Classifying South African Chenin blanc wine styles

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: South African Chenin blanc wine is characterised by its style diversity and has been receivingmore industry limelight over the past few years. Three dry Chenin blanc wine styles arecurrently described by the wine industry as Fresh and Fruity (FF), Rich and Ripe unwooded(RR-unwooded) and, Rich and Ripe wooded (RR-wooded). According to the South African wineindustry, however, consumers seem to be somewhat confused by these various Chenin blancwine styles, which have not yet been clearly defined and classified. During this study weinvestigated the following perspectives of this wine style classification confusion:Currently, no specified sensory method is being used to differentiate between wine styles ofa single wine cultivar, such as Chenin blanc. The sorting method can be used as a more costand time effective classification and profiling method than general quantitative descriptiveanalysis (QDA). It was therefore investigated whether both uninstructed and instructed sorting,with consumers and wine experts, can be used to classify and describe the Chenin blanc winestyles similarly to QDA. The increase in young wine consumers, Generation Y, introduces newwine marketing opportunities for the wine industry which need to be investigated. Youngconsumers are not aware of the various Chenin blanc wine styles, which may influence theirwine preferences. The influence of wine style knowledge on these consumers' wine stylepreferences were investigated during blind and wine style informed preference test. Anysegmentation within this Generation Y group was also investigated with regards to their Cheninblanc wine style preferences and/or exploratory data. The following scientific and industrialfindings were made:QDA was successfully substituted by instructed and uninstructed sorting tasks. Although thesorting tasks easily differentiated between wooded and unwooded wines, QDA differentiatedmore successfully between the unwooded wines. Wine tasting experience did not significantlyinfluence the sorting results of the consumers versus the wine experts, but more experiencedpanellists consistently used fewer descriptors than untrained consumers. All panellists sortedproducts slightly better when they were provided with wine style sorting instructions. However,there were no significant differences between the instructed and uninstructed sorting taskresults, i.e. a wine style descriptor list did not improve panellists' abilities to describe their sortedwine groups.South African Chenin blanc wines can definitely be divided into wooded and unwoodedwine styles, i.e. two wine style groups, but the unwooded Chenin blanc wine spectrum formed awine-style-continuum. This finding is apparent from both the sorting and QDA methods. Theunwooded continuum wines can further be differentiated from one another with the use of afresh-to-mature scale and/or a light-to-full body scale during QDA.Generation Y wine consumers preferred all the Chenin blanc wine styles equally andmoderately during the blind tasting, but their knowledge of the wine style concepts significantlyincreased their preferences for the wines during the informed wine style tasting. The cognitiveinfluence of wine style knowledge is therefore powerful in terms of influencing a consumer'swine preferences. Other interesting correlations were also made between Generation Yconsumers' wine style preferences and their exploratory data.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University