Charles Spence is Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford and head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory, which he founded in 1997. His research demonstrates that flavour is constructed by the brain through the integration of all five senses, memory, and expectation, not detected by the tongue. Author of the international bestseller Gastrophysics (Penguin, 2017) and Sensehacking (2021), winner of an Ig Nobel Prize for proving that the crunch sound changes how fresh a crisp tastes, he writes on the science of taste perception for the Ourglass Taste Decoded series.
In 2004, in a laboratory at the University of Oxford, Charles Spence and his colleague Massimiliano Zampini sat two hundred volunteers in front of a stack of Pringles and a pair of headphones. The volunteers bit into the crisps. The headphones played back the sound of each bite in real time, with modifications the volunteers did not know about. When the high-frequency crunch was amplified, the crisps tasted fresher. When it was attenuated, the same crisps from the same tube tasted staler.
The food had not changed. The sound had changed everything.
The experiment won the 2008 Ig Nobel Prize, awarded for research that first makes people laugh, then makes them think. But the finding was not a joke. It was the first widely reported proof of a principle his laboratory had been documenting for years: what we call flavour is not a property of food. It is a construction of the brain, assembled in real time from taste, smell, sight, sound, touch, memory, and expectation.
If sound alters the crunch of a crisp, what does music do to a glass of wine? If the weight of a fork changes the perceived quality of the food on it (it does; Spence tested this too), then what exactly are we evaluating when we say we are tasting?
'Taste is the only sense that demands ingestion.'
Charles Spence explains why flavour is constructed by the brain rather than detected by the tongue, and why drinking better starts with understanding what context, light, sound, and expectation do to the wine in your glass.
THE BRAIN BUILDS FLAVOUR
The tongue registers five tastes: sweet, salt, sour, bitter, umami. But these are raw signals. The alphabet, not the sentence.
Flavour is assembled higher up. Retronasal olfaction (smell reaching the brain via the back of the palate, not through the nostrils) contributes the vast majority of what we experience as 'taste.' This is why food loses its flavour when you have a cold. The trigeminal nerve adds texture: the burn of chilli, the tingle of carbonation. Visual cues prime expectation before the first sip. Auditory cues (the pop of a cork, the ambient sound of a room) modulate the experience in real time.
All of this converges in the orbitofrontal cortex, the insula, and the hippocampus, where the brain integrates sensory data with memory and expectation to produce a single, unified flavour. You do not taste wine and separately hear music and independently feel the weight of the glass. You experience one thing: this wine, in this moment. Change the music, the glass, or the moment, and the brain builds something different from the same liquid.
Spence demonstrated this in a study where white wine was dyed red. Trained tasters, not novices, described the dyed wine using red wine vocabulary: dark fruits, tannin, structure. The liquid was unchanged. The visual signal overrode the chemistry because the brain builds flavour from all available inputs, and colour was, for the brain's purposes, just as real as chemical composition.
Trained tasters described white wine dyed red using red wine vocabulary. The liquid was unchanged. The visual signal overrode the chemistry.
There is a practical corollary. The PROP gene determines sensitivity to bitter compounds: roughly a quarter of the population are 'supertasters' who experience tannins and astringency at far higher intensity than everyone else. Two people tasting the same glass of young Barolo are having measurably different experiences. Not because one palate is better trained. Because the brains are building from different biological baselines. Over a thousand academic papers from the Crossmodal Research Laboratory converge on one finding: flavour is not in the glass. It is in the brain that holds the glass.
THE PROVENCAL ROSE PARADOX
There is a wine every returning holidaymaker has tasted. It was perfect on the terrace in Provence: dry, mineral, the colour of pale copper in the late afternoon light. Three weeks later, the same bottle sits on a kitchen table in London under a sixty-watt bulb, and it is merely fine. Not bad. Not what you remember.
Spence calls this the Provencal Rose Paradox. The wine has not changed. The construction has changed, because the brain was working with different inputs: warmer light, outdoor sound, sun on skin, the relaxation response, the absence of cognitive load that accompanies an ordinary Tuesday.
The paradox is not that memory deceives. It is that context is a genuine ingredient. The Provencal experience was real. So is the London experience. They differ because the construction differed.
Spence has mapped the variables with experimental precision. High-pitched music measurably amplifies perceived acidity: a Sancerre tastes crisper with Vivaldi. Low frequencies deepen perceived body: a Barolo gains gravitas with cello. These are not metaphors. They are measurable shifts in reported perception, replicated across studies. Spence calls them flavour-sound correspondences.
Lighting follows the same logic. Warm light shifts perception toward sweetness. Cool light emphasises minerality. Candlelight makes an ordinary Cotes du Rhone feel richer, not because candles are romantic but because warm light changes the brain's flavour construction. And temperature, the most practical variable of all: most homes serve reds too warm and whites too cold, systematically distorting what the brain has to work with.
GASTROPHYSICS AND THE DESIGN OF EXPERIENCE
In 2017, Penguin published Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating. The book won the Le Grand Prix de la Culture Gastronomique. Its argument was simple and destabilising: if flavour is constructed by the brain from all available sensory inputs, then flavour can be designed.
Not manipulated. Designed. The chef who chooses a white plate over a black one is designing the sensory environment to support the flavour she intends. The drinker who cools a red to fifteen degrees and serves it with aged Comte is engineering her own experience, using Spence's findings as tools.
His most celebrated collaboration began in the mid-2000s with Heston Blumenthal at The Fat Duck in Bray. The dish was called 'Sound of the Sea': seafood arranged on tapioca sand, served alongside a large conch shell. Inside the shell sat earbuds connected to an iPod playing waves breaking on a shore and seagulls overhead. Diners who ate with the soundtrack rated the seafood as measurably fresher and more intensely flavoured than those who ate identical food in silence. Same plate. Same kitchen. Minutes apart. The dish remains on The Fat Duck menu nearly two decades later.
Diners who ate with the ocean soundtrack rated identical seafood as measurably fresher. Same plate, same kitchen, minutes apart.
The practical applications extend beyond three-Michelin-star theatre. The Ourglass 'Tuesday Night Rescue' is applied gastrophysics for a twelve-pound Cotes du Rhone: lower the temperature to fifteen degrees, switch to warm lighting, add anchovy toast, pour into a larger bowl, wait five minutes. The wine does not change. The conditions optimise what the brain constructs from it.
Sensehacking (2021) extended the framework beyond food to everyday life. The Perfect Meal (2014, with Betina Piqueras-Fiszman, winner of the Prose Prize for Popular Science) examined every non-food factor that shapes dining. Across fifteen books, the argument holds: the senses do not passively receive. They actively construct.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR HOW YOU DRINK WINE
The wine industry's evaluation infrastructure assumes objectivity. A score of 94 means the wine is better than a 91. An appellation guarantees origin and quality. These instruments are useful. In light of Spence's research, they are also incomplete.
The supertaster variation means a score assumes a shared perceptual baseline that does not exist. The context research means that even for the same individual, the same wine produces different constructions in different settings. What Spence's work offers is not a replacement for scores but a deeper understanding of what happens when you taste. Price shapes perception. Context shapes perception. Expectation shapes perception. Your own genetics shape perception.
None of these are reasons to distrust your experience. They are reasons to understand it.
Developing taste confidence means noticing what you are actually tasting rather than what you expect to taste. Drink the same grape from three regions. Drink the same wine at two temperatures. Drink the same bottle on a Tuesday and a Saturday. Each comparison gives the brain more construction material. You are not learning what wine tastes like. You are learning how you taste.
This is what Spence brings to the Taste Decoded series, alongside Rory Sutherland's behavioural economics, Tim Hayward's craft of critical thinking, and Amelia Singer's practice of drinking with curiosity. Sutherland explains why meaning shapes value. Hayward explains why argument matters more than vocabulary. Singer explains why permission matters more than expertise. Spence explains the mechanism underneath: the brain that builds flavour from everything it has.
The crisp has not changed. Still a Pringle from a tube. What changed was the sound, and the sound changed the experience.
Every glass of wine works the same way. The liquid has properties: acidity, tannin, alcohol, volatile aroma compounds. Real. Measurable. But the flavour you experience is a construction, built in real time by a brain processing the colour of the wine, the shape of the glass, the music in the room, the light on the table, the conversation at your elbow, and every glass of wine you have ever drunk before.
The flavour you experience is a construction, built in real time by a brain processing everything around the glass, not just what is in it.
This is not a reason for despair. It is a reason for curiosity. If the candle on the table changes the sweetness of the wine, you are not being deceived. You are understanding how your own instrument works.
The crisp is still a crisp. But you hear it differently now. What changed was not the crisp. What changed was you.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Benedict Johnson is the founder of Ourglass, a London-based taste platform dedicated to helping people become confident wine lovers. He writes on the psychology of taste, the economics of wine, and the culture of drinking, and curates the Taste Decoded series, which brings together sommeliers, communicators, academics, and creatives to decode what great actually tastes like.