Conceptual Change and Wine Expertise

Two studies explore conceptual change in the acquisition of wine expertise. In Experiment 1, tasters described a set of wines. Experts described the wines using more specific features than did intermediates, who, in turn, used more specific features than did novices. Specificity in describing wines was not related to discrimination performance on a psychophysical test. A regression analysis indicated that the features identified by the expert as well as those identified by the nonexpert tasters covaried with grape type, such that wines of the same grape were described more similarly than were wines of different grapes. In Experiment 2, the same tasters sorted the wines into clusters. Experts, unlike nonexperts, tended to sort the wines explicitly by grape type. Moreover, the features of the wines (described by the tasters in Experiment 1) covaried significantly better by the experts' clusters than they did by the nonexperts' clusters. Indeed, the features identified by the nonexperts covaried significantly worse when the wines were clustered by their own sortings than they did when the wines were clustered by actual grape type. It is suggested that the acquisition of wine expertise, a domain that is at once conceptual and perceptual, entails not only a greater differentiation of features but also a restructuring of the explicit schemes of classification.