Cornell studying how to improve Finger Lakes Rieslings(2)
The research team had 50 people show up to the solicitation for the panel. Of those, about half were chosen to develop a "wine aroma wheel" for the Finger Lakes Rieslings. The group kept discussing the different flavors that were common among the wines from Keuka, Cayuga and Seneca lakes. The descriptors they came up with include peach, caramel and "stemmy" (meaning it tastes like chopped up grape stems were in there).
Mansfield will then conduct comparative tastings with the Finger Lakes Rieslings to those from other wine-making regions.
Once the sensory portion is complete, some seasoned science will follow. Her team will quantify flavor and aroma compounds using a gas chromatograph: essentially an oven with a long, skinny tube measuring 30 meters long by a single micrometer wide at its tip (one hundredth of the width of a strand of human hair). When injected into the tube, the heated wine will break into microscopic components that travel through the tube at different speeds, exiting individually. Compounds are also identified through molecular analysis via a mass spectrometer, and through odors via a "sniff port" placed on the tube.
"The exciting thing is that Riesling, though not native to New York, has a natural affinity to the region and can be used to make very good wine — wine that's different from Rieslings made in Germany, the Alsace and Australia," Mansfield says. "We have lots of empirical evidence that this is true, and lots of verbiage from winemakers and consumers indicating how they experience the wine."
The goal at the end of the year is to have a wheel of 12 descriptors perfected, so all of the Finger Lakes Rieslings will be rated on how intense the aroma and tastes are in each of these categories.
This way, a white-wine aficionado sampling our region's bounty could attest to "how a Finger Lakes Riesling is, say, similar to German Rieslings in structure but different in fruit character," says Mansfield.
Such talk, of course, is critical to staking a claim on the world wine map. "People hold these kinds of discussions about wines produced in Burgundy or California all the time," she adds. "We're at a point that we should have the same level of knowledge about our microclimates."
