DESCRIPTIVE SENSORY ANALYSIS OF WINE VINEGAR: TASTING PROCEDURE AND RELIABILITY OF NEW ATTRIBUTES

A procedure for the sensory analysis of vinegar, which provides reproducible results and minimizes the standard deviation of attributes, was developed. A new tasting protocol was proposed that leads to low dispersions of panelists' answers. The list of attributes that describe vinegars was extended to a total of 13, the importance (or discriminant utility) of which was analyzed by using Partial Least Squares Regression related techniques. The attributes selected showed a good between-run reproducibility as was shown by the Discriminant Partial Least Squares Regression analysis on replications. The proposed methodology proved to be useful for tasting very different types of wine vinegars (i.e., sherry and red and white wine vinegars). PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS As the vinegar market is now making products from different raw materials, we believed that it would be interesting to improve sensory analysis. The European Union (EU) regulates the sensory analysis of oil but not of vinegar. Our manuscript describes a tasting protocol that aims to provide more reproducible results, proposes a broader vocabulary for describing vinegars and uses statistical tools to verify the reliability of new attributes.