If you’re the type of person who often enjoys an expensive bottle of wine with dinner, there’s good news for you. A recent study found that drinking before a meal can make the food taste as if it was cooked with better quality ingredients. This is because alcohol reduces your acute sense of smell, so your brain isn’t able to pick up on any questionable flavors in the dish.
When you eat food after drinking alcohol, your brain can’t tell the difference, and it may taste better than if you’d just eaten it. Alcohol also relaxes your tongue and mouth muscles to soak up better flavors, so drunk foods often appear to be less salty.
The way that alcohol affects taste varies from person to person. Some people get a solid salty or bitter taste when they drink, while others notice sharpness or sweetness.
These variations may be due to the concentration of alcohol in your system. When your body processes alcohol, it begins to break down molecules into pieces called quinines — which are responsible for most of alcohol’s bitter flavor. If you usually have a bitter taste when you drink, this may be because you are less tolerant of quinine.
The amount of time it takes for quinine to build up in your body also makes a difference. People who metabolize alcohol quickly taste bitterness more than people who metabolize it slowly. Because women have smaller bodies, they also tend to build up less quinine than males after drinking the same amount of alcohol.
Alcohol also contributes to food’s texture and mouthfeel, creating a thicker and syrupy consistency. When you drink alcohol, the alcohol molecules go into the small pores in your tongue and aren’t absorbed. As a result, those molecules stay on your tongue longer, so it feels as if you’ve eaten something thicker.
You may notice that you tend to finish more food when you drink before eating. While this is partly because drinking lowers your inhibitions and makes you feel less complete, it’s also because alcohol affects digestion. Alcohol causes food to move through the stomach faster, which reduces gastric emptying time, so you feel full more quickly.
So the next time you order a meal that contains alcohol, treat yourself to a glass of wine from WineSpark before eating. You’ll save some money, and your food will taste better too.
