S.E.N.S.E. - A Modern Approach to Sensory Evaluation
The Nose-Palate-Finish approach to tasting wines and spirits has been in use for over half a century. It was created to standardise wine evaluation by providing a common language and structured method for describing key sensory characteristics. It serves its purpose exceedingly well, and as the saying goes ‘If it ain’t broke don’t fix it’.
At The Sensory Advantage we are committed to collecting the most pertinent research for sensory perception in one place. To use cross-modal studies to inform and shape not just our understanding of the flavour experience, but also the processes and methods themselves.
The sensory evaluation of wines and spirits is uniquely susceptible to misinformed knowledge and techniques. Hints and tips are often developed through personal experience, anecdotal evidence, and self-marketing rather than through the rigors of scientific study.
The Sensory Advantage S.E.N.S.E. approach to evaluating wines and spirits has been developed to address common issues with the Nose-Palate-Finish method. It is designed to shift the focus away from evaluating the drink and towards evaluating the sensory experience itself, including the neurological pathways that create flavour. This subtle shift emphasises the subjective nature of odour and flavour perception.
Key issues with the Nose-Palate-Finish approach:
Retronasal olfaction functions as a separate sense to taste, somatosensation (mouthfeel), and orthonasal olfaction, and should be viewed as such.
A lack of clear distinction between palate, flavour, and retronasal olfaction is confusing and misrepresents the flavour process.
Somatosensation and chemesthesis (mouthfeel sensations) are often not given adequate focus and are commonly incorrectly described as texture.
Taste is often reduced to only considering the levels of residual sugar. Bitterness, sourness, saltiness, fattiness, and even umami should also be evaluated.
The common practice is to prioritise orthonasal olfaction (nosing) and use flavour and retronasal olfaction to substantiate the orthonasal qualities. However, in practice, and from an enthusiast’s perspective, what happens in the mouth is more valued than what happens on the ‘nose’.
Retronasal olfaction is not being optimised due to breathing practices being overlooked.
The high degree of importance placed on the visual appearance of wines and spirits creates psychological cues that influence the flavour experience prior to smelling or taking a sip.
The order of nose-palate-finish can miss volatile odours than are more easily identified retonasally (in the mouth).
The focus is on the drink (the stimuli), creating the misleading impression that it’s sensory properties are fixed and there is a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ way of describing it.
Background Knowledge Before Starting
When we talk about how we experience flavour, it’s useful to distinguish between the outer nose (orthonasal olfaction) and the inner nose (retronasal olfaction). The outer nose is engaged when we sniff aromas from the environment, drawing volatile molecules through the nostrils to the olfactory receptors. It is therefore a means of understanding the external environment – exteroception.
The inner nose (retronasal olfaction), by contrast, comes into play when we eat or drink. Volatile compounds travel from the back of the mouth up into the nasal cavity during chewing, swallowing, or breathing out. The sensation represents the internal environment – interoception.
Both pathways stimulate the same olfactory receptors, but the route to them changes how we perceive the aroma and the neural processes involved. The outer nose is designated for identification and our dopamine pathways. It creates a motivational response termed ‘wanting’. The inner nose is closely connected to the gustatory cortex, taste, and mouthfeel. It is designated for value judgements through the opioid pathways, termed ‘liking’.
But flavour itself, however, is more than just smell. Taste receptors provide basic signals of sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. But there is also a strong case for fattiness being a taste also, plus perhaps others too. While we have just 2 groups of sweet receptors we have 25 groups of bitter receptors. This underscores the evolutionary importance of bitter tastes and why bitterness can be perceived in a more nuanced way than the other tastes.
Somatosensation is one’s perception of texture, viscosity, sliding friction, and temperature in the mouth. It’s touch sensitivity like the feeling in our fingers. While this if foten confused with texture, there is much more to it such as how tannins or fatty acids impact the sensation of lubricity in the mouth.
Chemesthesis, meanwhile, adds the chemical sensations such as the burn of chilli, the cool of mint, and the tingle of carbonation. The types of burn and colling are varied, especially in spirits. They can range from mild ginger, through peppercorns, and chillies for burning, and from peppermint, through eucalyptus and camphor for cooling.
The brain combines sensory inputs from the inner nose, taste, touch, and chemesthesis to create the sensation of flavour. Plus, in addition, it includes visual and auditory inputs, memories, emotions, cultural influences, expectations, and personal biases.
Breathing for the S.E.N.S.E. method
Research has suggested that retronasal odour (inner nose) identification is consistently poorer than orthonasal olfaction (outer nose), even when the same odours are used. But also that the difference is not due to two separate systems of smell, but rather due to the efficiency of odour delivery to the olfactory mucosa. The breathing technique when ‘tasting’ is often overlooked yet evidence suggests that modified breathing can improve retronasal odour perception and identification (Pierce & Halpern, 2016).
Diaphragmatic breathing (sometimes called belly breathing or deep breathing) is a way of breathing that uses your diaphragm, a dome-shaped muscle under your lungs, instead of just your chest muscles. It helps you breathe more fully, calmly, and promotes many health benefits.
Here we outline a method of diaphragmatic breathing that is optimised for odour perception via the inner nose. Practice the method until if feels natural before applying it to tasting wines and spirits.
How to do it
1. Find a comfortable position
2. Sit upright in a chair with your feet flat on the floor
3. Place your hands
4. Put one hand on your upper chest and the other just below your ribcage (on your belly). This helps you feel where the breath is going.
5. Take a normal breath in slowly through your mouth
6. Let your belly gently rise under your lower hand as the air fills your lungs.
7. The hand on your chest should stay as still as possible – the movement should come mostly from your belly.
8. Exhale slowly through your nose with your lips closed
9. Let your belly fall gently as the air leaves.
10. Keep the upper chest relaxed and quiet.
11. Aim to maintain a normal breath in but extend the breath out for as long as feels comfortable.
12. Once you feel comfortable with the technique add a small amount of force to the breath out, just enough so the air leaving the nostrils makes a subtle audible noise.
Caution: over practicing can cause dizziness, a faint feeling, or panic attacks. To avoid this, practice no more than 3 repetitions in a row and breathe normally for at least 60 seconds between each session.
Tips to make it easier
Imagine inflating a balloon in your belly as you inhale.
Keep your shoulders loose – they shouldn’t lift up.
Practise daily, even for short sessions, until it feels natural.
The goal is to shift your breathing from shallow, chest-based breaths to deeper, slower, belly-driven breaths. Once you are comfortable with this type of breathing you can implement it in the S.E.N.S.E. process.
The S.E.N.S.E. Method - Step by Step
It’s important to understand that the desired outcome of the S.E.N.S.E. method is to create a systematic approach to flavour that clarifies its individual component parts and promotes enhanced sensory perception. Therefore, it is a method of evaluating sensory experience rather than a list of descriptors or a flavour wheel.
It can be applied to any assessment of a flavour product, be it whisky, wine, rum, sherry, gin, chocolate, coffee, or toffee. Hence a list of flavour descriptors or a flavour wheel are not required. Limiting the experience to a predetermined list is valuable for quantitative analysis in the industrial setting but is limiting outside of this. Such lists cannot account for the impact of differences in culture, language, thresholds, anosmia, parosmia, or daily fluctuations in physical and emotional state.
Here's the process:
Step one: sip
Before all else, before nosing, or anything, just take a sip to acquaint yourself with the drink. Don’t get caught up in the what, why, and how, just consider the experience in a holistic sense.
Taking a small sip prior to nosing primes the brain and will help the outer nose to identify odours in the next step.
Step two: outer nose
Now smell the drink using your outer nose. Use your diaphragmatic breathing, modified to breathe in through the nose, to ensure steady and constant airflow over the olfactory epithelium in the nasal cavity. Alternate nostril smelling is also a good strategy.
Tip: rather than placing one’s nose in the glass, perch it above the furthermost rim of the glass.
Step three: mouthfeel
Pinch your nose and take a sip (nose pegs used for swimming are a useful addition). Consider only things such as how it feels in the mouth. Burning – what type of burn? Is it cooling – what type? Tingling?
Step four: taste
Take another sip and again pinch your nose. This time think only about taste – sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami, and fattiness.
Step five: inner nose
Take a normal breath in through your mouth, close you lips and breathe out through your nose using our diaphragmatic breathing protocol. The aromas you are now smelling are from your inner nose retronasal olfaction. The breathing protocol is designed to not only direct volatile molecules to the olfactory epithelium by breathing out, but also through creating turbulence within the nasal cavity.
Step six: finish
What people usually call finish is in fact the inner nose experience. Finish is simply the lingering sensations of taste, smell, and mouthfeel combined. For this reason, it rarely highlights additional sensations, but merely creates a sense of fading flavour – the most significant component being the duration of the finish. However, finish can be amplified by repeating step five.
