Start out the right way and get your buds done

At COPIA The Wine Team have developed a revolutionary Budometer www.budometer.com. By answering a few simple questions around your taste preferences, you can get the direction you need to taste wines with confidence. This is a great way to find out your “preferred taste.”

The founders of the Taste BUDOMETER postulate that people’s preferences in food, music, wine and all things "sensory" can be best understood in two primary dimensions: Sensory Discrimination and Aspiration Value. While people are distributed all across these two dimensions, the deep genetic and cultural influences at work mean, in reality, that people are highly clustered into groups within the Flavor-Aspiration Matrix.

The Taste Budometer will ask you simple questions about salt, coffee and mixed drinks that are proven in many studies to align with taste sensitivities.

Sensory Discrimination

First, people have radically different capacities for Sensory Discrimination based on physiological differences in the number of taste buds you have. This capacity is genetic and is a direct function of the number of taste buds possessed. Hyper-sensitive Tasters comprise about a quarter of the population and can have well over 10 times the number of taste buds of Tolerant Tasters. Sensitive Tasters comprise the other half of the population spectrum. There is not a "better" or "worse" place to be – just different taste sensitivities. In fact our research shows many consumers who will drink only sweet wines in fact have the MOST taste buds. Again, this is not good or bad, just a physiological phenomenon that weighs heavily in shaping your personal wine preferences.

Aspiration

Second, your personal life experiences plus the amount of time and effort you put into learning about wine strongly influences preferences and buying behavior. Some folks are acutely attuned to and influenced by travels to wine regions, memberships or alignments to wine affinity groups and general cultural influences during their life. In the wine world, for example, there are communities of consumers are deeply influenced by the Wine Spectator/Robert Parker point systems (typically more Tolerant Tasters) or alignment with organizations that forward Rhone grape varieties, Zinfandel or "Anything But Cabernet/Chardonnay" crowd (typically more Sensitive or Hyper-sensitive Tasters). At the other end of the scale, a segment of the population focuses on finding great wines at the lowest possible cost. In the middle, value buyers desire a wine that simply tastes good with a balance between the wine brand and price.