Volume 42, June 2015, Pages 110–122
A sensory study of the ageing bouquet of red Bordeaux wines: A three-step approach for exploring a complex olfactory concept
Highlights
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- Wine professionals conceptualized wine ageing bouquet into eight semantic classes.
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- A core of seven aromatic descriptors structured its sensory definition.
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- Three of them were found significant for wine discrimination.
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- Free association task and citation-frequency help to define this complex concept.
Abstract
The
ageing bouquet, which defines the overall quality of fine wines, counts
among the most fascinating but least known phenomena in oenology. Its
complexity and subtlety are highly-valued attributes, together with the
perfume and flavour of a fine wine.
The aim of this
work was firstly to explore whether wine professionals shared a common
representation of the ageing bouquet of red Bordeaux wines and then to
move on how they perceive and translate its main sensory
characteristics. In a first step, a large panel of wine professionals
including winemakers, wine-science researchers, oenologists, wine
consultants, and graduate students in oenology were invited to answer a
questionnaire about their personal definition of the wine ageing bouquet
concept. The lexical field generated through a free association task
revealed that conceptualisation of the ageing bouquet involves a wide
variety of quality dimensions, where intrinsic attributes, such as
sensory clues, complexity, balance, and positive ageing evolution, play
an important role. Importantly, this step showed the occurrence of a
confusion of the ageing bouquet with a reductive fault of wine among the
panel and emphasised the need for a careful selection of assessors
before moving on to the next wine tasting steps.
In a
second step, 30 red Bordeaux wines were assessed by 13 wine
professionals from the Bordeaux area who were selected among the best
skilled ones thanks to the initial step of our study. They were
initially required to score to which extend each tasted wine represented
a qualitative ageing bouquet. Then, they were invited to freely express
their individual sensory descriptions for those with the highest
scores. A profile of aromatic attributes of the ageing bouquet
typicality of these wines was then compiled on the basis of the
frequency citation method. Although all wine professionals were not
consensual in their assessment of the typicality of individual wines
during tasting, they were able to express a collective representation of
the main odour characteristics of a wine’s ageing bouquet. Their
olfactory representations tended to highlight a pool of seven main
aromatic notes: undergrowth, truffle, toasted, spicy, liquorice, mint,
and fresh red- and black-berry fruits. As a third step, a validation of
these seven more frequently elicited aromatic descriptors was addressed
through a profiling of their sensory intensity by the panel. Three out
seven (undergrowth, truffle, and spicy notes) were turned out
significant for wines discrimination among the assessors. Overall, this
study provides new insights into the ageing bouquet concept in red
Bordeaux wines and offers an interesting framework for carrying out
subsequent conventional quantitative sensory analysis as well as
initiating qualitative and quantitative chemical work.
Keywords
- Wine ageing bouquet;
- Red Bordeaux wines;
- Sensory concept;
- Wine professionals;
- Free word association;
- Citation-frequency based method
- Corresponding author at: Univ. Bordeaux, ISVV, EA 4577, Œnologie, F-33140 Villenave d’Ornon, France. Tel.:
+33 557575835.
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
