Conceptual vs. perceptual wine spaces: Does expertise matter?

This study explores the differences in wine categorization between wine experts and novice wine consumers using 10 Melon de Bourgogne (MB) and 10 Chardonnay (CH) wines. Participants performed a free sorting task based on odor similarity followed by a CH and a MB typicality rating task and a liking rating. All tasks were performed orthonasally. We observed a clear agreement between experts concerning typicality scores. Moreover, despite a slight overlap we found a clear differentiation between CH and MB for experts' typicality scores. For novices, no such agreement on typicality scores was observed and we found a complete overlap between both types of wines. These results suggest that experts developed through successive wine tasting separate consensual sensory concepts for CH and MB wines. Multidimensional Scaling analyses of the sorting tasks showed an expertise effect since the expert similarity plot showed a better separation between MB and CH wines than the novices' one. For experts, significant correlations between both CH and MB typicality scores and the MDS first dimension coordinates suggest that experts' CH and MB sensory concepts are partially based on perceptual similarities. Additionally, experts' hedonic scores were significantly correlated with their CH typicality scores as well as with the MDS second dimension. This correlation suggests that liking was involved in the sorting task but was not the main expert's criteria to sort the wines. Our results suggest that wine expertise may be more of a cognitive expertise rather than a perceptual one. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.