Anna Katharine Mansfield<\/a>, associate professor of enology at Cornell AgriTech. \u201cPrior to coming to Cornell I worked with breeders at the University of Minnesota and often there was this idea that consumers would reject a wine if its color didn\u2019t look very Vitis vinifera-like. But no one had ever studied that question.\u201d<\/p>\nAdditionally, the research was motivated by chemistry, according to co-author and food science doctoral student Catherine Dadmun.<\/p>\n
\u201cEspecially in Europe, there are historic restrictions on the chemical color compounds that appear uniquely in hybrid grapes,\u201d Dadmun said. \u201cThis has led to the assumption that these compounds must result in low-quality color. We were trying to clarify what is and isn\u2019t important for consumer perception of color quality from a chemical composition standpoint.\u201d<\/p>\n
As winemaking regions across North America and Europe grapple with more erratic weather, late frosts and increasing fungal disease pressure, hybrid cultivars offer a compelling alternative to the European grapes that have dominated fine wine for centuries. Varieties like marquette, Mar\u00e9chal Foch and St. Croix can be grown with far fewer pesticide applications and survive winters that would devastate conventional vineyards. But commercial adoption has been slowed by persistent doubts about whether consumers will accept the resulting wines.<\/p>\n
To test one of those doubts directly, the research team recruited 82 regular red wine drinkers through the Cornell Sensory Evaluation Center and asked them to evaluate eight commercial red wines, five made from hybrid cultivars sourced from New York, Wisconsin, Tennessee and Iowa, plus pinot noirs from three regions, without knowing which was which. Panelists rated how much they liked each wine’s appearance, how much they expected to enjoy it based on color alone, and then, after tasting, how much they actually liked it.<\/p>\n
The results cut in two directions at once. Color did matter, but mostly as a prelude. Wines that appeared lighter or showed more yellow and brown tones<\/strong> scored lower for visual appeal and generated weaker expectations. Three wines clustered at the bottom of the visual rankings: a Finger Lakes pinot noir, Norton from Tennessee and corot noir from near Albany, New York. But when panelists tasted all eight wines, color\u2019s predictive power largely evaporated. The statistical relationship between appearance liking and actual liking explained only about 8% of the variation in drinkers\u2019 responses.<\/p>\n\u201cThe fact is, taste and aroma are so much more important than color in overall quality perception,\u201d Dadmun said. \u201cWhen we evaluated hue-liking and overall appearance-liking, the pinot noirs and hybrid grapes were largely in the same pool.\u201d<\/p>\n
The finding holds an implicit challenge to wine industry assumptions.\u00a0Darker wines have long been associated with higher quality, a bias that has made some winemakers reluctant to promote hybrids. But the Cornell data showed no meaningful correlation<\/strong> between color intensity and actual liking. What seemed to drive the lower visual scores for the three least-liked wines wasn\u2019t lightness per se, but a tendency toward brownish, yellow-tinged hues rather than the deep red-purple that consumers associate with a young, well-made red.<\/p>\n\u201cAnother thing to bear in mind with color evaluation is you\u2019re frequently doing this in the glass, not the bottle,\u201d Mansfield said. \u201cYou\u2019re rarely buying wine in a clear glass bottle because green glass is more protective, so color is a non-issue in some ways. My hope is that people breeding hybrids can just worry less.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\n
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JOURNAL<\/h4>\n
American Journal of Enology and Viticulture<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ITHACA, N.Y. \u2013 When a glass of red wine arrives at the table, most drinkers make a snap judgment before taking a sip. Is the color deep enough? Does the hue suggest quality, or raise a red flag? For years, that visual scrutiny has posed a challenge to an emerging category of wine grapes. Interspecific… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":34781,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"no","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"off","neve_meta_content_width":70,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1112,1114,324,1113],"tags":[465,127,1115,548,41,927],"class_list":["post-34780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alcohol","category-drinking","category-senses","category-taste","tag-colour","tag-decision-making","tag-ratings","tag-taste","tag-visual","tag-wine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34780"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34780\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34782,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34780\/revisions\/34782"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}