The Australian Wine Research Institute (AWRI) has recently come up with a PinotG Style Spectrum, which is supposed to tell consumers what kind of Pinot Gris they’re getting, on a scale that ranges from “crisp” to “luscious.” As an industry response to the multitude of Pinot Gris styles now being made in Australia, it makes sense as shorthand, so that prospective purchasers don’t have to actually read descriptive back labels or know how to interpret technical notes.

Researchers correlated organoleptic data from a trained tasting panel with spectrographic analyses to develop the scale, allowing a wine to be classified according to its spectrographic “fingerprint” rather than according to some winemaker’s or marketer’s subjective impression.

As an attempt to remove subjective taste criteria from style description, the PinotG Style Spectrum parallels in some ways the development of the International Riesling Federation’s (IRF) Riesling Taste Profile, which purports to tell consumers how sweet their Riesling is based on the relationships in the finished wine between residual sugar, total acidity and pH. That’s it: just numbers, crunched into a linear scale from “dry” to “sweet.”

At the Nelson International Aromatics Sympsium in New Zealand held this past February, the IRF scale took some abuse from a number of the attendees, including guest of honor Ernst Loosen, who noted that in many cases the numbers didn’t tell the whole story. Several wines were perceived to be drier than they should have been (according to the numbers), while others were sweeter. Although the scale isn’t a complete failure, neither is it a complete success, as its accuracy is limited by its reliance on only three variables.

As Bob Campbell, MW pointed out close to two years ago, alcohol content and the type of sugar that is present can both affect how residual sugar is perceived. By using spectrographic fingerprinting, the PinotG Style Spectrum avoids the overreliance on a few easily measured lab values that handicaps the Riesling Taste Profile. On the other hand, the beauty of the IRF solution is that it’s so easy to calculate and thus more likely to be adopted by producers.

In the end, each of these scales gives consumers another tool in choosing a wine that is more likely to match up with their taste preferences. By making these references independent of marketing spin, the wine industry is moving closer to giving consumers the unbiased information they increasingly demand. Who knows? Perhaps one day we’ll be able to plot our own preferences and match them up with spectrographic diagrams on back labels. No colorful descriptors–indeed, no words at all–needed.

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