Investigating Fruitiness Perception in Red and White Wines
This report details activities that occurred from February 2018 – January 2019. The final date of this project is August 2019 and the next 6 months will include completing the last of the sensory panels and combining all data analysis. A final report will be submitted in January 2020. We are still slightly behind on the timeline due to issues detailed in last year’s report and we also had to renew our IRB (human ethics approval) in June 2018. Once the renewal is submitted it is illegal to run sensory tests on the project until approval is given, which was obtained in September 2018. In January 2019 we completed the last of the Pinot noir sensory panels, although we have not yet done data analysis on the January 2019 panel. Also as stated previously, we have not been able to complete any predictive modeling, some initial reviewer comments said that this objective might have been too ambitious in the timeline and after the 1st year we have to agree and have since removed this objective. We plan on working on predictive modeling in the future but this would be after the current grant is completed.
To date we have investigated 80 different compound combinations and their impact to fruit aroma in Pinot noir wine. We have also completed a panel that shows the influences of phenolic content on fruity aromas in Pinot noir and one panel that shows the impact of ethanol content on fruity aroma in Pinot noir. We have 2 potential marker compounds for red fruit aroma in Pinot noir and 4 red fruit solution sets using fsQCA that show the cause of red fruit aroma in Pinot noir. We have also found 5 solution sets for dark fruit aroma in Pinot noir using fsQCA.
We have also investigated 49 compound combinations for fruitiness in white wine. We are still working on using fsQCA to analyze this data. Preliminary results suggest a combination of low thiols and high esters are responsible for tropical fruit aromas, low to no esters are needed for citrus aromas, and esters and terpenes cause pear, peach and apricot aromas.
We will be running the last 4 Pinot gris sensory panels from February2019-June 2019 and completing the final data analysis. We are in the process of writing the first paper for publication and have done 2 presentations at domestic conferences on the analytical data analysis. Spring /Summer 2019 we will be presenting at 4 different international conferences in Europe and have plans for at least 3 more peer-reviewed publications.
