Despite being a major focus in wine production, there are currently no standard procedures to measure the overall sensory quality of wine. While abundant, ratings from specialized guides and magazines lack scientific and statistical foundation and may confound preference with intrinsic quality. The presented method aims to bridge this gap by providing a 'quality assessment by merging ranks of an expert-consumer panel (QAMREC)' procedure, which ranks wines on a quantitative scale according to their sensory quality. While the methodology is essentially a preference testing method, by confining the sample space to wines with a similar origin and vinification and the recruitment of an expert panel, the effect of individual differences in preferences can be reduced and the resulting ranking is believed to provide a better representation of their intrinsic quality as valued by educated consumers who use an unconscious rationale for their judgement. It also takes into account human limitations and organizational constraints. Expert-consumers, consumers familiar with the rating of the sensory characteristics of wine, were selected as panellists with welldefined criteria including a high wine involvement profile. An optimized incomplete block design was deployed to guarantee a balanced tasting sequence. By applying the rank-order logit model, incomplete rankings obtained were converted into utility values for each wine compared to a reference wine. These utility values are an approximation of the intrinsic quality of the individual wines as judged by experts. The method was applied in ten tasting sessions each comprising 9 wines from one particular origin and 12 panellists. Most sessions, with the exception of the Pouilly Fumé and the Graves tasting, resulted in the identification of several wines with statistically different utilities. These findings introduce QAMREC as a valid approach for assessing the sensory quality of wines.
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