Flavour in Motion

Flavour used to be something we described. Now it’s something we experience.

There’s a growing shift in how we engage with taste. It’s no longer about intensity or impact – it’s about what unfolds. A progression. A sense of movement. This is where Flavour in Motion comes into focus – not as a trend, but as a deeper response to how people want to feel when they eat or drink something remarkable.

Across the food and drink world, we’re seeing an embrace of complexity. Products are being designed to deliver change – sweet to bitter, soft to sharp, spice that blooms slowly. Confectionery that plays with pacing and texture, like Compartés chocolate bars layered with unexpected elements – black sesame, passionfruit, matcha, and sea salt – each bite revealing something new. Cocktails are being composed like songs, such as the signature serves at London’s Tayēr + Elementary, where ingredients are chosen as much for their narrative arc as for their taste. Even in retail, brands like Ghia are crafting non-alcoholic aperitifs with deliberately staggered flavour releases – herbaceous tension up front, citrus in the mid-palate, and a long, dry botanical finish designed to echo the complexity of a spritz.

Flavour, now, is being treated as an experience with tempo and tension. And wine, arguably the original layered drink, is perfectly placed in this moment.

The same could be said of coffee. In the last decade, specialty roasters have trained drinkers to notice origin, processing method, extraction time. A well-pulled espresso or a carefully brewed filter doesn’t hit all at once – it rises, shifts, resolves. Acidity gives way to sweetness, bitterness lingers. Like wine, coffee has taught us to taste in phases.

The best wines have always carried you through a sequence: how they land, how they hold, how they finish. But what’s changing is the audience. People are more attuned to detail. They’re looking for transitions, for stories. A bottle of natural Syrah from Gut Oggau or a pét-nat from Patrick Bouju no longer needs to be explained with varietal charts or region maps. The story can be told through what it evokes – the way it unrolls across the glass, the hour, the table. A sense of improvisation, of mood.

This opens up space for a different kind of storytelling. Less about the what, more about the how. Less about the notes, more about the journey. It invites wine brands, and any brand built on flavour, to move beyond the grid of grape, soil, altitude. To explore language that is cinematic, musical, sensory. To speak of pacing, of movement, of a moment unfolding.

It’s also a design opportunity. A bottle that opens quietly and builds. A tasting flight curated like a gallery. A menu written to guide the palate, not instruct it. We’re seeing this already in the work of producers like Empirical, whose spirits are released in limited “drops”, each crafted for narrative and tension, each one treated like a sensory artefact. Or restaurants like Alchemist in Copenhagen, where courses are staged like acts and drinks pairings are chosen not for harmony but for drama.

As people become more fluent in sensory sequencing – in food, in streaming, in fashion – this idea of flavour that moves feels less like a discovery and more like a standard. A kind of new literacy around how we taste, not just what we like.