Ep. 536 Janice Wang | Voices

Welcome to the Italian wine podcast. I'm Rebecca Lawrence, and this is voices. In this set of interviews, I will be focusing on issues of inclusion, diversity, and allyship through inter at conversations with wine industry professionals from all over the globe. If you enjoy listening, please consider donating through Italian wine podcast dot com. Any amount helps us cover equipment, production and publication costs, and remember to subscribe and rate our show wherever you tune in. Welcome to the Italian wine podcast with me, your host today, Rebecca Lawrence. I'm excited to be talking to doctor Janice Wang, assistant professor, the apartment of food science at Orchard University. Welcome to the podcast Doctor. Wang, I have to say I I don't really know where to start as you've been involved in so many interesting pieces of research. Oh, thank you. That's that's very kind. And, it's a pleasure to be here, Rebecca. You initially trained as a computer scientist Yep. And then returned to academia to follow your passion for sensory perception and cognition. So maybe the best place to start is is what came first, your your interest in multi sensory research, or given this is the Italian wine podcast, your love of wine. Definitely my love of wine because after so, my bachelor's was in computer science. And then afterwards, I was working at a very large computer software company as a software developer, but I I was to be honest, quite bored with my job, and I wanted to explore, like, something else that was interesting and different. And I've always liked wine because, I mean, I also like perfume. I liked very complex smells, and I like that experiential side of things. So for example, even a university, I went to university in California, and, you know, most people went to Mexico for spring break. I went to Napa for spring break. And I had, you know, this, like, great road trip spring break, you know, visiting wineries, and that was my idea of fun. So I've I've always loved wine. And when I started feeling like, oh, my job is really boring. I want something else to do, I started taking WSTT courses. So you started taking WSTT courses as well as studying, or this is while you were working. So you managed to fit in WSTT and a full time job. So I did level two and level three while I was doing my full time job. And then when I decided to quit my job and go back to academia, I was I first went to MIT to look at how music influences flavor perception. So in fact, it was my love of music that kind of took me away from my job. But then the more research I did with, you know, music and flavor, the the more I got into the multi sensory part of things. And when I went to Oxford for my PhD, I I actually wanted to join the wine tasting societies at Oxford, not really for the wine, but in order to be able to recruit participants for my experiments because I knew that I wanted to do research looking at, you know, how music influences flavor, and I wanted people who already, you know, had a good sense of how to describe flavor. So I think that kind of fell into the university wine society because they told me about the Cambridge Oak for varsity blind tasting competition. And, I mean, I'm Canadian and the company from the US, I I thought this was the most harry potter thing I can imagine, right, like an Oxford Cambridge wine showdown. So I got really involved in competitive blind tasting and ended up running the society for a few years. So that got me even deeper into wine, and that's what motivated me to do my diploma in Oxford. That's amazing. I mean, the WCT diploma is enough of a feat if you're just studying for it, but doing it whilst also running a wine society at Oxford and studying for a PhD. I mean, that's incredible. It it was difficult, and I should say that I started my diploma when I was doing my postdoc. So I I had the good sense to finish my PhD first before starting the diploma, because I had many friends in who was trying to do the diploma and the PhD at the same time, and they told me that was really hard. So, you know, instead I was doing my diploma while doing my postdoc and also starting my job as the assistant professor, which arguably isn't much easier. That doesn't sound any different to me. But, yeah, the the diploma, as you know, takes a lot of time. I used to joke that I've never studied for anything you know, my PhD was easier than the diploma in a way because I didn't have to memorize all this facts and knowledge. That's so funny because that's exactly what I tell people because I I think my diploma was harder than my PH today, for sure, because it's a different mode of studies. Exactly. And you have, as you have sort of already alluded to this this sensory aspect to it. It's not just memorizing facts and being able to build arguments. It is also there's this tasting element, which sounds like you must have been pretty well prepared for having done competitive blind tasting. Can you can you tell me a little bit more about this? Cause I'm really intrigued about the idea of competitive blind tasting. Yes. So you'll be surprised to hear that it's actually quite a popular, I guess, university based, competitive activity, I guess, because the oldest one there is is the Oxford Cambridge one that, has been running now for sixty eight years. And in that one, you get twelve wines, six reds, six whites, you get them port you in glasses, you know, they can't, you know, look at the bottle shape or anything. And then, we have to say what's the major grape variety? What's the country, major region, and sub or sub region of origin, the vintage, and we also have to write a tasting note. And it's usually judged by Genesis Robinson and Hugh Johnson. Oh my. So so, you know, just just a couple of, you know, the biggest names in wine. Yeah. Because they both, you know, Hughes from Cambridge and Genesis from Oxford. Yeah. It makes sense. But, you know, that extra level of pressure there. I mean, you'd be surprised how many people in the UK wine trade came out of the Oxford Cambridge Cambridge, Marcy match. It's like a thing. But but besides the Marcy match, many schools in Europe, especially in France, also do blind tasting competitions. So when I was in Oxford, I used to spend, a lot of time in the spring just, you know, traveling around Champagne and Bordeaux doing different competitions. It's a very tough life. So, the good thing about doing all this blind tasting, like, we practiced a lot. I went back when I was running society, we used to do sixty to seventy events a year. Of blind tasting practice, and we would usually bring in, wine educators, mostly from London. Lots of times, it's, you know, alumni who went on to, you know, work in a line trade, they would come and do tastings for us. And they would be ten to twelve line blind tastings. And we also had a coach, Hanneka Wilson. She's been a coach since nineteen ninety two, I believe. So, you know, we take it very seriously. And in fact, I've published two papers now on what the effect of blind tasting training. So I've published a paper showing that blind tasting training does work. It's not a hoax, and also that blind tasting training actually there's a generalizable perceptual learning effect so that you actually get better at discriminating different smells in general just from wine tasting training. So I am very interested in wine training just as a, you know, as a academic research also because it helps, you know, people appreciate wine. Yeah. I I really like that you use the term training as well because, you know, your palate is a muscle and you are having to train it like an athlete and know, I joke about there are so many, connections between between wine and sports, and how you approach them. But actually, I I think your approach is exactly right that you have to train and you do get better as you train. And Oh, of course. Yes. And now, actually, you you're not only obviously qualified, as WCT diploma and an educator, you teach about tasting specifically. Yes. So I wondered if you might share a couple of tips and tricks with our listeners. Anything in particular you've discovered useful, particularly given the research that you were doing at this time and and, you know, continue to be interested in. Yeah. So I live in this quite, you know, privileged world, so to speak, because I paced wine, I teach about wine, and also I do research on flavor perception in the memory. So it's like, you know, my research helps with my personal love for wine. But, so for example, when learning from my experience at the Oxford blind tasting society, what we used to teach people over and over again for blind tasting is that it's all about the structure and not about what it smells like. Because the way that a wine smells like can change over time just in the glass, and many wines will smell similar, and it's very easy for people to latch onto a smell that they think they get in the glass, and then that will completely take them down the wrong road of deduction when they're tasting. So instead, we train people to focus on the structure of the wine, so, you know, acid sugar, alcohol, body, whether it's oaked, what's the length. Because these structural elements, you can actually train to become good at analytically deducting them. And also if you get the structure of the wine down correctly, that will usually help you tailor the what the origin of the wine and what's the, you know, the grape of the wine. Is that with knowing the structure that will usually tell you to a pretty good degree what kind of wine you're looking at, and that's arguably a more accurate way of than looking at smell or flavor. And another thing I want to mention And this comes from a recent study that I ran in the lab, with Madira, is to look at the temporal evolution of the wine because we did a study looking at you know, one complexity and how how aging correlates to one complexity, and especially how the evolution of flavors in the mouth correlates with aging and complexity. And we have this sensory science method called, temporal choose all that apply. It's basically, a software setup where every single second, the participant has to pick all the flavors that they detect in the wine. And we do this for a hundred twenty seconds. And when I was pilot testing it and kinda try it on myself, I really noticed the difference of, you know, if we're sitting down on a moment by moment basis to look at wine evolution, there is actually really drastic changes like the the three year old, ball versus the twenty year old ball, like, I can see with time at which point to do, like, do the orange flavor or do the caramel flavor come up and at which point is a die down. And I feel like this kind of temporal evolution of wine has been overlooked in terms of wine tasting. I know that Nick Jackson recently published book on wine tasting, and he talked about the evolution of acidity in the mouth. Yeah. And I mean, like, I think that is a really key point. You know, does the does the acid hit immediately, or does it only, you know, come up after five or ten seconds? And I find the same with Canon as well. You know, does the tendon hit immediately or does it hit after? And I feel like these are aspects that we should you know, include in our wine tasting practice instead of just, you know, for that BSCT, when we're writing a tasting note, we say all the flavors as if they occur at the same time, but they don't. And I think if we have a more nuanced approach, to, you know, tackling wine tasting. It might help us get more out of the wine, and it might also help us, you know, with the deductive elements of wine tasting. So That's really fascinating and something that hadn't really occurred to me, but you're completely right, that flavors come and go, aromas come and go at different points. I do because I I'm also a WCT educator here in Verona, and and and in London. And one of the things I also talk to with my students is about moving your nose around the glass because you detect different compounds at different points in the glass. And it's a similar thing. It's like, have think about when the different flavors appear and disappear. I think this would be a really useful addition for students particularly at those upper levels, like you say, when you're coming to doing blind tasting for your diploma, for your master of wine, having that extra tool Yes. For your deduction is so fascinating. Yes. I completely agree. And I should say because I've been kind of preparing for M W for a while now, so I I practice deductive tasting at home with my husband who's also a pull my holder. And and yeah, I mean, I've I was saying the other day that I I should just have a stopwatch with me almost start by quantifying that level just just to see, you know, but I in general, I think it's important to notice when you're tasting a wine, you know, what hits you first, what hits you second, what hits you third, and I think that kind of sequence will help tell you more about the wine. So I wanted to just spend a little bit of time talking about your work with sound and taste because obviously your sensory perception work is not just based on taste, it it is other senses as well. So I was hoping you could talk a little bit about about the work that you've been doing with this and the interaction of sound and taste. Yes. Because my PhD was on how music influences flavor perception. And it's it's something where when I first tell people about, you know, how how music can influence what you taste, people think it's a crazy thing to look at. But actually, I believe that flavor is not in the food product, but flavor exists in the brain. And our what we taste in the food doesn't just come from the chemical compounds of the food itself. But, you know, it's also influenced by your mood, your expectations, you know, what what is the surroundings that you're in. And one of the, what we call contextual factors is background sound or music. And I should say that music can actually influence food in many ways. So, for example, if the easiest way is if you play music that you like, you'll like the food more. If the music that's playing, you don't like it, then you're not gonna like the food much. That's like one of the most simple ways in which the environment can influence food. But, you know, you can also get into more specific things like genre. So there are lots of research that show you have the restaurant place, you know, classical music, versus top forty pop, people will spend longer in the restaurant, and they'll also pay more. There's even been a study in a wine shop, showing that if you play classical music, people will pay more in the wine shop and also if you play French music versus German music, then people will buy more French wine than German wine. I mean, these sound kind of like silly examples, but it just shows the the power of the implicit effect of music. Now what I specifically focused on during my PhD and also now is on how people make associations between specific auditory attributes and also basic tastes. So for example, maybe I'll try this out on you and see how well it works. Oh, dear. So so so imagine I have a piece of music that's it's very high pitched. It's a it's a flute. That's playing a fast and high pitched piece of music versus if I have a a slow, say, a a cello sonata. So it's low pitched and slow. Right? So so we have a high pitched flute, That's fast versus a low pitched chalo that's slow. And I wanna tell you that one of them is sweet and sour and fruity, and the other one is more bitter. Which one do you think is the sweet and sour? And which one do you think is the bitter? Oh, that's interesting. I would go with the flute being sweet and sour and the cello being bitter. Yes. And this thank you for saying that because This is the this is like the most robust result that we've seen over time. It's actually with with pitch and taste. So people think that low pitch is associated with bitter tastes and also higher pitches with sweet and sour. That's really interesting because I thought you were gonna ask me what wine I was gonna pair with those sounds. Cause immediately, as you said, the the two different ones, I was thinking of wines. So which kind of wines would you pair with them? So I was thinking for the flute, something like, a a mosel riesling? Uh-huh. Kind of tropical fruit, but also high acidity. So like sweetness and sourness. Yep. And then for the cello, I was thinking something like, a northern rose, so a syrup, something with those kind of tannins that kind of dastiness evoke. Yes. Exactly. And we have published multiple papers looking at how people match music to wine, and also playing different music will that bring out, say, the fruitiness of a wine versus the oakiness of a wine versus the tendons? So, yeah, maybe not surprisingly. I have done a study where we had flute music you know, versus cello, and we used, New Zealand sollum versus, Argentine Malobec. Oh, yeah. So you can kind of mentally imagine which one goes with which. Exactly. But we also showed that, for example, acidity in the wine increased when they when people heard the flute music while tasting the wine. It's just blowing my mind. I now need to go away and just, like, read all of your papers and Well, so I I wrote a lot of papers during my PhD because my supervisor, Charles Spence is quite, you know, infamous for writing a lot of papers, but we do have three a series of three review papers specifically on wine and music. Fantastic. And it's open access. So This is amazing. So now, of course, we have the problem. Like, has your research meant that you're unable to just sit down and enjoy a glass of wine without thinking about it? And I assume this is also not helped by having, you know, your husband in the house who is also a wine, a wine expert. I can't turn my brain off when I taste white. In fact, no, I almost feel like I can't taste the wine properly unless I'm also writing a note about it. I know it's it's not ideal, but I almost feel like my hand is now a part of my my mouth in a way, at home because, you know, my husband also used He my husband actually took over the society after me, and we met, you know, doing blind tasting. So at home, we always blind taste wines. We each have our own separate stash of wines that the others don't really know what is inside, so we can give each other blind tastings. And before the whole COVID situation, whenever we had people come over, you know, like when my PhD students came over, they always knew that, you know, a dinner at my house means that there's gonna be blind tasting involved. So, you know, I I cannot divorce wine from a deductive thinking. I don't know the last time I had a bottle of wine without, you know, without having a blind. Wow. Your brain is always working on what you're doing. Or, you know, that's maybe it's work or maybe that's just the way that that's a different way of enjoyment. Yeah. No. I I completely agree that you've you've just changed the way you enjoy wine. It's not that you enjoy it any less. It's just that how you enjoy it has changed. And if anything, I enjoy it more because I'm engaging with it not just on a sensorial level, but also on I'm always thinking, you know, what's the climate? What's the origin? How did they make the wine? And I think, you know, more information, the better. That's why we have PhDs. Right? Yeah. For sure. So I think the only thing really left to ask is is what's next? You've already done so much, not only from lots of different backgrounds and now bringing them together, but also you've published a lot. You've worked on lots of different projects. Where is your research now taking you? So, I would like to do at MW. I was, you know, planning to take the entrance exam last year and then COVID happened. So I'm hoping to be able to sit the exam this year. And the reason is not just because I want more letters after my name, but, I I would really like to position myself as someone who can straddle both the academic research world and also the wine world. And I think that having an MW would actually help me open doors to, you know, help with my research so that I get credibility on both sites, so to speak, because I find that in academic wine research, very few of the researchers actually know anything about wine. So a lot of times I'll be reading academic papers and looking at their study design and thinking, you know, the way they they treat wine storage or the way they treat wine selection. It makes no sense if you know anything about wine. So even on this kind of basic level, I I think it would help a lot to have, you know, the wine researchers know more actual wine knowledge, and also on the other side for people who study wine, and for people who work in wine to have more academic knowledge. So one of the new research directions that I'm really interested in is to study how people remember wines so that we can help people even even people without training help everyone to be able to describe and remember wines better. Fantastic. And actually, I will direct our I want to direct our listeners to your website because you actually have a link to a questionnaire on your website right now that's kind of helping you with your research, I believe. So maybe we can get some of our listeners to to go to your website and take part in the questionnaire so that we can make sure that your research has has as much reach as possible because I think it's such a fantastic thing for the wine industry. And like you say, for the for the academic world as well. Thank you. Yes. So, I have a private homepage, Janjanice Wing dot com. Because right now, we're we're actually in the middle running this online study looking at how wine experts describe and remember wines. And this is in collaboration with Utrips University in the Netherlands. So, yeah, it would be fantastic if, your listeners can go and help contribute to our wine study. I hope they do. I I certainly, you know, I have a little bit of time want to complete the survey partly because I'm also just interested in how it makes me think about wine in a different way. That's one of the things that doing the research for the interview today really kind of sparked in me, and I I really appreciate what you're doing. So Doctor Wang, thank you so much for joining me on the Italian wine podcast. So you've got your website. Where can we find you on social media? So I have an academic Twitter, but I also have a wine related Twitter, and I feel like the wine related one might be more more of interest to people. It's d q p wines, both on Instagram and Twitter, and this is a place where I will write about my wine research. And also my husband and I, both right about our, you know, blind tasting one wind, you know, adventures and how we trick each other. So, no, it's it's great fun. I I once threatened divorce on Twitter because he gave me a ten year old Muska day to blind taste. That's just cruel. So one last fun question, before I let you go, because of course, this is the Italian wine podcast. So I was going to ask if you had a favourite Italian wine and music pairing. Oh, and music pairing. That is really interesting. Now I feel like I have to pick a Kelly composer. What color was opera or or something? That's a great question. My favorite Italian wine is Swave because I'm a well, I'm a reasoning lover at heart, and I I love anything that's you know, kind of mineral and fruity and high acid and and kind of crystalline. So for me, I love Swave. Now I'm trying to think what music would go well with this kind of mineral yet fruity aspect. And I have to admit that, most of my research deals with classical music, so I'm always thinking of of classical music. Something like an oboe concerto. Oh, yes. Lovely. Where you have this, like, smooth like, roundedness of the of the swave and this, like, gonna golden color association. So something that's not too fast, gently chloe. Yeah. So I think I'll leave it at that. So I encourage our listeners to go and look at your papers, put on an oboe concerto, and crack open some Swave. Doctor Wang, thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure to have this conversation. Thanks, Rebecca. Listen to the Italian wine podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We're on SoundCloud. Apple podcasts, himalaya FM, and more. Don't forget to subscribe and rate the show. If you enjoy listening, please consider donating through Italianline podcast dot com. Any amount helps cover equipment, production, and publication costs. Until next time.