The Food and I Sensory Perception as Revealed by Multivariate Methods

Abstract

When drinking a glass of wine, the light flavours of fruit and berries normally will balance the spicy and vegetative aromas of pepper, green beans and asparagus. This represent a description of the balance between ripe and not-ripe aromas in the grapes, reflected in the perception of the matured wine as we drink it. One can expect that the human senses have evolved to recognise the degree of ripening in a fruit, and therefore this becomes one of the most immediate impressions when we drink a fruit based wine. For wine experts, with a very different vocabulary, the same perception can be expressed in many other ways, such as “a cosmopolitan wine, well balanced, harmonious and with a touch of peach and oak”. In this, the description hints at describing a “good” wine for “cosmopolitans”, while others may not understand the description at all. This is a simple indication that even if the perceived entity may be the same, interpretations or meanings may be extremely different between two human beings. This chapter starts out with a very philosophical introduction, but ends up in very practical examples where the introduction is applied in a pragmatic way.