Desempenho das escalas hibrida e autoajustavel no perfil livre associado a consumidores. / Performance of the scales hybrid and autoajustável in the free profile associate the consumers.

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2003

RESUMO

Within the Brazilian wine sector there is still only limited research aimed at identifying national consumer perception with respect to the quality of national wines, especially those which verify how the consumer perceives and discriminates these wines as a function of their sensory attributes. In this respect, the Free Choice Profile technique, proposed by Williams &Langron in the eighties, appears to be one of the most adequate methodologies to obtain such information. However, in order to use the Free Choice Profile with completely untrained consumers, it is necessary to identify an intensity scale presenting the following characteristics: i) easy to use by the consumers, ii) not favoring the occurrence of psychological errors such as the habit error, tending to the center, etc. and iii) favoring the generation of continuous data which adjust to presuppositions associated with parametric analyses such as data normality and homoscedasticity. Recent studies have reported advantages of the hybrid and self-adjusting scales as compared to traditional structured and non-structured scales with respect to several of the aforementioned items. However none of these studies explored the performance of these two scales when applied together with the Free Choice Profile technique in consumer tests. Thus the objectives of this study were: i) verify the performance of the hybrid and self-adjusting scales when applied to the Free Choice Profile technique in consumer tests and, ii) verify how two categories of national wine consumers - oenophilists and non-oenophilists - perceive and discriminate different quality wines commercialized in Brazil. Thus 40 habitual wine consumers - 20 oenophilists and 20 non- oenophilists - used the Free Choice Profile technique to evaluate four samples of dry red wine, all highly competitive on the Brazilian market: two Cabernet Sauvignon, one Assemblage produced from a mixture of Merlot and Cabernet Franc grapes and a fourth non-variety wine, cheap but very popular. All the consumers took part in four tasting sessions: two to develop the descriptive terminology for the samples and two to quantify the sensory attributes using the hybrid and self-adjusting scales. The presentation orders of both samples and scales were balanced amongst the panelists. To evaluate the performance of the two scales - hybrid and self-adjusting - in the segmentation of the four wine samples, the data generated by the 40 consumers was grouped and analyzed as a group using the Generalized Procrustes Analysis (GPA). To identify differences between oenophilic and non-oenophilic consumers, the data generated by the hybrid scale was analyzed separately for each consumer group, using GPA. The results revealed considerable consensus and discriminating power of the consumers in the evaluation of the four wines using both the hybrid and self-adjusting scales. The accumulative consensual variability for the first two dimensions of the GPA was high and very similar for the two scales: 80.87% for the hybrid and 82.78% for the self-adjusting scale. Similar performance by the two scales was also confirmed by: i) an analysis of the residual variance of individuals, ii) a comparative analysis of the individual configurations of the panelists and iii) distribution of the consensual and residual variances of the first two GPA dimensions throughout the four wine samples. Finally the similarity in performance of the two scales was confirmed observing the distribution of the four wines throughout the sample configurations consensus; both the Cabernet Sauvignon wines were allocated in quadrants II and III, the non-variety wine in quadrant IV and the Assemblage wine in quadrant I. Good consensus was observed between the oenophilic and non-oenophilic groups with respect to the distribution of the four wines in the sample configurations. Consensus was also good within each consumer group, as revealed by the following analyses: individual configurations of the panelists, individual residual variances and the distribution of the consensual and residual variances of the first two GPA dimensions throughout the 4 samples of dry red wine. However, the oenophilic consumers presented a significantly (p<0.05) greater capacity to generate descriptors, as compared to the non-oenophilic group. In general the results of this study revealed that consumers, be they oenophiles or otherwise, discriminated between wines of different quality in a very similar way. It is therefore recommended that wine producers include affective and descriptive methods applied to everyday consumers, in their sensory analyses.

ASSUNTO(S)

consumidores cabernet (wine) avaliação sensorial wine consuming sensorial evaluation vinho - degustação - teses

ACESSO AO ARTIGO

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