Sensory profile of pink port wines: Development of a flavour lexicon

Port wine is a Portuguese fortified wine produced exclusively in the Douro Valley. Under the guidelines of the European Union Protected Designation of Origin, only products from Portugal may be labelled as Port or Porto. Pink port was first released in 2008, so it is a very recent variation in the market. Sensory evaluation has been widely applied in different fields in the wine industry, especially for testing quality, for product design and marketing. Herein, we evaluated the applicability of sensory techniques in the pink port wine industry, in order to assist winery operations in characterizing pink port wine sensory properties. To achieve these goals, our study was divided into several steps: the selection and training of panellists by using triangle and ranking tests, the identification and selection of descriptors and, finally, establishing a sensory profile with non-parametric multivariate analytical techniques such as categorical principal components analysis and multivariate analysis of variance, of several pink port brands. From the brands studied we conclude that three of them are very similar in terms of attributes, while the other two have different organoleptic characteristics. Copyright (c) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.