Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
So when you taste a glass of wine,
the first thing we typically do is swirl it.
And that's to get a lot of the aroma compounds in the wine
into the headspace of the glass.
And then you stick your nose in the glass,
and you breathe it and smell it.
And that's where the aroma comes through.
And it travels through your nose until it
hits your olfactory bulb, which is
right between the center of your eyes.
And then your brain interprets all those different aromas.
I'm Elizabeth Tomasino, and I'm a wine sensory scientist
at Oregon State University in the Department of Food Science
and Technology.
And I'm a core member of the Oregon Wine Research Institute.
At the Oregon Wine Research Institute,
we have the philosophy that we cover everything
from the vine to the wine.
And I specialize in that last step dealing with wine.
Things get more complicated when you actually taste the wines.
So this means we're putting the wine in toward the mouth.
What happens there is, again, you have aroma, part of flavor.
But we also have tastes going on.
So all those taste buds in your mouth.
So you taste sweet and salty and umami and bitter and sour.
And then also something called mouthfeel.
So what occurs with mouthfeel are two very different things.
One, you have a stimulation of the trigeminal nerve.
You might be familiar with this for when you eat a hot pepper.
Your mouth goes all tingly and hot.
And then the other one occurs is one things in the wine react
with what's in your saliva.
And it can cause a graininess.
And what makes that all complicated is
when you taste wine, all of those things
happen at the same time.
So your brain has to interpret all of these different things.
Here in Oregon, we look for high quality in our wines.
We do have a lot of variability.
We're in a cool climate area.
And each vintage is always a little bit different.
So if you're going to maintain quality each year,
it's really important to know how all of those factors--
how weather, how management practices--
will affect aroma, flavor, taste, and mouthfeel,
particularly when you're trying to obtain
a specific level of quality.
And in order to maintain and even dominate
more of this area, we need to have a very good understanding
of how compositional elements affect sensory and then how
those management practices then affect
the compositional elements.
In our study, we found that pinot noir wines across Oregon
have differences to them.
These differences are sometimes subtle,
but we can find different aromas, tastes, mouthfeel,
and flavors that distinguish each of these wines,
showing that Oregon pinot noir is truly unique.
So one study that we're very excited about
is investigating terroir of Oregon wines.
Terroir really means having a sense of place.
And wine really embodies this, because if you
look at where grapes are grown, and they're affected
by the climate and the soil.
And then wines are made to represent a very specific area.
And you can taste that in the final product.
And so we're in the third year of a five-year study
where we're trying to determine the differences between Oregon
pinot noirs from different areas within Oregon.
So the Willamette Valley has AVAs,
which are American Viticultural Areas, that are characterized
because of the differences in soil and climate
and topography.
We collected wines from wineries.
And the wines were made specifically
to be these regional products.
And we collected all of these wines,
and we ran sensory analysis on it.
And we did find differences each year.
We started with 2012 pinot noir wines.
And we just finished in February,
tasting our 2014 pinot noir wines.
Because when you look at multiple years for this,
we'll get an overarching trend.
We're not releasing any of the information to the public
until the fifth year of our study.
But we're quite excited to show how all these Oregon pinot
noir wines are unique.
Working with the Oregon industry is great.
About every two months, I have winemakers from the Willamette
Valley come and participate in research sensory analysis.
And they come and partake in either tasting research
wines or, in this case, the wines
from the [INAUDIBLE] study.
These are people that running the top wineries.
They're on really busy schedules.
So we're very lucky to have industry involvement.
And this will ensure that Oregon stays on top.
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Elizabeth Tomasino is a sensory analyst at Oregon State University’s Department of Food Science and Technology. She's also a core researcher with the Oregon Wine Research Institute. She's interested in the relationship between wine sensory characteristics—the aroma, flavor, taste, and mouthfee—and the chemical components that produce them.
Produced by Stephen Ward. Special Thanks to: Bill Boggess, Executive Associate Dean, OSU College of Agricultural Sciences Danielle Gabriel, inspiration for OWRI research video series.
Want to learn more about this topic? Explore more resources from OSU Extension:
Wine, beer, cider and spirits
