Emotional responses elicited by wine when pairing with high fat food

• Author(s): Almeida, Susana Cristina Aleixo de
• Date: 2017
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.5/14827
• Origin: Repositório da UTL
• Subject(s): wine; food pairing; sensory analysis; emotions; wine tasting
• Document Type: Master thesis
• Language: English
• Advisor(s): Malfeito Ferreira, Manuel; Mota, Mariana Gomes
• Contributor(s): Repositório da Universidade de Lisboa

Description

Mestrado em Viticultura e Enologia / Instituto Superior de Agronomia / Faculdade de Ciências. Universidade do Porto

This work was aimed at the evaluation of emotional responses elicited by wine before and after food consumption. The tastings were performed by one trained panel and by consumers, segmented by gender, Vinotype, 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP) sensitivity and Saliva flow rate. Three commercial red wines with different sensory features were used: i) Grand Gold awarded wine from Alentejo (2013); ii) wine from altitude vineyards in Douro (2011), iii) classical European old wine (1999) from Bairrada. Wines were evaluated using a tasting sheet with emotional and conventional tasting descriptors before and after eating a typical Portuguese dish, whose distinctive feature was its high fat content. Overall, food did not change the global evaluation scores given to the wines but some of their characteristics were scored significantly different through the emotional tasting. The results of both panels demonstrated that the emotional responses were more correlated with the global evaluation of the wines than the classical sensory descriptors. Within the trained individuals, the main correlations with global evaluation were obtained with “Initial Impression”, “Expectation for the mouth” and “Impression in relation to odor”. In particular, the global evaluation for the Bairrada wine, could be predicted by a model including these three variables with a R2=0.73. With the untrained tasters, the correlation with global evaluation was only significant for the “Impression in relation to odor”. The average scores given to the three wines by both panels did not diverge, despite their different sensory attributes. Therefore, our work only reflected trends in wine preferences. The untrained panel preferred the Alentejo wine while the trained panel preferred the Douro wine, before the food ingestion. The correlations between the global evaluation and the other sensory descriptors for the Alentejo wine could not explain this preference. We speculate that the untrained panel scored the wines based on what they are used to drink, giving lower scores to the unfamiliar one. The trained panel demonstrated a higher correlation between emotional and sensory descriptors. In fact, the trained panel seemed to understand better the different range of qualities of the wines. After ingesting food, the preference changed only for the trained panel, showing preference to the Bairrada wine. Both panels agreed that the old Bairrada was the most complex and difficult wine to understand In conclusion, the emotional tasting sheet was easy to interpret by all segments of consumers, leading to open and fair answers because it appeals to individual personal feelings. This tasting approach appears to be promising in the rapid learning of the different wine styles. In the future, it would be interesting to evaluate the evolution of scores given to unfamiliar wines that would require time to be appreciated using appropriate foods. This way, the classical European wines, that are difficult to understand by consumers, would have a better chance to be correctly appreciated