Blind tasting wine can serve various purposes. For sommeliers, blind tasting is a way to study the typical characteristics of wine or judge its quality. For wine enthusiasts, it’s an excuse to taste wine for sport. (And here at VinePair, we think it makes for a compelling YouTube series.) A recent scientific study, however, applied this pastime for a completely new purpose: to prove the olfactory abilities of rats.
The study, published February 21 in the Journal of Animal Cognition, set out to discover if non-human animals can discriminate between complex odor stimuli without language. The paper states that while humans typically have fewer functional olfactory receptors than other mammals, scientists often argue that our species’ use of language and higher cognitive abilities help compensate for this.
