Canadian terroir: characterization of Riesling wines from the Niagara Peninsula

The Niagara Peninsula (Ontario, Canada) is thought to have distinct viticul tural areas ('bench', 'plains', 'lake'), but the uniqueness of wines from t hese regions has not been documented. Therefore this research was undertake n to document the nature and magnitude of the terroir differences using 14 commercial Riesling wines from producers who utilized grapes from the 'Beam sville Bench' ('bench') and the 'Niagara Plains' ('plains') regions. The se nsory characteristics of the wines were profiled using descriptive analysis (DA) coupled with univariate and multivariate statistics. Six trained judg es evaluated 10 aroma (pineapple, melon, grapefruit, lemon/lime, apple, pea ch/apricot, rose/floral, honey, diesel/petrol, mineral/flint), six flavour (pineapple, melon. grapefruit, lemon:lime, peach/apricot, honey), two taste (acidity, sweetness), and three other (alcohol, body, finish) sensory attr ibutes. Data were analyzed using analysis of variance, step-wise discrimina nt analysis (SDA) and principle component analysis (PCA). Wines from the 'b ench' had significantly higher grapefruit, pineapple, melon and lemon/lime aromas, more acidity and greater lemon/lime flavour than the 'plains' wines . 'Plains' wines were more diesel/petrol-like in character. A PCA of the da ta, using the most relevant sensory descriptors (as determined by SDA), ind icated that 68.7% of the variability could be explained in the first two di mensions, with factor one accounting for the lemon/lime, grapefruit, melon and acidity of the wines and factor two representing the mineral/flint char acter. Crown Copyright (C) 2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All righ ts reserved.