A vineyard nearing maturity.

Cracking the code for wine flavour

The Food Futures Flagship is working to identify the origins of wine grape flavour to be used by winemakers to develop targeted wines to suit specific markets.

• 3 February 2006 | Updated 12 January 2012

• Background
• Current activities
• Outcomes 

Background

The Food Futures Flagship is undertaking a program of research into grapes and wine to investigate wine flavour compounds and the use of technologies to measure them.

Grape berries and their subsequent wine products have hundreds of compounds that contribute to their:

• flavour
• smell
• appearance.

This research will help identify these compounds, to provide an objective basis for developing grape varieties and improving winemaking techniques.

Current activities

The program aims to:

• better understand grape and wine flavour
• quantify aroma development and management.

In the first stage of the project, researchers are assessing the differences between grape berries and wines made from vineyards that produce wine with different characteristics.

Working with industry partners, CSIRO researchers are sampling vineyards with similar viticultural parameters that also produce berries with significantly dissimilar commercial grades.

The researchers are carrying out biochemical analyses of the berries and the relevant winemaking practices.

This is compared with sensory information gathered from trained analytical panels, together with an industry panel of Australian winemakers.

The aim is to identify compounds that correlate with the sensory characteristics of the grapes and wine.

Initially, the research has focussed on the Cabernet Sauvignon variety, but it will eventually broaden to include other varieties.

Outcomes

This research will have several long-term benefits to the Australian wine industry, including:

• a better understanding of:
  • grape and wine flavour
  • aroma development and management
  • what factors affect these elements
• a capability to measure ‘quality’ objectively, based on grape-derived compounds that contribute to wine flavour
• the ability to analyse precursors of flavour and aroma compounds found in wine, and their interactions during fermentation.

This will give Australia’s A$1 billion wine industry a competitive advantage, by being able to produce wines of a defined quality for targeted markets.

Find out more about our work with Quality biosensors.