ABSTRACT
Gustatory taste was originally thought to have sensory access to four primary qualities (sweet, sour, salty, and bitter). In the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant held that the experience of taste was an individual’s immediate hedonic preference and that it could not provide a temporally extended reflective experience. In the nineteenth century, Brillat-Savarin revolutionized our understanding of taste by showing that it must also include olfactory sensing, which allowed for an expanded number of gustatory qualities called ‘flavors.’ Brillat-Savarin also showed that tasters were able to have an extended reflective experience by means of the alimentary trajectory of ingesting, retronasally sensing, and swallowing what had been consumed. Later scientific studies have confirmed retronasal sensing’s role in contributing to gustatory experience and the existence of the alimentary trajectory. Yet there have been some commonplace attempts to short-circuit the trajectory—particularly in wine tasting—by an individual’s not swallowing. The chapter defends the trajectory from attempts to short-circuit it and diminish its importance. Also, the integrity of the process is particularly important for understanding a topic of current interest: the complex but subtle collection of qualities that constitute sensing a particular wine’s distinctive terroir.
