How to Taste More Intensely

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IIf you don’t detect subtle notes of chocolate in the wine or nuttiness in the caviar, don’t worry. We might be able to intensify our tasting skills through training, the researchers suggest. Take sommeliers, for example: they seem to refine their palettes over time through experience, rather than possessing particularly powerful senses from the start.

But can we learn to sharpen our taste buds? In a small study in 2022, researchers at Toho University in Japan reported that it helped people improve their ability to identify the four basic tastes: sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. The team first measured each participant’s taste thresholds, or the lowest concentration of a given taste they could perceive. Then they repeatedly exposed them to lower and lower concentrations of these substances to improve their sensitivity, asking them to correctly identify the unlabeled substance they had tried until they got all the answers correct.

Today, some of the same scientists claim that this protocol can improve a person’s ability to discern different qualities of softness.

Read more: “This meal might make you cry”

With a group of 40 healthy adults, the team began by determining how much glucose, fructose, sucrose, maltose and lactose each person needed for the snack. Then, for three consecutive days, participants were repeatedly asked to memorize and correctly identify different types of sweetness at concentrations below and above this minimum. Training continued until they could accurately guess the mystery substances at these higher and lower concentrations. In each case, the individuals were ultimately able to learn to taste different gradations of sweetness at lower doses.

“Even subtle differences within the same taste quality can be discerned through taste training,” write the authors in their article published in Chemical Senses. “This result seems to validate the expression ‘a demanding palate’.”

The recent study has limitations: The sample size was small, for example, and the researchers did not test how participants’ food preferences affected their taste sensitivity.

But with more research, this type of training could be used to treat taste disorders, for which highly effective treatments are lacking. It may also help older adults who develop anorexia as their sense of taste diminishes, among other aging-related issues that affect food intake.

It might not take years of sniffing wine to become a flavor expert: a few days of taste boot camp might be enough.

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Lead paint by Philips Gijsels / Wikimedia Commons

• Molly Glick

  Published on December 23, 2025

  Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.