A New Wine Tasting Approach Based on Emotional Responses to Rapidly Recognize Classic European Wine Styles

Abstract

Conventional tasting sheets are widely used to evaluate wine quality in wine tasting competitions. However, the higher scores are mostly obtained by international commercial wines, resulting in lower scores being awarded to the classic European wines. We hypothesize that this is due to the tasting methodology that fails to recognize this wine style. Therefore, the purpose of this work was to show the implementation of a new wine tasting approach to overcome this drawback. The proposed training technique is based on the emotional responses of the taster after smelling two wines of clearly opposite styles. The first wine is characterized by high aromatic intensity but low in-mouth intensity, perceived as disappointing to the taster, here defined as an "easy" wine. The second wine is characterized as a wine with low aromatic intensity but that provides an unexpectedly positive in-mouth experience, here defined as a "difficult" wine. These emotions are explained by the wine sensorial characteristics. The "easy" wine has an intense, simple smell with short persistence while the "difficult" wine has a low intensity, complex aroma, and long persistence. The first style corresponds to the international commercial wines most prized in international wine challenges. The second, frequently rejected by untrained tasters, is consistent with the "so called" classic European wines, and is characterized by light red or yellow straw colors, weak smell intensity, and aggressive mouth-feel. After no more than four training sessions and using the OIV tasting sheet, inexperienced tasters were able to score "difficult" wines equally as "easy" wines and understand their different attributes. In conclusion, this new tasting approach may be used by wine professionals to explain the characteristics of high quality wines that are not easily recognized by untrained consumers.

Patterns of sweetness preference in red wine according to consumer characterisation

“…Similarly, in red wines the effect of sugar may not be recognized by consumers as a sweetener but as a smoothener. The appeal of these smoothened wines may also be inferred from the results of wine challenges, where the best awarded wines (Great Gold medal) have frequently over 10 g/L of residual sugar (Loureiro et al, 2016). These authors also showed that average residual sugar concentrations increased in the wines awarded great gold medals from 2004 to 2014.…”

“…More recently, Blackman, Saliba, and Schmidtke (2010) reported the preference for sweetness in two Australian Semillon wines with different acidity levels. International wine challenges also tend rate sweeter samples more highly (Loureiro, Brasil, & Malfeito-Ferreira, 2016). Therefore, either from controlled experiments with wines spiked with different sugar levels or from overall consumer preferences, it seems that a "sweet tooth" observed in other foods (Wansink, Bascoul, & Che, 2006) may also be applied for wine drinkers.…”

Off-Flavours and Unpleasantness Are Cues for the Recognition and Valorization of Organic Wines by Experienced Tasters

“…These outputs suggest that the acceptance of faulty wines was increased in the presence of an organic bias in the context of blind tasting. Moreover, it was not surprising that the classic European wines from Burgundy, used as prototypes for high reputation wines, usually not appreciated because of their initial off-flavours [10,20], were particularly liked in the "organic" session and not on the "conventional" one. With regards to the "Reductive" descriptor, in the Chablis wine, it was less cited in the "organic" session, but this descriptor was a cue for the "organic" guess.…”

“…Wines CB2016 and CT2015 represented organic wines with clean flavours, whereas the other 4 organic wines had different noticeable off-flavours. The conventional Burgundy wines (CC2013 and PN2015) were included as prototypes of classical European wines that are recognised as having initial off-flavours that disappear after leaving them to breathe [10]. Additional 4 conventional wines were included in the two first sessions to serve as distractors.…”

Wine tasting based on emotional responses: An expedite approach to distinguish between warm and cool climate dry red wine styles

“…Hopefully, this relation would enable wine professionals to anticipate consumer preferences and better predict wine choice, which is a common challenge for food companies in the present competitive business climate (De Pelsmaeker et al, 2017;Kenney & Adhikari, 2016), and has been demonstrated with basic taste solutions (Samant, Chapko, & Seo, 2017) and in chocolate with different sweetness (Lagast, De Steur, Schouteten, & Gellynck, 2017;Thomson, Crocker, & Marketo, 2010). Having this concern in mind, Loureiro, Brasil, and Malfeito-Ferreira (2016) proposed a tasting sheet where the emotional responses were explained by the sensory characteristics of wines, enabling recognition of the so-called classic European wines mostly produced in cooler climate regions.…”