Human olfaction at the intersection of language, culture and biology

Abstract

It is widely-held that people are poor at describing flavors. Flavor experts have been overlooked and understudied in drawing these conclusions. This study focused on flavor naming of two expert groups -- wine and coffee experts -- in comparison to novices. The present datasets are data from wine experts, coffee experts and novices when naming the smell and taste of wine, coffee, everyday smells (e.g., lemon, cinnamon), and "basic" tastes (e.g., bitter, salty). Data also includes quantitative measures of the smell and flavor descriptions (length of the descriptions, consistency of the answers, types of answers). In addition, there are questionnaires measuring wine and coffee knowledge and odor awareness of participants.