Aims: Given the diversity of French dry Rosé wines, Provence Rosé producers (France) wish to evaluate the typicality of their wines in order to better identify their typical characteristics. A clear pink color is one of them but they would also like to identify some specific odors and aromas. Here, we address these issues by: (i) assessing whether the identity of Provence Rosé wines is perceptible by tasting and shared by professionals based on specific odors and aromas (disregarding color as indicator using black glasses), and (ii) evaluating the impact of color on Provence Rosé wine typicality.Methods and results: Complementary methods were used: exemplarity measurements by a panel of wine professionals, sensory evaluation by a trained expert panel, and color assessment. It was confirmed that Provence Rosé wine typicality is based on color because the clearest wines were found to be more typical. However, typicality in odors and aromas was also demonstrated. Using black glasses, wine professionals from Provence agreed on ‘citrus fruit’, ‘exotic fruit’ and ‘fresh floral’ odors and aromas being typical attributes of Provence Rosé wines. Next, when using transparent glasses, the color of the wines clearly modified the perception of exemplarity.Conclusion: There is no single sensory profile of typical Provence Rosé wines. Variability within the sensory profiles of this specific Rosé wine area was observed, but some common aromatic and visual characteristics were identified.Significance and impact of the study: These results could be used as a marketing tool to better highlight the specific intrinsic characteristics of Provence Rosé wines. It will now be interesting to investigate the Provence area further in order to evaluate potential sub-area specificities linked to “terroir” factors.

The production of Rosé wine is developing around the world. In terms of quantity, the volumes made are increasing. In terms of quantity, two apparently contradicting tendencies can be observed: a global trend converging towards a clear, dry model and, at the same time, a desire to differentiate different regions, based on terroir. Thanks to several analytical and sensorial databases which have been assembled over the last fifteen years, the Centre du Rosé provides an objective view of these emerging phenomena. The typicity of the Provence Rosé wines can be measured, both analytically and sensorially, and within the Provençal vineyard itself, the different vintages have some remarkable characteristics. In other French and European wine regions we examined typical rosé wines whose particularity has its origins in the terroir.

Wine aromatic characterisation is generally a complex task, even for well-trained assessors. To facilitate such characterisation, aroma terms are typically arranged in some sort of hierarchical structure, such as aroma wheels. However, information about this structure is lost with existing data acquisition and treatment methods. To fill this gap, we propose a new approach, Hierarchical-Rate-All-That-Apply (HRATA), for the characterisation of products. It combines the Rate-All-That-Apply (RATA) methodology with a hierarchical structuring of general and specific attributes. The aim is first to facilitate data acquisition and, secondly, to account for the hierarchical links among attributes during data analysis. We applied an HRATA approach to the characterisation of five rosé wines by 66 subjects based on 118 hierarchically structured aromatic attributes. Using monadic evaluation, assessors were asked to select all the attributes that characterised each wine and to rate their intensity on a three-point scale. For the data analysis, an initial coding step was carried out to represent the hierarchical structure of the attributes, which also made it possible to manage a large amount of non-evaluated data. After that, statistical tests and multivariate analyses were tailored for both the identification of discriminating attributes and the determination of a product map. Finally, the characterisation obtained with HRATA was compared to the results obtained from a descriptive analysis (DA) conducted by a trained panel. HRATA represents an interesting alternative for obtaining aromatic characterisation using a panel of subjects without collective common training or with diverse skill sets.