Sensory typicality of wines: How scientists have recently dealt with this subject

Wine is one product whose concept of typicality is prevalent. This paper tries to synthesize how scientists have recently worked on the concept of typicality with wine professionals. Is it possible to get an agreement on sensory typicality inside a Protected Designation of Origin (POD)? When there is a consensus, which methodology can be used to describe it? Ballester (2004) suggested investigating typicality with a single question, where the assessor is asked to score if the sample is a good example or not of the type. This manner of exploring typicality has been used by number of authors afterwards (Ballester, Patris, Symoneaux, & Valentin, 2008; Cadot, Caine, Samsonc, Barbeaua, & Cheynier, 2010; Perrin, 2008). The investigation of POD typicality is not straightforward, as it seems that there is more sensory overlapping between close POD than between wines made with different grape varieties: the results depend on the samples choice, the professional tasters selection and the POD itself. Different sensory methodologies are applied to precise sensory characteristics of typical products such as sensory profile, sorting methods and qualitative descriptions. A new sensory methodology to improve accreditation tasting is presented. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.