Abstract
The present study aims to understand an ill-defined sensory concept by a long-term memory-based strategy with Spanish winemakers from four wine regions using “green wine” as a case study. A total of 77 Spanish winemakers from four Spanish wine regions carried out a non-tasting free description task. The description task yielded terms belonging to two main categories including origin-related terms as well as sensory terms. Sensory terms belonged to aroma, taste, trigeminal, colour, multimodal and hedonic subcategories, which elucidates the multidimensionality of the studied concept. The most cited specific terms were “vegetal aroma”, “bitter” and “unpleasant”. Despite these commonalities, a certain idiosyncrasy linked to taste (“excessive sourness”) and trigeminal (“astringency”) subcategories as well as to wine components (“tannins”) was evidenced as they were cited distinctly by experts belonging to separate wine regions. The capacity of approaches based on long-term memory to decipher multidimensional and ill-defined concepts is highlighted. The regional effect is also explained in terms of cognitive processes (i.e., knowledge and experience), which is linked to the use of sensory concepts by wine experts.
Highlights
The evaluation of food sensory characteristics, or sensory profiling, provides valuable information for the food industry
A total of 23 terms were cited by ≥ 10% of participants in at least one region (Table 2). These individual terms were classified in two main categories: 1) intrinsic wine characteristics related to sensory properties and 2) origin of green wines
The structure of descriptions carried out by experts starts with a description of the colour, followed by aroma, taste and mouthfeel sensations, the use of global multimodal descriptors and an overall hedonic judgement of the wine
Summary
The evaluation of food sensory characteristics, or sensory profiling, provides valuable information for the food industry. Their main advantage is to reduce training time or even to avoid it because their purpose is not to reach a consensus among participants but to identify sensory differences among products, related to either monodimensional or multidimensional perception (Valentin et al, 2012). The main drawback of employing untrained panels for describing products is the difficulty interpreting the terms generated by them; consumers use words employed in daily conversations, defined by Lawless and Heymann (2010) as “everyday language” To avoid this problem, in certain domains, technical experts are selected to carry out the description of products as their vocabulary is a priori easier to understand and more consensual than the vocabulary of consumers. Some examples of difficult to interpret wine concepts are: “minerality” (Rodrigues et al, 2015), “complexity” (Parr et al, 2011), “bouquet” (Picard et al, 2015)
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