How do consumers describe wine astringency?

Astringency is one of the most important sensory characteristics of red wine. Although a hierarchically structured vocabulary to describe the mouthfeel sensations of red wine has been proposed, research on consumers' astringency vocabulary is lacking. In this context, the aim of this work was to gain an insight on the vocabulary used by wine consumers to describe the astringency of red wine and to evaluate the influence of wine involvement on consumers' vocabulary. One hundred and twenty-five wine consumers completed and on-line survey with five tasks: an open-ended question about the definition of wine astringency, free listing the sensations perceived when drinking an astringent wine, free listing the words they would use to describe the astringency of a red wine, a CATA question with 44 terms used in the literature to describe astringency, and a wine involvement questionnaire. When thinking about wine astringency consumers freely elicited terms included in the Mouth-feel Wheel, such as dryness and harsh. The majority of the specific sub-qualities of the Mouth-feel Wheel were not included in consumer responses. Also, terms not classified as astringency descriptors were elicited (e.g. acid and bitter). Only 17 out of the 31 terms from the Mouth-feel Wheel were used by more than 10% of participants when answering the CATA question. There were no large differences in the responses of consumer segments with different wine involvement. Results from the present work suggest that most of the terms of the Mouth-feel Wheel might not be adequate to communicate the astringency characteristics of red wine to consumers.