Turns Out Rats Can Conduct Blind Wine Testings

On screens large and small, audiences have seen rats prepare a nostalgia-inducing meal and an unappetizing-looking sandwich. But whether these stories being told are comic or aspirational, they have one thing in common: they are wholly fictional. When it comes to rats and wine on the other hand, it turns out certain rodents have far more refined tastes than we humans might imagine — according to science, anyway.

According to a study published in February, a group of nine rats were trained to distinguish between different varieties of wine. The experiments included both Riesling and Sauvignon Blanc wines; a group of male rats were used, the paper’s authors write, because of concerns that female rats’ sense of smell might change as a result of their reproductive cycle.

What the scientists learned was that, as they phrased it, “rats were more likely to press the lever for novel wines of the same variety that they were previously rewarded for,” as opposed to wines of a different variety. The process by which the rats were trained and a total of nine rats received high marks for their olfactory prowess involved a lot of training and a lot of wine.

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This doesn’t mean that we’re about to see a new generation of rodent sommeliers, however. The paper’s authors write that “this indicates that a nonhuman mammal can discriminate between complex odor categories” — a discovery that has applications far beyond the wine world.