Washington State Wines Set Tongues Wagging

(Wines&Vines) - When the wine starts talking, a new $90,000 device at Washington State University’s sensory evaluation lab in Pullman listens.

Acquired last year, the ASTREE Electronic Tongue developed by Alpha M.O.S. of Toulouse, France, gives WSU associate professor Dr. Carolyn Ross a new tool for assessing and analyzing the components of various food products.

Putting it to use

A current project is the analysis of 60 red wines from Washington state, and the correlation of results from the e-tongue with chemical analysis and the results of sensory analysis by trained tasters.

“We’re trying to see how well all of these chemical parameters, taken together, explained what our trained panelists observe in the wine,” she said. “The e-tongue will never replace people, but it certainly has use if you’re screening a lot of different wine samples. People get tired…and it’s hard to distinguish differences, especially if (the wines) are really astringent or they’re really high alcohol.”

The challenge is well-known, as underscored by the regular debates about the palates of wine judges (see “How Consistent Are Wine Judges?”).

One of the first challenges, however, was to determine what kind of information the instrument could provide and how to correlate this information with other ways of understanding wine.

Taste the rainbow

A broad selection of red wines was chosen to give the tongue the greatest latitude of tasting experience.

“We wanted differences among the wines. We were trying to find low-alcohol Merlots, high-alcohol Merlots, high-tannin/low-tannin ones that varied in the properties to see if the e-tongue could distinguish them,” Ross said. “We felt it would give a good indication of the way we could group the wines together.”