HOW TO LEAD A TASTING 303:
TASTING SCRIPTING & THE STORYBOOK TASTING WRITTEN BY TIM KNITTEL
YOUR SPIRITS HAVE A STORY TO TELL. CONTEXT TASTES BETTER Scientists (and chefs) have known for a long time that context — location, atmosphere, color, light, sound and music, plating, glassware, course pacing, dining companions and especially mood and attention level of the consumer — has the capacity to drastically alter the experienced flavor of food and drink. This is the foundation of the “vacation effect” in wine where the same bottle delightfully enjoyed while gazing at the setting sun over the Mediterranean Sea is startlingly
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s I stated in How to Lead a Tasting 101 and 202, a sampling is handing out shots but a tasting is a performance with greater potential for return on the investment of your time and product. The ultimate in a performance is to tell a story and the most impactful tasting will follow a story structure.
disappointing back at home. Deliberately setting context can enhance the consumption experience. “No matter how good the stuff’s coming out of the kitchen is, if you don’t know what’s going on in the mind of the diner, if you don’t set the expectations right, they will not enjoy the experience as much as they otherwise should.” — Professor Charles Spence, head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory, Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University in his TEDxHull 2015 talk, What Defines The Perfect Meal?
The physical elements of context may or may not be under your control. In your distillery you can certainly control every aspect, but out in a liquor store or at an expo it may be quite the opposite. Regardless of how much you can influence, the more deliberate you are with the contextual elements, the better your tasting may potentially be received. Price is another element of context, and expensive tastes better. Recent studies in the Journal of Marketing Research1 and Scientific Reports2 have confirmed a bias of perceived value increasing experiential
1 Hilke Plassmann & Bernd Weber. (2015). Individual Differences in Marketing Placebo Effects: Evidence from Brain Imaging and Behavioral Experiments. Journal of Marketing Research. https://moneydotcomvip.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/plassman_jmr_13_0613.pdf 2 Liane Schmidt, Vasilisa Skvortsova, Claus Kullen, Bernd Weber & Hilke Plassmann. (2017). How context alters value: The brain’s valuation and affective regulation system link price cues to experienced taste pleasantness. Scientific Reports, volume 7, Article number: 8098 (2017). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-08080-0 WWW.ARTISANSPIRITMAG.COM
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