(NBCNews) - If you’re a wine connoisseur or enjoy a good Cabernet, you likely don’t need another reason to put “wine tasting” on a list of activities you like. But science has one for you: it can stimulate the brain more than a lot of other activities (from listening to a Beethoven concerto to solving a complex trigonometry problem).

Don’t go thinking that’s a license to start guzzling glass after glass of Rosé with reckless abandon, however. A key part of the activity is the “concentrated discrimination of the taste of wine,” explains Gordon M. Shepherd, PhD, DPhil, Professor of Neuroscience at Yale School of Medicine, who wrote the book on this topic, "Neuroenology". That means the brain ramps it up when you’re actively engaged in tasting your libation, but probably not so much if you’re thoughtlessly gulping.