Researcher's invention may alleviate wine taster's woes
10:53 a.m. Thursday, August 7, 2008
Melissa Monosoff dips a big spoon into a stainless steel bowl. As she lifts the spoon to her mouth, she says, "let me taste this one again."
Monosoff makes her living with her sense of taste. As the wine expert at Maia in Villanova, Pa., Monosoff is in charge of coordinating the restaurant's food with wine.
"How a wine can partner with that dish, and not only make the dish better, but make the wine better, too," Monosoff said when she was asked about her job.
She worries that some day, her finely-trained palate will fail, and she'll lose that keen sense of taste.
It can happen as people age, smoke, take certain medications or face certain illnesses.
Up until now it's been difficult to test sense of taste. That's why Temple University Researcher Dr. Greg Smutzer developed paper-thin testing squares. He got his inspiration from the popular breath-freshener strips.
"It was sort of a eureka moment, and it's my only one so far," Smutzer said.
After several years of work, the strips are almost ready for commercial production.
They could replace older methods of taste testing, which are done with liquids, in what's called a 'sip and spit' method.
"These types of solutions are bulky, and they are hard to transport out of the lab," Smutzer said.
The new strips use the same compound as the breath strips, with a tiny bit of chemical added.
As testers place them on their tongue. they'll either taste sweet, salty, sour, bitter or savory.
The mixture is poured into Teflon-coated trays where it cools into a clear, thin film. It's then cut into 1-inch squares.
They're cheap, don't need refrigeration and last up to six months.
Smutzer says the strips are ten to 100 times more sensitive than the old test. He says they could even help diagnose some medical disorders.
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