Development of a vocabulary of terms for sensory evaluation of dessert port wines

Twelve wood-aged dessert ports were assessed by a panel of 19 assessors using free choice profiling with the aim of developing a vocabulary of terms for subsequent use in a fixed-scheme sensory evaluation of conventional profiling. Relationships between personal product spaces were examined to clarify the basis of assessor judgements: product, spaces of four assessors were examined to explore whether educated or inexperienced consumers had similar perceptions of appearance, flavour, mouthfeel and thus relative character. The complete data were analysed by generalized Procrustes analysis, resulting in two significant principal axes accounting for 43% original variance. When appearance terms were eliminated from a data set from which unreliable assessors had been removed, a total of 49% variance was explained in 4 significant principal axes. Appearance was found to be an important factor in port differentiation, reflecting assessor difficulties in using other descriptors. In both analyses, two primary clusters appeared based on port style: tawny or late bottled vintage. A consensus vocabulary was obtained with six terms for appearance attributes, thirteen for aroma, eight for taste, two for mouthfeel and five for aftertaste. This vocabulary can be utilised for differentiating sensory characters in dessert port wines, such as wood-aged ports.