0:04 So I would like everyone to close their eyes, just for a second,
0:10 and imagine that you're holding a glass of wine.
0:13 And really imagine that experience.
0:16 Take the wine, swirl the wine, smell it, and take a sip.
0:23 Now imagine that someone next to you leans over and says, "Mm,
0:29 that was a really complex wine."
0:32 OK, what did they mean by that?
0:34 What exactly does complexity mean?
0:37 It's a term that we use a lot in the world of wine.
0:41 Wine critics use it, right?
0:43 When I write a tasting note, I sometimes use complexity.
0:47 But I will tell you an industry secret.
0:51 If you ask 10 different people,
0:53 "What does complexity mean," you might get 10 different answers.
0:58 So today I want to explore this idea of complexity to show that actually,
1:04 when it comes to smell and taste,
1:06 we can get a lot of complex cognitive ideas
1:10 that usually are reserved for the realm of art.
1:13 So a very small art history introduction first,
1:16 and then we'll get to the good stuff, which is the wine.
1:19 So in psychology, we often see this curve, this Berlyne curve,
1:24 that explains the relationship between complexity and liking.
1:30 And the idea here is that it's an upside-down U curve,
1:34 so if something is too simple, people don't like it.
1:38 On the other hand, if something is too complex, people also don't like it.
1:42 So there's a sweet spot in the middle, like an ideal complexity.
1:48 I made some audio clips to demonstrate this idea.
1:51 So here's a simple one.
1:56 (Music note) So maybe if you're into very modern music,
1:58 you might think that was really good.
2:00 Otherwise you might find that a bit boring.
2:02 So here's another one with a little bit more complexity.
2:09 (Musical tune) These are my original compositions, by the way.
2:11 And here's a third example where there's a lot of complexity.
2:18 (Musical tune) So how many people like that one?
2:21 OK, we have a few in the audience.
2:22 Very nice, very nice.
2:25 But I wanted to demonstrate the point, right?
2:27 When you have too much complexity, often people don't like it.
2:31 But is that true in the world of wine?
2:34 I chose one quote from a famous wine critic, Matt Kramer,
2:39 and let's see what he said about complexity.
2:42 "The greatest standard used in assessing the quality of wine is complexity.
2:48 The more times you can return to a glass of wine
2:51 and find something different,
2:53 either the bouquet or the taste, the more complex the wine.
2:57 The greatest wines are not so much overpowering as they are seemingly limitless."
3:03 So this is a very beautiful quote, right?
3:05 Very artistic.
3:06 And you start thinking, OK, so what exactly is complexity?
3:10 I work as a researcher, I'm a scientist.
3:14 In my work, I need to try to define what one critic says, right?
3:20 This is a very vague idea.
3:21 So how do I exactly go in and investigate this concept?
3:26 And the approach I took, I will demonstrate a little bit today.
3:30 There are actually two ways of thinking about complexity
3:33 when it comes to wine
3:34 or food.
3:36 There's, first, chemical complexity, right?
3:38 That's the stuff that's in the glass.
3:40 What are the chemical molecules in the wine?
3:43 And then there's a concept called psychological complexity,
3:46 where complexity is not really in the wine,
3:48 but it's in the mind of the drinker.
3:51 And I will show two different studies.
3:53 The first one: we investigate the idea of chemical complexity -- it's complexity in
3:59 the glass.
4:00 And in the second study, we'll look at psychological complexity.
4:03 It's complexity in the mind of the drinker.
4:06 So let's look at the first one.
4:08 This was a study I conducted at the University of Oxford some years ago.
4:13 And the idea was, OK,
4:15 if I have two wines and I make a 50/50 blend,
4:19 surely the blend should chemically be more complex, right, than the individuals.
4:25 So here we took three wines, single grape variety from the same producer,
4:31 and then I made 50/50 blends of these three wines for a total of
4:35 six.
4:36 It looks something like this.
4:38 When someone came to the lab to do the study,
4:40 they were presented with six wines.
4:43 They were not told which one was which, right?
4:44 We didn't tell them at all about which are blends, which are single variety.
4:48 They were just told, here are six red wines,
4:50 I would like you to taste them.
4:52 And people made some ratings.
4:54 For example, they had to guess whether the wine was a blend or not.
4:58 They had to name the flavours
5:00 and then they evaluated the wine based on things like liking,
5:03 familiarity, complexity, flavour, intensity, quality and willingness to pay.
5:09 So I want you all to just take a moment and think.
5:13 Do you think that people could actually tell, in a blind tasting,
5:16 which were blends and which were single varieties?
5:19 So maybe hands up, how many people think yes, they can tell the difference?
5:24 OK, maybe one or two or three.
5:26 Most people think no.
5:27 So I'm going to tell you something that was a very surprising finding.
5:31 Because I had around 80 people in this study,
5:34 there were some people who knew nothing about wine,
5:36 they just worked in the department and they wanted to come for free wine.
5:39 And we had some other people who had different wine certifications.
5:44 I was running the Oxford Blind Tasting Society,
5:46 so I kind of also got people in society to come do the study.
5:50 So the surprising finding was, if you looked at everybody overall,
5:54 people couldn't tell blends from single varieties.
5:57 But the fun thing was that actually it was the beginners,
6:01 the people who didn't know that much about wine,
6:03 who actually could guess blends or not higher than chance.
6:07 Very surprising.
6:08 It was the beginners who did better.
6:10 I don't know why, but that was one of the surprising findings.
6:13 Another finding we found was
6:15 that the blends were not rated
6:19 as more complex than the single varieties.
6:23 This was maybe also a little bit surprising.
6:25 What it showed is
6:26 that chemical complexity in the glass does not necessarily equal perceived complexity
6:33 when people are rating the wine.
6:35 A final surprising finding from this study was
6:38 that there was actually one thing
6:42 that could explain people's complexity rating.
6:45 It wasn't whether it was a blend or not.
6:47 It was how much oak they could taste in the wine.
6:50 So people who wrote things like vanilla or spice or cinnamon,
6:56 writing those words in the flavor was actually predictive of higher complexity
7:03 and also more willingness to pay.
7:06 So at the end of the story,
7:08 it seems like chemical complexity doesn't really equal perceived complexity,
7:13 but if you put your wine in oak,
7:14 people are going to think it’s more complex,
7:16 and they might like it more.
7:18 So that was the first study.
7:21 For the second one,
7:22 I'm going to go back to this idea of psychological complexity.
7:25 So, you know, it's beauty in the eye of the beholder.
7:29 Or is complexity in the mouth, I guess, of the taster?
7:35 And here, I wanted to introduce a different concept,
7:38 which is this idea of time.
7:41 Complexity, when you're tasting something, there can be two different ways of defining it.
7:46 You can have static complexity.
7:48 This is at any moment in time, you know,
7:51 how many different flavors do you perceive?
7:54 Or there's an idea of dynamic complexity, which is, imagine,
7:58 go back to your imagination.
8:00 You're tasting the wine in your mind.
8:02 If you pay attention to how the wine is evolving in the mouth over
8:07 time,
8:08 you can actually follow how it changes.
8:11 So I also made some audio clips to demonstrate this idea.
8:15 The first one is a static complexity.
8:21 (Music note) So standard major triad, nothing complex.
8:25 And -- it's complex.
8:26 The second one is dynamic complexity.
8:35 (Musical tune) So when I run these studies,
8:37 I use music a lot
8:37 as a way to demonstrate these concepts
8:37 because everyone knows that music is something
8:39 that evolves over time,
8:39 right?
8:39 So you can listen to a change
8:39 and the same thing can be applied to flavor.
8:39 So for this study,
8:39 I really needed to find some wines that are very complex.
8:39 Because we're in Portugal, but also because I love Madeira,
8:39 it's my favorite fortified wine,
8:39 we ran a study with Madeira wines at different aging points,
8:39 because it's a well-known fact, at least in the wine world,
8:39 that the older the wine, the older the Madeira, specifically,
8:39 the more complex it gets.
8:39 This is what everyone in the wine trade believes,
8:39 but we wanted to see if this is actually true.
8:40 So for this study, I worked with Justino’s Winery,
8:40 and we had Madeira samples that are three, 10 or 20 years old,
8:40 aged in barrel.
8:40 Again, the study looked something like this.
8:40 People got six glasses, and you might think, OK,
8:40 these glasses look different from the other study.
8:40 Why are they black?
8:40 So the reason why they're black is,
8:40 if anyone has had Madeira or port before, I'm in Portugal after all.
8:40 As the wine ages, the color will change.
8:40 So if we used clear glasses here,
8:40 people could just notice by the color how old the wine might be.
8:40 So to eliminate that factor, we used black glasses here.
8:40 You can also see that they have randomized three-digit numbers.
8:40 So we really made this study where people had no idea exactly what they
8:40 were tasting.
8:40 They were told it was Madeira tasting.
8:40 And for the study, we had both novices and experts.
8:40 This time I had about 70 novices and 30 experts come do the study,
8:40 so I could also compare between them.
8:40 Now, the first thing they had to do is just taste the wine
8:40 and rate how complex they think the wine is.
8:40 On a simple scale, one to nine, how complex they think this wine is.
8:40 And the results were quite interesting.
8:40 So on this graph, I tried to make it simple.
8:40 On the horizontal axis, we have the three different aging groups.
8:40 So three years, 10 years, 20 years.
8:40 The green line represents the novice -- the people who don’t know
8:40 that much about wine.
8:40 You can see that there's a slight upwards curve, right?
8:40 So people kind of think as the wine gets older, it gets more complex.
8:40 Actually, this is not statistically significant.
8:40 But if you look at the... in the orange line, right,
8:40 the curve is much more steep.
8:40 And here we can actually see that for experts, in a blind tasting,
8:40 with black glasses where they couldn't see the color,
8:40 they actually do consistently rate older wines as more complex.
8:40 So in other words,
8:40 there is something to this idea that as the wine ages,
8:40 it gets more complex, as we can see here.
8:40 The second thing that we asked people to do,
8:40 and this will take maybe a little bit more explanation,
8:40 is that we asked them to do a test that we call TCATA,
8:40 temporal check all that apply.
8:40 What happened was that as people were tasting the wine,
8:40 they had eight different descriptors --
8:40 that sounds like a crazy video game --
8:40 that they had to check for every descriptor they were perceiving at any moment
8:40 in time.
8:40 So imagine holding the wine in your mouth for 30 seconds.
8:40 For each second, you had to tick all the descriptors like,
8:40 do I taste caramel now?
8:40 Do I taste orange zest now?
8:40 So it was a constant ticking action.
8:40 And the reason why we did this kind of crazy game is to really
8:40 measure,
8:40 as you're holding the wine in your mouth,
8:40 how do the flavours change over time?
8:40 And also people spit the wine out at some point,
8:40 but we kept on measuring the aftertaste.
8:40 So we had this measurement of both the in-mouth sensation
8:40 and also what happened afterwards.
8:40 And the reason why I'm explaining is
8:41 because I'm going to show a crazy video trying to demonstrate what happened with
8:41 the wines.
8:41 So let me just talk you through it really quickly.
8:41 What you're about to see is the temporal trajectory of how the wines change
8:41 in the mouth over time.
8:41 The simple way to interpret this graph is if you’re closer to,
8:41 for example, orange zest in the middle,
8:41 the closer the line gets to orange zest, the more you taste orange zest.
8:41 The closer the line gets to bitter, the more you taste bitter.
8:41 I'm going to illustrate the trajectory of three different wines.
8:41 Tinta Negra is the grape variety, and they’re aged three,
8:41 10 and 20 years.
8:41 Basically, the darker the line, the more aged it gets.
8:41 So I'm going to start the video.
8:41 Basically for every two seconds, the lines will move in this space,
8:41 in this flavor space.
8:41 Every two seconds equals 15 seconds in real time of evolution in the mouth.
8:41 And this is the result of experts.
8:41 So let me play the video, and then we can walk through it.
8:41 (Video) So you can see that the three curves are different, right?
8:42 Especially the dark one in the middle, for the 20 years.
8:42 The flavor evolution is a little bit different from the other two.
8:43 And now, if you compare
8:44 that with how the novices do it,... the curves don't really deviate from each
8:44 other so much.
8:44 They all kind of follow each other.
8:44 And this says something about how novices perceive the flavor evolution.
8:44 Whereas experts are able to clearly differentiate the three lines, for the novices,
8:44 it's much more of a similar experience.
8:44 And this brings up point that when it comes to complexity,
8:44 it's not just what's in the glass,
8:44 but also what's in the mind of the drinker.
8:44 Novices and experts have different mental experiences,
8:44 and they have different concepts of what means.
8:44 So to go back to my Berlyne curve in the beginning,
8:44 one of the questions
8:44 that still remain in the world of wine is whether more complexity equals better.
8:44 We know that for music, too much complexity might not result in more preference.
8:44 But in the world of wine,
8:44 we actually haven't found evidence that too much complexity is bad.
8:44 So maybe it depends on the mind of the beholder.
8:44 So my last message to everyone is, the next time you drink something,
8:46 you eat something, just take some time to slow down
8:47 and stop and think about how the flavors are evolving over time.
8:47 Thank you very much.
