WINE AS AN EMOTIONAL AND AESTHETIC OBJECT: IMPACT OF EXPERTISE
Abstract
Wine tasting has been shown to provide emotions to tasters (Coste et al. 2018). How will expertise impact this emotional response? Burnham and Skilleås (2012) reported that the cultural, experiential, and aesthetic competencies characterize an expert in wine compared to a novice. Although there is no consensual definition of an aesthetic experience, Burnham and Skilleås (2012) reported that aesthetic appreciation is “disinterested, normative for others and communicable” in comparison to sensory pleasure. In another sector where the emotional impact takes an important place, the artistic sector, Leder et al. (2014) demonstrated that expertise exerts an influence on cognitive and emotional processing, which results in attenuated emotional reactions. Paasschen et al. (2015) reported that the cognitive aspects of artistic evaluation, relating to the aesthetic aspects would strongly depend on expertise, but that the affective components would on the contrary be less affected by the expertise, and consistent between all the observers. These results are consistent with the Kantian notion that an aesthetic position is emotionally distanced. The purpose of this study is to determine the impact of expertise on emotions and aesthetic judgment in wine tasting.
To answer this issue, 20 oenologists, 20 musicians and 20 novices had tasted 6 red wines. Two kinds of emotional responses were measured and previously validated in a wine tasting context. The first one is a conscious and subjective response, the cognitive component of emotion (also called feelings). This response was measured using self-declarative questionnaires. The second kind of emotional response is an unconscious and objective response. The unconscious part of emotions was evaluated with measurement of the response of the autonomic nervous system (heart rate and electrodermal activity). The emotional responses were compared to the aesthetic judgments of wines evaluated with self-declarative questionnaires.
The aim was to evaluate whether there is a contradiction between the supposed distanced declarative response of the expert and the unconscious physiological emotional response. Moreover, the results obtained with musicians allowed to determine whether the impact of the expertise is specific or transposable to another aesthetic field.
DOI:
Issue: OENO Macrowine 2023
Type: Article
Authors
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Keywords
emotions, expertise, aesthetic, sensory analysis