The Best Balance : An Investigation of Expressions Describing Taste Experiences

Abstract: Taste, or gustation, has long been considered a primitive, and even non-rational, perceptual sense. Taste, as a subject of academic research, has been given very little attention; especially, when contrasted to other human perceptual senses. The knowledge of how people express and discuss their perceptions and sensations of tastes, and, specifically, the descriptions of tastes of chocolate, is very limited. Furthermore, the terminological inconsistency in the vocabulary of chocolate tasting, with the risk of misunderstanding or miscommunication, suggests that a basic method for representing tastes is needed. This thesis presents a study of how people actually express the perception or sensation of tasting, and specifically when tasting chocolate. This study also explores the possibility of crafting a method for use when describing the tastes of chocolate. The study was carried out by holding two tasting workshops. The first one was concerned with recording conversations about tasting chocolate. Participants were asked to taste different kinds of chocolates and, freely, discuss what they perceived and sensed. In the second workshop the participants were asked to describe the tastes of chocolate using predetermined vocabulary and formatted questionnaires. The results of this study are linguistic semantic analyses of the different words that were used, and also a proposal for a prototypical method to use when tasting chocolate.