Comparative profiling reveals distinct chemical and sensory traits in Texas red wines, indicating clear differences between regional growing areas.
Key Points
To characterize the physicochemical, phenolic, volatile, metabolomic, and sensory profiles of Texas Cabernet Sauvignon and Tannat wines compared to regional benchmark wines.
Evaluated 26 Texas wines from the Texas High Plains and Texas Hill Country AVAs alongside benchmark wines from California, France, and Uruguay.
Conducted physicochemical testing, targeted LC-MS/MS phenolic profiling, HS-SPME-GC-MS volatile analysis, untargeted metabolomics, and sensory profiling via Hierarchical Rate-All-That-Apply (HRATA).
Modeled chemical and sensory relationships using multivariate methods, specifically principal component analysis (PCA) and partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA).
Multivariate PCA and PLS-DA models demonstrated distinct chemical and sensory separation between Texas wines and benchmark regions.
Texas High Plains wines associated with more favorable aromatic and sensory attributes, whereas Texas Hill Country wines displayed distinct chemical and sensory profiles.
Observed co-occurrences linked chemical compounds to specific sensory attributes, establishing the first combined reference dataset for Texas Cabernet Sauvignon and Tannat.