At the moment, I’m spending a good portion of my waking moments in research activity. It’s a lovely aspect of what I do: dealing with new ideas. There’s something thrilling about discovering fresh things, and grappling with areas of academic endeavour where you have to face unfamiliar concepts and see through the jargon.

The thing that really interests me is bringing together different fields of science. If you can fuse together ideas from separate fields, you can often uncover some really interesting shared principles. The way science works is that everyone ends up operating in quite a narrow field. And scientists in particular disciplines rarely speak to those working in other areas. But synthesize these varied ideas and you end up with something very interesting.

Flavour lends itself to a fully multidisciplinary approach. There’s so much to be said about the practice of wine tasting that draws on psychology, neuroscience, physiology, psychophysics and even philosophy. Getting stuck into these varied disciplines is just so much fun, and I hope this will be a really good book.