Vinos. El vino y la comida en la experiencia del restaurante gastronómico (Volumen VIII)

What really is the fine-dining restaurant experience? When does it begin, when does it end, and what factors determine how we live and remember it?

The eighth and final volume of Wine Sapiens offers a comprehensive look at the gastronomic experience, placing the diner at the centre of the analysis and exploring the role played by wine, food and every element involved in the experience.

The work begins by defining what we mean by the experience in a fine-dining restaurant and exploring a number of benchmark experiences that help us understand its possibilities and its limits. From there, we enter the universe of Homo degustador, the human being who lives the gastronomic experience, to understand their personality, motivations and expectations, and the way they perceive, interpret, enjoy and remember what happens in a restaurant.

As befits an analysis based on the Sapiens methodology, we break the experience down into stages in order to study each one in depth. From the decision to go to a restaurant, in which we identify more than 50 factors that can influence the choice, to the booking, the journey there, the welcome, the tasting decisions —appetisers, wines, elaborations, dishes and sobremesa—, the bill and the farewell.

But the experience does not end when we step out of the restaurant door. The journey home, the memory and the subsequent evaluation are also part of it.

At each stage we analyse the diner’s actions and decisions, how service influences their experience, and which mechanisms come into play in their satisfaction. We thus delve into multisensory perception, emotions, learning, memory and the workings of the reward system, without ever losing sight of the central role of wine and food.

The work also explores other factors that shape the experience, such as the gastronomic offer. From this perspective, we address fundamental issues such as service, hospitality, ambience, the relationship between wine and food —far beyond the traditional rules of pairing— and the perception of price and value.

The result is a book built on gastronomic knowledge, but enriched with contributions from disciplines such as biology, neuroscience, psychology and the perceptual and behavioural sciences.

A work to understand what we eat and what we drink, but also how, why and in what way we live that experience.