Development of a new wine tasting method based on emotional responses

Mestrado Vinifera Euromaster - Instituto Superior de Agronomia - UL

Conventional  sensory  analysis  uses  a  technical  language  to  define  and  quantify  visual,  aromatic   and  mouth-­‐feel  perceptions,  while  emotion  based  methods  aim  at  qualifying  the  impressions  or   expectations  these  perceptions  may  trigger.  The  objectives  this  study  were  to  (i)  develop  a  wine   tasting  sheet  including  emotional  responses  and  conventional  sensory  attributes;  (ii)  establish  a   list  of  emotions  described  by  consumers  after  tasting  red  wine.       A  previous  emotion  based  tasting  sheet  was  improved  through  several  Focus  Group  sessions.  An   Optimized  Quantitative  Descriptive  Analysis  (OQDA)  was  then  run  to  assess  8   sensory   descriptors  of  the  emotional  tasting  sheet.  Finally,  5  red  wines  were  evaluated  in  a  Final   Consumer  Tasting  (FCT)  of  103  consumers  with  the  improved  emotional  tasting  sheet  and  a   Check-­‐All-­‐That-­‐Apply  questionnaire  of  25  emotional  adjectives.       The  main  discriminating  attributes  were  “Complexity”  (Odor),  “Astringency”  (Taste)  and   “Duration  of  the  fragrance  of  the  wine”  in  the  trained  panel  (OQDA)  and  “Color”,  “Initial   impression”  (Odor)  and  “Expectation  for  the  mouth”  for  the  untrained  tasters  in  the  FCT.     In  particular,  a  classic  European  style  red  wine,  was  less  liked  in  the  FCT,  though  it  received  high   scores  in  the  OQDA  and  regarded  as  the  most  “surprising”  in  the  CATA.  This  result  is  promising   because  it  showed  that  emotional  responses  may  enable  an  easier  recognition  of  this  wine  style   by  consumers.       Overall,  the  emotional  method  developed  in  this  work  proposes  to  evaluate  wines  in  a  way  that   is  more  accessible  to  the  consumer  than  traditional  sensory  analysis