Understanding the White Wine Types
People Love

Research has shown that when specific flavors are present in a wine, they drive up or down how much you like a particular wine. 

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Why is it important to understand the reasons people love different white wine types?

• As a wine lover, it helps you so you can explain why you appreciate or not in a wine to a cellar clerk or a restaurant staff.
• As a cellar clerk, it helps understand the white wine style the customer enjoys to show him or her several options. Listening to your customer instead of suggesting a wine style you love will help you create a tasting experience that the customer will remember for a long time.
• If you are a wine producer, understanding the reasons people love certain white wine types is critical. It helps you offer a range of wine types to please customers with different wine preferences.

What does research tell us about the different white wine types people love?

Here is what the sensory scientists found.


After tasting 12 white wines from different regions, Canadian consumers expressed a strong preference for sweeter and fruitier wines as opposed to oaky and burning wines (2)


Two studies on Chardonnay showed that the fruity, spicy, and vanillin/oak aromas were essential for American consumers to like the wines (3). 

On Canadian Riesling wines, we found that people diverged in the white wine type they enjoyed most (3).

• One group of consumers loved the raisin, honey, sherry, melon, and didn’t care much about the fruity aromas.
• The other group of consumers loved the fruity flavors such as grapefruit, peach, lemon, or floral like rose, but didn’t care of the honey and melon aromas.

Three Sauvignon blanc wine types seemed to appeal to Australian consumers:

• wines with higher tropical and confectionary aromas; 
• wines with ‘green’ attributes, and wines that had a tad of ‘solvent’ and
• ‘green’ characteristics, but no tropical or cat urine/sweaty flavor - who would want these aromas in a wine? (4).

You might argue that these flavor differences come from the wine origins. It would be simpler to summarize the style people love by liking Old World wines versus New World wines. Indeed, Chardonnay, Riesling, or Sauvignon blanc from France, for example, are less fruit-forward, less sweet, less toasted oak than the wine styles produced in California or New Zealand.

Journalist Lettie Teague wrote recently, ‘Once, the division between Old World and New World wines was a whole lot clearer.’ Later she adds: ‘Shared winemaking and viticultural techniques have helped to merge the Old World and the New.’ (5) 

Indeed Old and New World wine regions can produce similar wine type, like the Chardonnay wine I poured for dinner last week.

Therefore understanding the white wine types you like or your customers like remains an asset in your journey to become a better wine taster.

Published January 13, 2020

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References used for this article:

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