Sensory evaluation of Protected Designation of origin Wines: Development of olfactive descriptive profile and references

[Display omitted] •Contribution to the harmonization of a sensory method applied to wine.•Wheel aroma construction for Catalan DOP wines.•Methodological approach for official sensory control of PDO wines.•Tool for the development of sensory studies in the wine sector. Wines covered by PDO or PGI quality labels have specific sensory characteristics. According to EU regulations, product characteristics (including the sensory description) must be defined in the PDO technical specification and should be verified for their compliance. There exist internationally harmonized quantitative descriptive sensory methods applied to products such as virgin olive oil, with well-defined attributes described in the method itself. Currently, in the case of wine, there is no harmonized international sensory descriptive method that allows comparison of results between different PDOs or laboratories. In this work, a qualitative and quantitative olfactory profile for a broad variety of wines (11 PDO and 37 wine types) and their corresponding reference standards are proposed. The sensory profile obtained can be used both to verify compliance with the technical specifications of the product and to categorize wines by type or region, thus becoming a powerful tool for the wine sector.