Abstract
Australian wine shows were identified as a useful platform to help understand consumer wine preferences. A new preference mapping method was developed and validated at wine show public tasting days.
Summary
The Australian wine industry is currently interested in better understanding consumer wine preferences. The wine show system in Australia does a fantastic job at improving wine quality by minimising faults; however, the system does not have a method in place to consistently identify wines that consumers will like. This PhD, funded by Charles Sturt University with additional funding provided by the Grape and Wine Research and Development Corporation (GWRDC), aimed to measure consumer taste preference at wine shows.
We determined at the onset of the project that, to successfully identify consumer-preferred wine styles, a validated method was required. In our literature search however, we did not find any suitable method that could be used in this setting. As a result, we developed a validated new method – relative preference mapping – that could be used at public tastings to quickly identify innovative new wine styles that consumers like. This method was tested at several wine show public tastings and validated against industry best practice. Results showed that relative preference mapping was easily understood by consumers and gave the desired results – helping to quickly identify those wine styles that were liked and found to be ‘different’ by consumers at public tastings. The method achieved this outcome when an archetypal gold winning wine was used as a reference sample.
Other uses for the relative preference mapping technique were identified, such as benchmarking against competitors or screening for liked products in the product development process. The method has potential use not only at wine show public tastings but at cellar doors and in formal testing laboratories. We determined that should wine show organisers adopt this test method as part of activities at their public tasting events, over time there would be a large database on consumer wine preference which would in turn be a powerful tool for industry to project consumer wine preference trends.