PERFORMANCE COMPARISON BETWEEN TRAINED ASSESSORS AND WINE EXPERTS USING SPECIFIC SENSORY ATTRIBUTES

The profile of nine samples of Chardonnay wines was used to compare the performance of an expert panel and a trained descriptive panel using a common sensory terminology. Each panel (expert and trained) consisted of eight members, and the descriptors used by both groups were generated by the trained assessors. Thirteen out of 17 attributes evaluated turned out significant for wine discrimination among experts, and seven out of 17 for trained subjects. The trained panel reached a higher level of consensus, while the experts were more discriminative among attributes. The principal components analysis (PCA) corresponding to the expert group explained 88.68% of the total variance among the samples of the first two components. A third component was needed for the group of trained assessors (87.66% variance). The PCA showed the same wine grouping for both panels, indicating that differences were perceived in a similar way, despite that the sensory dimensions of these differences was not the same in all the cases.

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