Characterizing the astringency of red wine: a case study

Red table wines of quality are characterized by pleasing and complex mouth-feel sensations, the most important of these being astringency. While a comprehensive set of terms has been developed over time to describe the flavor of red wines, an appropriate vocabulary describing the astringent sensations produced by these wines is not well defined. This paper presents a structured vocabulary derived by a panel of experienced wine tasters that can be used to describe the astringent sub-qualities of red wines. Multidimensional scaling of sorting data showed that an experienced panel and a group of skilled red wine-makers had similar interpretations of the relationships among the astringency terms. A tasting panel was successfully trained to identify and consistently rate the intensity of the astringent sub-qualities encountered in a set of one year old Shiraz wines. A novel approach of using finger touch standards to represent the astringent sensations experienced in the mouth was utilized. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.