The Mouth

In order to understand the interaction between food and wine, we need to begin at the beginning. For the purposes of this discussion, the beginning is your mouth. Aside from being a big gaping hole in our head through which we shovel energy into the system via food and liquids and an exit point for most of the thoughts and facts that our friends told us to keep secret but we just can’t help ourselves from uttering, it is also a place filled with tactile sensations. The large muscle in the middle of the hole, otherwise known as the tongue, is covered with nerve endings commonly known as taste buds. These taste buds can also be found on the inside of our mouths to a lesser degree.

One of the more important points to be made here is that just as every person is different in appearance and behavior, people’s mouths are different too. We each have a larger or smaller mouth, a larger or smaller tongue and a differing amount of taste buds present in our mouths. This can and does affect to a large degree what and how we taste. It stands to reason that people with a greater number of taste buds are more sensitive to taste while those with less taste buds are less sensitive to taste.

I know that we’re getting into some serious geek speak here, but please bear with me for a moment, I’ll be back to talking like a normal human again soon enough.

The taste buds themselves work on two basic levels, either through a protein coupled receptor or an ion channel. When bits of food or liquid dissolved in saliva come into contact with these structures, information regarding the sensation produced through the interaction of the food or liquid and the taste bud is then sent to the brain for analysis.

In our next post, we’re going to talk about what happens in the brain during the analysis of those taste sensations.