COMING UP WITH THE IDEA OF THE PINOTG STYLE SPECTRUM WAS THE EASY PART; MAKING IT A REALITY HAS BEEN AN ABSORBING THREE-YEAR PROCESS. THE CHALLENGE WAS TO FIND A WAY TO MEASURE THE STYLE OF A WINE SO IT COULD BE SHOWN ON A SIMPLE SCALE ON A LABEL.

After exhaustive tasting and analysis of PinotG wines from around the world, that’s exactly what we’ve been able to do.

The tasting panels, which included many Australian winemakers, agreed that some wines were crisp and zesty, others were luscious and rich, while the rest showed combinations of those attributes to varying degrees.

A wine’s ‘fingerprint’

The next stage was to define, in an objective, analytical way, what causes the variations that were identified by the expert tasters.

Our studies showed there are naturally occurring differences in the composition of the wines, in components such as flavour molecules and grape-derived acids.

The various concentrations of these components can be thought of as a wine’s ‘fingerprint’.

Comparing composition with taste

We analysed all the wines using spectral analysis, which is like X-raying them. It involves shining a fine beam of light at each sample and recording how much light either passes through or is absorbed by the wine.

The measurements indicate the level of concentration of various components. We then used advanced statistical techniques to study relationships between these findings and the expert tasters’ ratings of each of the wines.

The result: the style spectrum, by which individual wines can be rated on a comparative scale from ‘crisp’ to ‘luscious’.

Through cutting-edge science we’ve achieved a major breakthrough; it’s thought to be the first time the style of a wine has been able to be fingerprinted in this way.

Making the PinotG style spectrum a reality has involved a truly collaborative effort between many of our local wine producers and some of the world’s leading wine scientists at the Australian Wine Research Institute.

The main benefit is that it will help you identify the style of PinotG you prefer.