The History of Taste

1930s

The bland, but factual story [see Wikipedia] goes that “In 1931, A.L. Fox, a DuPont chemist, discovered that some individuals found phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) to be bitter while others found it tasteless”.

The interesting but perhaps slightly less august story says that Fox was doing an experiment that went completely wrong, blowing up what he was doing in his face and that of the chemist working on the bench next to him. When the mists cleared and the spluttering stopped, Fox’s lab fellow turned to him and said something along the lines of “What on earth was that old boy?! By jove! It tastes disgusting!”

Fox’s retort went something like: “I don’t know what you mean old chap, I can’t taste a thing.”

“I say, that’s interesting” thought both…and off they went to experiment further. 
 

If only the experiment had taken place in Cambridge during the 1950s and not at an American Chemical Company, that exchange could easily have occurred verbatim.

Fox went on to write a paper on his work, with geneticist Albert Blakeslee. Fox & Blakeslee's 1932 paper "Our different taste worlds" was pioneering for its time but was not picked up again in earnest until years later.

1980-2010

The core premise of Fox & Blakeslee's work (that we all have different sensitivity to bitterness and that this can be simply assessed using chemicals) was brought to a wider readership in the US through Linda Bartoshuk's ground-breaking 1993 work "The biological basis of food perception and acceptance".

This brought the phrases taster, super-taster and non-taster to a wider audience and was even picked up by the Great and the Goode of the wine world.

To cut 80 years’ worth of hard scientific graft even further short, the concept of our taste difference was then applied to wine in the United States by Tim Hanni MW and his collaborators at Cornell University led by Virginia Utermohlen. Wine on the Rocks caught up with Tim Hanni at Bibendum's annual tasting to find out about the science behind the Taste Test.

2010 onwards

This work has been developed for the UK market by Bibendum with one thought in mind: to democratize wine for the UK consumer.