The position of Australian Chardonnay in the world-wide flavour map.

Results of the ‘Attitudes, Drivers of Consumption and Taste Preferences: A focus on Chardonnay’ project demonstrated, via means of sensory and consumer studies, that there are existing styles of Australian Chardonnay that are liked by a broad range of consumers, and that some styles enjoy high demand amongst niche consumer groups. One of the key messages from the data has been how little parochialism Australian wine consumers show toward Australian wine. This is thought to be due to the lack of definition around how Australian Chardonnay differs from other countries. One of the key moves in defining New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc as different was the establishment of an international flavour map for Sauvignon Blanc (Lund et al., 2009). One of the challenges of this type of work is to accurately define each country of interest. For instance, in the Lund et al. (2009) study, Spain was defined through the use of just two wines.Defining an entire country’s variety through two wines is problematic, but pragmatically the task of conducting a full analysis for each country is not feasible. We sought to make the results from each country in our study relevant by choosing from wines that were readily available to consumers in Australia. By doing this, we were able to determine how Australian Chardonnay compares and contrasts in flavour compared to wines available in Australia from other countries. Our results are therefore relevant to domestic sales; readers can also extrapolate our findings to international sales for the countries where sufficient wines were represented â€Â' specifically New Zealand and France.The aim of this work was to establish how Australian Chardonnay differs from international wines available domestically.