesthesia and ventriloquism. He told me that
his three basic food groups are black coffee, dark chocolate, and red wine,
starting with Thunderbird at seventeen and working his way up to Ctes du Rhne.

Marks led me to a table on which sixty tiny plastic cups, each containing five
cubic centimetres of clear liquid, had been arrayed in precise rows, as if for an
unusually well-organized game of beer pong. First came the gustation test. The
thirty cups on the left contained either plain water or water with very low
concentrationsundetectable by some people, unidentifiable by manyof salt,
sucrose, citric acid, quinine, or MSG. Following Markss instructions, I swirled
the contents of each cup in my mouth, spat into a dedicated sink that had received
the expectorate of countless tasters before me, rinsed with water, and moved on to
the next cup: more or less like a wine tasting, but withoutthe wine. I wrote down
whether each sample tasted salty, sweet, sour, bitter, umami, or flavorless.
The thirty cups on the right contained either water or a very weak solution of
blueberry, strawberry, peach, banana, or vanilla flavoring. They constituted an
olfaction test, a term that led me to assume, incorrectly, that Id be sniffing
them. Instead, I was instructed to hold my breath, place each liquid in my mouth
for a few seconds, and then spit it out. I couldnt taste a thing until I exhaled,
at which point I apparently experienced each flavor as its vapors wafted up my
pharynx and into my nose. I dislikein some cases, hate, hate, hate!many fruits,
and had not eaten a peach or a banana since I was a child, though I had smelled
them, with displeasure, when others had eaten them in my presence. I did not expect
to recognize these flavors, and when I did I wished I hadnt.

After Id completed both tests, Marks extended his hand, as if proffering an after-
dinner mint. He was holding an envelope that contained several small white disks of
filter paper. PROP! Id finally found it. Even though I knew that the trials Id
just undergone might be a more complete predictor of taste sensitivity, it still
vibrated with talismanic power.

I placed a disk on my tongue.

Ewwwwwwwwwww.

It was the bitterest substance I had tasted in my entire life. And the bitterness
lingered, even after I had plucked the offending scrap from my mouth.

Marks handed me a pencil and a sheet of paper with a seven-point scale. The
instructions, though only one sentence long, were epic in scope: Please rate in
the context of the full range of sensations that you have experienced in your
life.

All sensations? Well, childbirth was worse. Also, to be fair, my tongue had not
thrashed like a hooked fish. I drew a mark partway between the top two levels,
Very Strong and Strongest Imaginable.

A lab assistant brought in the scoring forms from the earlier tests, and Marks
summarized my results. In the gustation test, I had been unable to distinguish
between the salty and the umami samples, but I had correctly identified four of the
five water samples, four of the five sour samples, and all five bitter samples. In
other words, I was sensitive to sourness and very sensitive to bitterness. In the
olfaction test, I had correctly identified twenty-eight of thirty samples,
including all ten samples of the flavors I hadnt tasted in decades. I was
exceptionally sensitive. In the PROP test, I was exactly on the border between
medium taster and supertaster. So close and yet so far.

Marks had been trained as a cognitive psychologist, and he cautioned me to remember

that biology is not the sole determinant of taste preferences. Experience matters,
too. For instance, he noted that, if a child grows up in Mexico and starts eating
chili peppers as a toddler, shell get used to them, and probably even learn to
enjoy them, whether or not she was initially sensitive to capsaicin. But he had no
doubt that my sensitivity to bitterness was responsible for my dislike of wines
with high tannin levelsthe more tannins, the more Id balk.

These propensities were later reconfirmed after I ordered a kit from 23andMe, a
genetic-testing company, and spat into a little plastic tube. I was duly informed
that I had several variantsnone of them particularly rarein TAS2R38 and TAS2R13,
two of the genes that encode for the taste receptors that perceive bitterness. One
set of variants intensifies the perception of bitter flavors in general, including
PROP; the other specifically intensifies the perception of bitterness in alcohol.
All the variants were heterozygous, which meant that I had inherited them from only
one parent (I feel pretty sure it was my mother, who loved milkshakes) and not from
the other (the one who loved wine).

So there it was. I didnt taste what my father tasted.

One night, as I was looking at a diagram of a tongue on my laptop screen, I

thought: My father would have hated all this. Not because he disliked science; he
had enjoyed reading biographies of scientists and edited two anthologies of stories
and poems about mathematics. But he would have thought that fungiform was an ugly
worda word that Wally the Wordworm would never have wanted to swallow. (Wally was
a small, bibliophilic invertebrate who ate his way through a dictionary in a
childrens book that my father wrote.) In the Clifton Fadiman universe, reducing
wine to a series of tests and charts and genetic acronyms would have been like
feeding a Keats sonnet into a computer and spitting out an analysis of metrics and
phonemes, or grinding up Chartres Cathedral in order to weigh the stone and the
glass.

My father wrote that wine contains an inexplicable lan vital. Inexplicable. It

not only couldnt be explained, it shouldnt be. He would not have wanted to know
which receptors he had used to taste the 1904 Chteau Lafite Rothschild he was
served at his eightieth-birthday party, just as he would not have wanted to read a
chemists account of how it had been produced. He liked to think of wine as made
partly by human beings but mostly by the glorious lottery of soil and slope and sun
and rainfall, no two vineyards alike, no two years alike, no two bottles alike, the
whole enterprise risky, suspenseful, and at least partly accidental. Accidental
is another word for miraculous. If the opposite of science is religion, then my
fathers feelings about wine were as religious as he ever got. My research
confirmed that I was different from him not only in matters of gustation and
olfaction but also in matters of character. He liked to leave some things a
mystery. Id rather find everything out.

Im more open about my wine non-appreciation than I once was, and I have discovered
that I am far from alone. Everywhere I go these days, I seem to run into people who
belong to the club. Its members include two former students of mine, one who says
that half a glass leaves her zonked and red-faced (I suspect an acetaldehyde
dehydrogenase deficiency), and another who invests in wine futures but has never
sampled his stock because he says wine makes his mouth hurt (possible supertaster).
A former boyfriend recently told me that his late father, who could have afforded
Haut-Brion, opted for half-gallon bottles of S. S. Pierce Sauternes, into which he
stirred half a cup of sugar (genetic variant for sweet preference).

And, of course, theres my brother Kim, the co-lyricist of the Dr Pepper jingle.
After I received the results of my 23andMe test, I called to tell him about TAS2R38
and TAS2R13. I thought that he might want to send off a saliva sample himself, but
he didnt. Like our father, he finds data reductive. Also, hed already told me why
he thought neither of us liked wine. I asked him years ago. He said, Because we
didnt need to escape our origins.

This is an excerpt from The Wine Lovers Daughter, to be published in November by

Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Anne Fadiman is the author of four books, including The Spirit Catches You and
You Fall Down, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Wine
Lovers Daughter, a memoir about her father. She has been the Francis Writer-in-
Residence at Yale since 2005.Read more

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