Structural approach of social representation: Application to the concept of wine minerality in experts and consumers

•We confirmed the possibility of using the theory of social representation for studying the meaning of the sensory terminology.•Whereas winemakers’ and wine consumers’ social representation of minerality have common elements these elements are organized differently.•Only the idea of terroir is shared by both groups suggesting an imaginary dimension.•The central core of winemakers’ representation, unlike that of consumers, also includes “sensory properties”.•In both groups, most participants associated a positive valence to the words they produced relative to minerality.

In recent years the sensory evaluation field has been moving from the traditional sensory descriptive methodologies towards consumer based methodologies. Sensory descriptions are not confined to sensory evaluation. In everyday life, people use also descriptions to communicate about products sensory properties. The theory of social representation offers a new approach for studying the meaning of the terminology used in these everyday life descriptions. One implication of this theory is that meaning is created through a system of social negotiations rather than being a fixed and finite code. The goal of the present study was to understand the meaning of the concept of wine minerality in different social groups, through the social representation theory. For this purpose, we worked with 40 winemakers from Chablis, France, and 47 wine consumers from burgundy. We used a verbal association task with the word minerality as a prompt. Participants had to write down all the words that came to their mind when they heard the word minerality and to rate both the importance and the valence of these words. Data were subjected to a prototypical analysis to identify the core and peripheral areas of experts’ and consumers’ social representation. Results showed that winemakers and wine consumers have a different way to represent and conceptualize minerality. The central core of winemakers’ social representation is formed by terms that give an idea of minerality coming from “a place” (Chablis, geology and terroir) and having a specific sensory characteristics (Shellfish, chalky and freshness) linked to this place. This representation is comforted by the elements of the first periphery (stone, acidity, gunflint and salty). For wine consumers, both the central core and the first periphery consist of only one term each (terroir and stone respectively). Sensory characteristics linked to this idea of terroir appear only in the third and fourth peripheries indicating that they are neither shared nor stable as it was observed by winemakers. Finally, the valence results showed that minerality have a positive connotation in both groups, which results in a sensory descriptor denoting quality.