Wine descriptive language supports cognitive specificity of chemical senses

In order to understand wine perception we analyzed tasting notes of four expert wine tasters. The analysis is based on co-occurrence calculations of words within the tasting notes using ALCESTE software. The results of such an analysis of one subject's notes give us word classes reflecting main text ideas and organization of the text. In the present paper we interpret these "results as follows: (1) Class number and organization are different among experts so that each expert has his own discourse strategy. (2) Wine language is based on prototypes and not on detailed analytical description. (3) Prototypes include not only sensory but also idealistic and hedonistic information. These results are in agreement with recent neurophysiological data. (C) 2001 Academic Press.