WINE AND CHEESE : A BALANCED “MOUTHFEEL”

Wine and cheese pairing is considered a highly nuanced art, but it appears science plays a role as well. A group of food scientists for the National Institutes of Health proposed a theory of food pairings that explains how astringent and fatty foods oppose one another to create a balanced "mouthfeel." Mouthfeel is the sensation caused in the mouth by the physical and chemical interaction between the mouth’s tissues and saliva and the chemicals found in food.The findings, reported in Current Biology(2012), offer a whole new definition of the balanced meal. 

Astringent foods alternated with creamier foods often create a pleasant taste combination.Because fat is oily, eating it lubricates the mouth, making it feel slick or even slimy. Meanwhile, astringents, chemical compounds such as the tannin in wine and green tea, make the mouth feel dry and rough. Although this food-pairing idea had been proposed before, it was a mystery how that balance might actually be struck, because wine, green tea and the other widely consumed astringents are only mildly astringent. No one knew how they managed to cut the fat as well as they do.

The researchers discovered that astringents have a stronger effect each time the mouth is exposed to them. Every time study participants took a sip of green tea, for example, they perceived it to be more astringent than during the previous sip, indicating that the astringents were reacting more strongly with the lubricating proteins in their mouths upon each exposure. This growth in astringency is why, even though tea and wine have only a weak effect at first, sipping them throughout a fatty meal eventually enables the astringents to counterbalance the strong lubricating effect of the fat.

The importance of repeated exposure explains why we don't tend to gulp down an entire glass of wine then eat our entire meal. Nor do we polish off our whole pickle before setting into our sandwich. The new research justifies the widespread use of astringent foods as "palate cleansers" that people sample throughout a meal.This discovery helps to explain why wine and cheese have been paired together for so long, as the two developed simultaneously centuries ago.