The Fairer Palate
When it comes the men versus women, many things are open to perpectual debate but when it comes to have a superior palate for wine, women win hands down and here’s why.
Do women have a sharper palate for wine?
This is a question posed not from the cliched space of gender one upmanship. Surely, that’s a medieval sport for most, pitting men against women to whip up needless competition. That women have a sharper palate than men and by extension, better tasters of wine is borne out by scientific fact and empirical evidence and rationally explains why there are now more women in the wine business than ever. Multiple studies by leading scientists have concluded, to a some degree of certainty that women, of reproductive age in particular had an acutely better sense of smell and taste than men. When it comes to picking up on the subtlest of aromas in wine, of which there are quite a few, women have the natural ability to pick up the faintest of aromas in a glass of wine — up to 11 orders of magnitude lower than men. This is thanks to the part of the brain connected to the nose having considerably more neurons. Scientists have also attributed women’s keener sense of smell to evolution wherein women developed a sharp sense of smell driven by survival instinct as well the instinct to protect their children. One study put it down plainly to the structure of a woman’s nose which tend to have larger nasal cavities.
Clearly men don’t seem to catch any break when it comes to matters of the nose. It doesn’t get better much better on count of the palate. Women are also credited with accounting for most of the world’s supertasters. These are individual gifted with over 100 times more taste buds on each centimetre. Such an extraordinary concentration of taste buds puts women at a superior perch when discerning the most subtlest nuances and notes, often times, illuminating the winemakers themselves with flavours they didn’t pick up on. Experts on the subject believe that in addition to have a sharper nose and palate for wine, women also tend to be able to convert this ability into a skill faster than men. This superior innate ability has helped many a female wine professional also pick on some of the unsavoury flavours in wines, especially signs of oxidation and spoilage which aren’t so obvious even to the trained palate. And yet a a recent Bloomberg research found that of the world’s 229 master sommeliers, only 32 were women. Now given that to be a master sommelier, one almost certainly needs to be a supertaster, clearly the gender balance in that regard needs correcting. Women, the facts lucidly suggest, have the fairer palate.
