Synaesthesia: The sommelier’s secret weapon

When sommelier Jaime Smith drinks a Châteauneuf-duPape, he sees blocky, heavy red and blue pentagons approaching him – clumsily bumping together. Alcohol drips from above, pushing the muscular shapes out of the metaphorical ‘box’ in his mind.

Smith, the first director of wine at the famous MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas and twice named best sommelier in America by Food & Wine magazine, has synaesthesia, a neurological condition that means that, when one of your senses is stimulated, you also experience another.

There are many different types of synaesthesia – from seeing colours when you hear music to associating numbers with different colours and even tasting flavours when reading certain words. Scientists estimate that it affects between 2% and 4% of the population.

Gustatory-visual synaesthesia, where people experience colours, shapes or textures when they taste, is even rarer – affecting about 0.0021% of the population (or one in every 50,000 people), according to researchers at Bournemouth University.

And yet it seems to be remarkably common among top sommeliers. Of the 279 people who have earned the title Master Sommelier, two – Roland Micu and Sur Lucero – are known to experience colours and shapes when they taste wine. Beyond the MS category, the number of synaesthete sommeliers grows further.

Both Micu and Smith put their success as sommeliers (at least in part) down to their synaesthesia – which Smith says gives him his ‘tasting superpower’. When blind tasting, they will often recognise a wine instantly from its shape.

‘Wines with certain acidity levels, alcohol levels, sugar levels do different things to you and create different shapes,’ says Micu, who was the youngest ever Master Sommelier when he qualified aged 28, in 2012, and is currently working at the World Equestrian Center in Florida.

‘Wines with the highest sugar and most alcohol are usually the most round. Those with the most acidity have the most angularity – like a firework shape.’

Roland Micu MS, beverage director at the World Equestrian Center, Florida, created this remarkable image for us, to illustrate his experience of tasting a Nerello Mascalese red from Etna, Sicily.

‘The image is coming at the mouth from east to west, east being the front of the experience. Initially, the wine hits with a burst of tartness and some tannin (east on the image), as the wine takes shape on the palate, the acid continues to take control but what is happening on the back end are the tannins growing (centre of the image) and growing, like a swarm of tiny little tannin compounds taking over the mid-palate and finishing (west on the image) with some balance.’

Personal impression

For Smith – who experiences tastes and smells in a ‘box’ in his mind, where shapes enter then leave – acidity generally shows as a coloured stripe. The longer and brighter the acidity, the longer the line.

Oak ageing, meanwhile, adds a textural fuzziness to his shapes, while high alcohol appears as a dripping precipitation from above.

For Gilian Handelman, vice president of education at Jackson Family Wines in California (and another synaesthete), wines have sounds, too. ‘You get swish swish wines – things like a high-acid Pinot Grigio or Assyrtiko – and gloop gloop wines, which are more viscous – Viogniers and Californian Chardonnay, etc,’ Handelman explains. ‘The noise depends on the body, the fruits and the ripeness.’

It even influences how she pairs wine with food – using the colours, shapes and frequencies of both wine and food to find the right matches. ‘If I’ve got salmon with capers and parsley – capers are “HERE” [she makes a high-pitched trill similar to one she made earlier when describing Sauvignon Blanc], so I know I need to pair it with a high-acid white,’ she adds.

Synaesthesia can also prove helpful when trying to explain wines to customers. ‘All of the time I’m using shapes and hand gestures to describe wines,’ Micu says. ‘I feel people understand better when I describe textures and shapes than when I use more traditional tasting notes.’

Does he think that people would engage more with wine labels if they had colours and shapes as well as tasting notes (a thing Handelman has been exploring)? ‘It could be interesting – though people might not be ready for it.’

Smith is sceptical: ‘People won’t understand if I say, “This is an ultra-blue wine from Otago”. I try to keep it simple.’

Gilian Handelman, of Jackson Family Wines, sketched for us the mental impression she gets on tasting the Gran Moraine, Yamhill-Carlton Chardonnay 2021 from Willamette Valley, Oregon (US$50 granmoraine.com).

‘I like to draw this wine from the inside-out as opposed to as a length (front to back) on my palate. I have always loved the brilliance of this wine. It struck me in its first vintage (2013) and I’ve been drawn to it ever since. Aromatically/flavour-wise it points to things from the garden: snap peas/fava, quince, Meyer lemon, squash blossoms, gardenia. Yellow mostly, but with flashes of orange and green.

‘But it’s the texture that thrills me, and where I feel it most in my body: it has a deep centre softness leading to brilliant, zingy frills on the outer edges as it unfolds on my palate. And there are elements within the wine that remind me of sand – enveloping and grainy, standing out as tiny polish points in the length of the texture.’

Memory enhancer

Some research suggests that, rather than being a binary condition that people either have or don’t have, synaesthesia is more of a spectrum. Does this mean that we could learn something from these sommeliers and their ‘superpowers’? All three have run classes where they taste wines and encourage attendees to draw shapes based on what they experience.

Often people are able to visualise what they’re tasting. ‘There will always be a large group with similar pictures,’ says Smith. ‘It’s unexplainable. I thought maybe I was influencing it so I stopped talking about the wine beforehand – but people still came out with very similar drawings.’

Studies also suggest that synaesthetes are more creative and have a better memory than the general population. For Maggie Harrison, an Oregon-based winemaker, her synaesthesia (which means she sees colours when she hears numbers and days of the week) isn’t a tasting superpower but a memory one.

She uses it when blending – which involves blind tasting more than 100 samples from different plots (each represented only by a number) and trying different blended combinations. By associating each numbered sample and each blend with a colour, Harrison can immediately remember its characteristics when blending.

The enhanced recall aspect of synaesthesia is another thing we may be able to emulate. A trial carried out by researchers at the University of East London found that, when non-synaesthetes were taught to associate certain letters with certain colours they were able to remember words more easily.

But be careful what you wish for. A synaesthesia superpower comes with downsides, too. ‘I can pick up all the smells in the room. As a child, I used to become overwhelmed,’ Smith says. ‘Chemical smells are really jagged to me. Even now, with my wife, we have to talk about what perfumes she buys because some trigger me.’

Three things can we learn from synaesthete sommeliers

• Even if you don’t think you perceive wines as shapes or colours, have a go at drawing what you experience during tastings. It may reveal more than you expect.
• If you’re trying to remember something, associating it with a colour or sound may help. This could be useful when trying to memorise wine regions or grape varieties.
• When pairing wine and food, think about colour and shape – not just flavour. Does a pointy green bean really go with a rounded butter-yellow Chardonnay? Or would a sharp, crisp, chartreuse-green Sauvignon Blanc be better?

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