Press Release

Munich/Mannheim April 26, 2006: "young fruit, biting, full palate, subtle aftertaste, animalistic aroma, nuanced structure, tar notes, crisp tannin, elegant taste, an earthy bouquet…" no matter how meaningful these modern wine tasting descriptions may be to the connoisseur, they are of little help to the normal consumer fidgeting in front of a seemingly endless row of wines at the local grocery store as he or she agonizes over which bottle to chose. Do the producers or distributors of major wine brands know how the consumer perceives their brand? Does today's buyer see any discernable difference at all between the various brands of wine, or is there a uniformity of  taste that predominates Europe's wine brands, as the high priests of the wine world so readily assert? And when there is a difference, what distinguishing characteristics does the buyer use?

There is no lack of statistical figures to describe the wine market. There have also been sufficient major studies that subdivide the target groups. Yet few have concerned themselves with the question of how consumers perceive  wine as regards to taste.

This is exactly the content of the latest multi-client study of the business group SAM Sensory and Marketing. With the title "The Red Wines of Europe", the EPP® (European Product Profiles) addresses both wine producers and distributors. The study provides a totally new source of information for successful wine marketing. For the first time, using  trustworthy, reproducible sensory profiles, which show how the consumers perceive the 60 most important European wine brands. This unique European comparison-study examined wine brands in the one to ten Euro price class, coming from ten wine-producing countries.

The wine profiles of the EPP® red wine study have been drawn up using the same modern descriptive sensory research methods as those that are used in other areas of the food industry. These methods aim at gaining an objective understanding of the taste characteristics of products found in the marketplace in order to analyse the connection between market success and taste characteristics.

With a total of 60 descriptive wine attributes, the consumer-specific vocabulary was a deciding factor in the study. The attributes were worked out by specially trained consumers. With its clear and unambiguous definitions, this vocabulary intelligibly mirrors the consumer's capability of perception and differentiation, a capability that up to this point has been neither well researched or understood by the experts.  

The sensory profiles, represented as  spider-web graphics, make the sensory characteristics of wine visible, and show how the wines look, smell, feel, and taste from the consumer's perspective. If one spider-web is projected over another it will become unmistakably clear which characteristic differentiates one wine from another (see illus. 1). Thus taste differences between the various wines can be delineated.

The study also contains the results of chemical analysis (ph., alcohol, acidity, etc), so that the connection between these values and the wines' sensory characteristics can be deduced.

The Taste Landscape of Europe's Red Wines 

In addition to superordinate statistical analyses, the study's unique and extensive data also allow mappings showing the taste positioning of all 60 wines in one diagram. This impressive "European red wine taste landscape" is further differentiated and analyzed in a total of ten diagrams illustrating particular points of view such as land of origin, geographic marketing, price, etc (see illus. 2). These diagrams show e.g.  which wine taste is preferred in which countries, how different wines from a specific area taste, or how strong the difference in wine taste is from region to region.

The information-packed study of Europe's red wines contains a total of 89 pages with numerous graphs and abundant analyses. It includes a printout version and a CD-ROM version for representation of the spider-web graphics.

The study is available in several languages and can be obtained at a cost of 
€ 6,000 (excl tax) through:

SAM Sensory and Marketing
International AG
Dr. Martin Kern
Chief Executive Officer
Seeblick 1
CH - 6330 Cham

Phone:  + 41 44 439 70 44
Fax:   + 41 44 439 70 51
Mobile:  + 41 79 820 56 01
martin.kern(at)samresearch.com