Colour code

Is synaesthesia the sommelier's secret weapon?

- MARIANNA HUNT

When sommelier Jaime Smith drinks a Châteauneuf-du-Pape, he sees blocky, heavy red and blue pentagons approaching him - clumsily bumping together. Alcohol drips from above, pushing the muscular shapes out of the metaphorical 'box' in his mind.

Smith, the first director of wine at the famous MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas and twice named best sommelier in America by Food & Wine magazine, has synaesthesia, a neurological condition that means that, when one of your senses is stimulated, you also experience another.

There are many different types of synaesthesia - from seeing colours when you hear music to associating numbers with different colours and even tasting flavours when reading certain words. Scientists estimate that it affects between 2% and 4% of the population.

Gustatory-visual synaesthesia, where people experience colours, shapes or textures when they taste, is even rarer - affecting about 0.0021% of the population (or one in every 50,000 people), according to researchers at Bournemouth University.

And yet it seems to be remarkably common among top sommeliers. Of the 279 people who have earned the title Master Sommelier, two - Roland Micu and Sur Lucero - are known to experience colours and shapes when they taste wine. Beyond the MS category, the number of synaesthete sommeliers grows further.

Both Micu and Smith put their success as sommeliers (at least in part) down to their synaesthesia - which Smith says gives him his 'tasting superpower'. When blind tasting, they will often recognise a wine instantly from its shape.