Ethanol creates pain when you ingest it. When it touches your taste buds, and the even more sensitive olfactory nerves (smelling nerves), it creates pain in those nerves. Think about the last time you had Everclear or Bacardi 151, you must have felt that burning sensation.

Evidence suggests that the burning sensation comes from Ethanol messing with the TRPV1 receptor, lowering the temperature threshold when nerves feel a “burning sensation”. [2]

TRPV1 helps sensory nerves keep you safe by creating the feeling of pain. Specifically pain associated with heat or irritant chemicals. It reacts to capsaicin (which gives hot peppers their heat), acids, and temperatures over 42ºC. So Ethanol tricks TRPV1 into thinking that it is no longer normal temperature in your mouth, but bloody hot water in there. That means that after you drink alcohol, your body heat alone would activate those nerves.

This is the magic of how our body protects itself. When these nerves are activated by your body heat, they let the brain know that it is playing with fire. Thus the more the ABV, the greater the intensity of the pain signals. And when the pain signals overpower the not-so-important-to-survival-right-now signals of taste and smell, we stop figuring out what we are drinking or smelling.

An average lager beer is 5% ABV; an average bottle of white wine is around 14% ABV, and a nice dry red wine should be around 16% ABV.

At 5% ABV you do not even feel the alcohol, but at around 20% ABV, you will definitely start feeling the burn of the alcohol; and the amount of information processed by the brain from taste and smell signals start to deteriorate.

It is important to remember that signals are still being transmitted by the sensors in the mouth and the nose. But the brain will give this a lower importance and not be too concerned with processing these signals as it is more concerned with keeping the body safe by warning against possible danger. [3]

It is no coincidence that more people are able to understand wine better than spirits like whiskey; this is because of the fact that lesser ABV allows more signals from receptors to be processed by the brain in order to interpret more information about the flavour molecules.

So when you’re making a drink, you want to have enough of the influence of the alcohol so that you can taste the nuances of alcohol and enough dilution so that your brain is open for understanding the information that the molecules of flavour have to provide.

For the purposes of this article I’m going to standardize the ABV to 40%. Of course there are many gins that are more or slightly less in ABV than 40, but I believe sticking to a round number of 40% ABV is a very good baseline for comparison.