Consumers’ emotional responses elicited by wines according to organoleptic quality

Abstract

Wine is often described with emotional terms, such as surprising, disappointing or pleasant. However, very little has been done to really characterize this link between emotions and wine. Can it really bring emotions to wine tasters? Many studies have looked at the extrinsic factors that can improve the emotional experience of tasters when discovering a wine (Danner et al. 2016, 2017), but few have been carried out on the emotional impact of the organoleptic characteristics of wines. One study, however, has shown that where novice consumers fail to distinguish two different styles of red wine using conventional sensory descriptors, they manage to do it with emotional attributes (Coste et al. 2018). This new approach highlights a role for emotions in tasting, and it seems interesting to try to better understand and characterize this role. The present study explored the link between organoleptic quality defined by tasting experts and emotions felt by consumers (connoisseurs). Different red Bordeaux wines, with different sensory properties and different levels of quality (defined by wine experts) have been tasted by 65 connoisseurs. Emotions were measured using both direct and indirect methods. The evaluation of the conscious part of emotions was conducted with cognitive measurements, using self-declarative questionnaires. The unconscious part of emotions was evaluated with two types of measurements. One measures the behavioral component of emotions with facial expressions, and the other measures the response of the autonomic nervous system with physiological data known to be correlated to emotional response, such as heart rate, respiratory rate and skin conductance level. Finally, the aim was to evaluate whether it is possible to differentiate wines through emotions and which type of measure (conscious or unconscious) is the most relevant. The results were compared with classical approach in sensory analysis with consumers (measure of hedonic perception).