Expertise level and odour perception: What can we learn from red burgundy wines?

We compare the olfactive dimensions used by expert and novice wine tasters to describe and categorise a series of 13 red burgundy wines. Verbal and no nverbal approaches have been used in parallel. The verbal approach included a communication task and a description task. Pairs of assessors were asked to match a series of samples based only on verbal exchanges. All the gener ated terms were recorded and the most frequently used terms served as a bas is for the description task. The non-verbal approach included a similarity judgement task. Multivariate analyses have been used to analyse the data. R esults show that (1) both groups of subjects were able to perform the commu nication task reasonably well and to generate a coherent set of descriptors , (2) the two groups of subjects used an equivalent number of dimensions to describe and categorise the wines, and (3) the two groups of subjects used the same dimensions for the non-verbal task, but different dimensions for the verbal task. This dissociation between verbal and non-verbal task sugge sts that the perceptual representation of wine is similar for the two group s of subjects but that the verbalisation of this representation varies with expertise level. Subjects with a higher level of expertise tend to use ana lytical terms whereas subjects with a lower level tend to use holistic term s.