Dominique Valentin

Institut Agro Dijon | AgroSup Dijon · Sensory evaluation & consumers behavior

The presence of vines across diverse landscapes and peoples led to the production of different wine styles with a variety of sensory characteristics. In the 20th Century, these styles were sorted into Old (i.e., European) versus New World (i.e., from other continents) to facilitate communication. Geographic origin has been playing a prominent role...

In sensory studies, sour taste is considered a basic taste without further considerations. Yet, many foods and beverages are composed of a variety of organic acids with potentially different acidifying power and sensory quality. This is the case for instance in wine, coffee, ramen soup, apple, or apricot. Whether natural, added or produced during f...

Consumers’ mental pictures of wine are multifaceted and are shaped by their sensory (taste, smell, visual, sensation) perceptions, in addition to emotional, cultural and extrinsic (brand, price, and awards) influences. This study explores whether consumers from three different wine cultures share mental representations of three wine concepts. Throu...

The objective of this chapter is to underline the main practical and methodological issues encountered when applying CATA or RATA to wine profiling. In the material section, we discuss some important methodological points that might impact the efficiency of the methodologies such as the type of assessors able to perform the task, the selection and...

Drinking experience has gained the attention of researchers in recent years, mainly measured in different social-leisure contexts. However, no or very little, scientific attention has been paid to the drinking experience phenomenon when detached from the influence of the enjoyment of the social factor component. The objective of this study was to u...

Whether “gurus”, “emperor” or “influencers”, wine consumers need references to help them choosing and buying wines. Given the diversity of possible sources (reviews from wine guides, wine merchants’recommendations or back wine label), where should they turn? Are all wine experts consensual in the way they taste wines? Do they differ depending on th...

The definition of regional typicality is a determinant for the preservation of perceived wine quality and protection of wine origin. This work firstly aims at evaluating the sensory diversity of young Tempranillo Tinto wines in the three subregions of DOCa Rioja (Alta-RALT-, Alavesa-RAVS- and Oriental-RO-) and secondly aims to explore the capacity...

In the climate change context, wine industry is source of proposals to help producers’ adaptation. One of the major challenges is to move from the current grape varieties to new ones. The aim of this study is to evaluate the consumers’ acceptation of three new varietal adaptations. For this purpose, 65 French consumers from Lyon were recruited to c...

Consuming insects as a solution to climate change became popular in scientific publications but, most of these publications focus on western countries. The objective of this study was to explore attitudes and motivations towards insect consumption in a country where insect consumption is common (e.g., Mexico).. The rationale for this work is that...

The present study analyses the sensory effects associated with the interactions between different woody aroma compositions and a simple fruity ester vector in red wines. The semi-synthetic wine models contained a fixed aroma composition, the dearomatised non-volatile fraction of red wine and 21 different combinations of ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (frui...

Wine PDOs are based on their place of origin and technical product specifications. Some studies have looked at sensory differences between PDOs, but few have shown real sensory specificities for each PDO. These studies have focused on well-established PDOs, leaving aside the new appellations developed in recent years. This article investigates expe...

People form mental concepts of categories of objects, which permit them to respond appropriately to new objects they encounter by making inferences from properties of known categories. Among those concepts, food concepts are central to human food perception and acceptation, but how these concepts are represented in memory is unclear and remains a v...

The problems of malnutrition constitute a major challenge in South Africa, particularly affecting the underprivileged populations of the Eastern Cape and Limpopo provinces. The present study aimed to gain an understanding of how to improve the nutritional intake of South African university student mothers and their children by the introduction of M...

Native to India, Moringa oleifera Lam. is a plant with high nutritional value, which is now grown across the world, especially in tropical and subtropical regions. This study determined the knowledge, consumption, attitudes and beliefs toward Moringa oleifera in some African countries (Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa) and in India to gain a better...

In experiential literature there is a collective accord that consumers’ experiences should be conceptualised in a multi-dimensional configuration. From the sensory science viewpoint, the recent focus on consumption experience is gaining momentum but more findings are still needed. This study aims to reveal the dimensions shaping the wine drinking e...

Minerality in wine has consistently gained attention from the wine industry in the last three decades. It has been considered for a longtime as an ill-defined and controversial sensory attribute. In the last decade several academic articles have addressed the conceptual, sensory, and chemical delimitation of this fuzzy concept. However, the link to...

Encouraging consumers to reduce their meat consumption is imperative in mitigating climate change effects related to the food industry. For some, transitioning away from meat may be facilitated by meat substitutes. However, these are not always accepted as suitable alternatives to meat due to a combination of psychological, situational, and sensori...

The analysis of texts is still a challenge since it is born from the meeting of several scientific disciplines such as linguistics, statistics, and computer science, among others. This challenge is even greater if we consider the textual diversity contained in social media, more specifically in tweets. This book chapter considers the basic and prac...

We investigated perception of mouthfeel in Pinot noir wines and its physicochemical determinants. Seventeen wine professionals judged 18 Pinot noir wines via two tasting tasks, Descriptive Rating and Directed Sorting, the latter based on perception of in-mouth attributes. Selected chemical measures of the same 18 wines were determined. Sensory resu...

A shift towards a plant-based diet is desired to promote sustainability, improve health, and minimize animal suffering. However, many consumers are not willing to make such a transition, because of attachment to meat and unwillingness to change habits. The present work explored the perception of Norwegian and French consumers' attitudes, barriers a...

Protein intake for humans is a major issue as the production of meat is contributing to the excess of greenhouse gas emissions and loss of biodiversity. To cover the upcoming protein demand in a sustainable way, a shift from animal-based food items to plant-based ones will be necessary. The aim of this article is to better understand the representa...

During the early months of 2020, the world experienced a novel, violent, and relentless pandemic era. By the end of the year more than seventy-seven million cases of COVID-19 had been reported around the globe. Due to it being a highly contagious disease, the recommended measures adopted by most nations to prevent infection include social distancin...

Culture is an important factor that influences how marketing interacts with food choice. This study aims at exploring the effect of consumers’ Country of Origin (COO) on wine representations and perception using Chenin blanc as a model. The first objective was to evaluate the role of origin in the construction of the representation. We used the the...

Wine experts’ mental representations have often been studied by comparing experts and novices without differentiating between the types of experts. Yet, it seemed that experts developed skills through their training and practice, and thus may have different wine representations. The first objective of this study was to examine the effect of experts...

Moringa oleifera is a nutrient-rich plant, known as a miracle tree, and commonly used as a food supplement. Despite its popularity, there are scant empirical findings on its real nutritional benefits and acceptance among consumers when added to food. To fill this gap, we added Moringa Dried Leaves (MDL) to biscuits. A consumer test was implemented...

The coronavirus outbreak in December 2019 completely changed the dynamic of consumption in different sectors of industry. The food and beverage industries have been profoundly affected, from production, to modifications in consumers’ choices. Among the different reasons behind those modifications is confinement, which forces consumers to stay at ho...

Recent research has shown that the colors of plateware, glassware, cups, packaging, and even the room and its lighting are able to influence consumers’ preferences, expectations and perceptions of taste, flavor and texture of food and beverages. This study contributes to the subject by investigating how packaging colors affected the expectations of...

The present study aims to understand an ill-defined sensory concept by a long-term memory-based strategy with Spanish winemakers from four wine regions using “green wine” as a case study. A total of 77 Spanish winemakers from four Spanish wine regions carried out a non-tasting free description task. The description task yielded terms belonging to t...

Bài báo này trình bày kết quả một khảo sát người tiêu dùng được tiến hành theo hai bước, định tính và định lượng tại Việt Nam. Mẫu khảo sát thu được có một phần lớn là người tiêu dùng thành thị, nữ giới, có độ tuổi từ 24 - 39, nghề nghiệp văn phòng. Các kết quả trong tổng thể do đó tương ứng với các tiêu chí lựa chọn thực phẩm của mẫu khảo sát này....

We aim at studying consumerś Perceived Sensory Quality (PSQ) concept. We manipulated a priori both familiarity (contrast local vs. foreign cheeses) and quality level (contrast PDO or traditional cheeses vs. their non-PDO and/or industrial counterpart). The study was run in four European countries. Thus, eight cheeses (one PDO or traditional cheese...

It is generally assumed that intensity can be used as a proxy of the arousing properties of odors: the more concentrated an odorant, the more intense an odor and the more stimulating and the less relaxing the odor. The aim of the present study was thus to investigate the relationship between relaxing and stimulating properties of odors when judged...

Using data collected at a world wine trade fair, we study how the country-of-origin impacts wine traders’ mental representation about wines. In the analysis we use traditional exporters in Old (France) and New (Argentina) world wine countries in comparison to non-traditional exporters in Old (Switzerland) and New (Brazil) world wine countries. Thre...

Quality and complexity are abstract terms employed frequently to describe a wine’s overall attributes. In the present study, we investigated: (i) attributes driving wine professionals’ judgments of quality and complexity in Pinot noir wines; (ii) the relation between these two abstract concepts; and (iii) association of each concept with varietal t...

Important scientific works have demonstrated that our sex and our gender affect the way we approach objects and situations. Although this is a long-established discussion in the field of social sciences, it seems that discussion about the relationship between sex, gender and food is still sometimes neglected in our daily lives, including empirical...

Pivot© profile (PP), a method which compares samples to a reference (pivot), has shown profiling potential for complex matrices. However, various aspects require further investigation. This study’s aim was to compare PP to frequency of attribute citation (FC) considering individual judges’ data and sample set complexity. A trained panel analysed th...

Smoked bacon is a food consumed everywhere and previous work has focused on the sensory properties and acceptability of the product. However, little attention has been given to the non-sensory factors that drive sensory and hedonic perception of this product. In this context, the aim of this work was to study the influence of non-sensory factors on...

Do consumers know what organic processed food is and are they able to correctly identify it? This article aimed to address these questions in Brazil. We used the snowball methodology to disseminate the questionnaire (1,690 answers) containing 21 questions regarding: 1. frequency of consumption, 2. self-assessment of knowledge regarding organic proc...

The objectives of this study were to determine the effect of reducing the content and size of NaCl on the instrumental texture and dynamic sensory profile, and to determine the temporal drivers of liking (TDL). The reduction of the NaCl content decreased the hardness and chewiness parameters, and affected the dynamic sensory profile of the product....

When people lose a sense there is thought to be an increase in the remaining sensory functions. The case of vision has been of interest due to the prevalence of visual impairment worldwide, and the question of whether blind persons’ evidence an increased acuteness in other senses has been a subject of controversy for over a century. In sensory anal...

Wine supply in the French market is structured in an intricate system of categories based on origin. There is very little knowledge about consumers understanding of this complex category system and the sensory styles behind these categories. This study investigated how assessors with different level of expertise categorized Beaujolais wines from ge...

Aroma contribution of individual esters has been studied in complex mixtures mimicking red wine models. A mixture containing 14 ethyl esters at concentrations found in wine (V1) was prepared and kept as reference. Isointense and qualitatively similar aroma vectors with a reduced number of esters (V2-V7) were prepared. Those vectors were introduced...

Wine is of great economic and cultural significance for South Africa, but some population groups were until relatively recently denied equal access to wine and alcohol products. The South African wine industry has launched various campaigns in recent years that aimed at portraying wine as an acceptable and attractive choice when alcohol consumption...

Wines can develop off-odours that depreciate their quality. Among them, oxidation is one of the most prevalent. The main objective of this work was to study the perception of wine oxidation through the categorization of oxidized wines perceived as not-faulty/faulty depending on the expertise of participants. For this purpose, one white wine and one...

Over the last 50 years, vine researchers have developed innovative grape varieties with resistance to disease in our environmental context. Although these grape varieties are already marketed, there is still little information about the sensory profile of the wines produced. The aim of this study was to develop a rapid and efficient method to posit...

This study was conducted to investigate the representation of the association between two contradicting concepts: premium and low-priced foods (instant noodles and yogurt) by different age group. Subjects undertook free word association tasks relating to the cue words premium, instant noodles, yogurts, premium instant noodles, premium yogurts and r...

Part of special issue: Sensory Science and Consumer Perception. Food Physics & materials Science.

This study determined the effect of the incorporation of micronized salt on physicochemical, yield and con-sumer's sensory characteristics of beef burger. The micronized salt was obtained by sieving the commercial salt in a 60-mesh stainless steel sieve. The commercial (regular salt) and micronized salt presented differences in the mean size, size...

In a consumer response, not all attributes contributes equally to the final value for the consumer. The final decision of a consumer to purchase a product is based on a complex trade-off between the different attributes of the various alternative products [1]. In that sense, Conjoint Analysis (CA) is a method to determine consumer response towards...

This article makes a review of the experiential aspects of consumption with a special focus on food and beverages. Experience and consumption are two important concepts in consumer research, concepts which are so inter-related that it seems almost impossible to do consumer research without talking about experience. Today, in the hyper-modern cultur...

Fermentation has been used for centuries to produce food in South-East Asia and some foods of this region are famous in the whole world. However, in the twenty first century, issues like food safety and quality must be addressed in a world changing from local business to globalization. In Western countries, the answer to these questions has been ma...

Quality plays an important role in the criteria directing wine product development. The evaluation of sensory characteristics associated with wine quality, as perceived by industry professionals, is therefore important. We investigated the suitability of the free-sorting sensory evaluation method, in combination with wine quality scoring using a 20...

Blind individuals display superior sensory abilities in other modalities, yet results remain contradictory regarding their performance on olfactory tasks. Using complex ecological olfactory tasks, we evaluated the impact of blindness on olfactory performance. We tested 12 early-blind individuals (M = 49,SD = 13.09) and 12 sighted controls (M = 49,S...

Our interaction with the world is mediated by three systems: affects, senses and cognition. Humans use these systems to interact with the social and material world, and the stimulation of these systems gives space to what we call “product experience”. Today, the consumer is changing from being a collector of possessions to a collector of experience...

Projective mapping and sorting tasks—often called “Holistic” Methods—are methods that directly obtain similarity measurements between products by asking participants (who could be novices, trained assessors, or experts, adults or children) to provide a global evaluation of a set of products of interest. In projective mapping, each participant is as...

This chapter describes how ethnography can be used to understand consumer behavior and choice. Ethnography is an observational method that has been used traditionally in anthropology, but it has gained more and more interest in consumer research, both in academia and in industries. As an observational technique, it addresses the problems linked to...

Tasting has always been at the heart of coffee growing and production. Expert coffee tasting prevails while applying a correct and structured sensory evaluation still requires improvement. In reality, the key actors of the coffee sensory assessment all along the value chain are the expert coffee taster, the sensory analyst, and the consumer. A majo...

Intercultural study

The present study investigates the role of sensory interactions and the level of expertise of consumers on the perception of bitterness and astringency in a red wine complex matrix. In the first experiment, a commercial red wine was spiked with quinine sulphate to produce two levels of bitterness. Seven samples with high and seven with low bitterne...

In today's market, every product seems to be marked by the label of "experience". It is expected that successful products give the consumer "extraordinary experiences". The research in consumption experience is growing, but much work still needs to be done to understand the food and beverage experience. A qualitative study was conducted using conte...

The Pivot Profile© (PP) was proposed recently by Thuillier, Valentin, Marchal, and Dacremont (2015) as an alternative to classical descriptive methods. Its principle is to describe each product by comparing it to a stable reference (called Pivot). While the method seems promising there is little data available and some issues still need to be exami...

One way of exploring knowledge representation is to compare expert and non-expert strategies. Expert knowledge representation seems to be acquired through both exposure and intensive formal training, leading to the development of skills and conceptual knowledge related to a specific field. The objective of our study was to dissociate the effects of...

Product experience is shaped by the interaction between the human systems and the product. Human systems include a sensory system to perceive the surrounding world, an affective system that evokes emotional responses to certain stimuli, and a cognitive system that makes meaning and processes information. We hypothesize that experience is a combinat...

La dégustation du vin est une expérience sensorielle mais aussi cérébrale, cognitive et émotionnelle. Etude des processus cognitifs et des biais perceptifs mis en oeuvre lors de la dégustation, certains étant inconscients.

Reductive off-odors are amongst the most frequently off-odors found in wines. This defect is caused by Volatile Sulfur Compounds (VSCs). It is not infrequent that VSCs appear during bottle aging most likely if the closure is quite hermetic (1). Therefore, it is paramount to dispose of rapid sensory methods to discriminate among samples with reducti...

The goal of this work was to evaluate the effect of vineyard position on the minerality of wines and to establish relationships between minerality scores, sensory descriptors and chemical composition. Sensory analyses included minerality rating and free description performed by wine professionals under two conditions: orthonasal olfaction alone and...