Wine drinkers in a Cornell-led study did not consistently favor the color of traditional pinot noir over wines made from hybrid grapes, a finding that challenges a longstanding concern among growers in the Finger Lakes and other cold-climate regions.
The experiment asked 82 regular red-wine drinkers to judge eight commercial wines first by appearance and then by taste. Some hybrid wines ranked among the most visually appealing, while color explained little of the difference in how much participants liked the wines after tasting them.
Researchers at Cornell AgriTech and Université Bourgogne Europe published the study Sept. 23 in the American Journal of Enology and Viticulture. Anna Mansfield, a Cornell enology professor, said breeders and winemakers have long worried that consumers would reject hybrid wines because their color differs from wines made with traditional European grape varieties.
Hybrid grapes can withstand cold and disease pressures and may need fewer pesticide applications, giving growers another option as weather and growing conditions change. The question in this study was narrower: whether the wines' appearance itself discouraged consumers.
Appearance shaped expectations, not final judgments
Five of the wines came from hybrid cultivars grown in New York, Wisconsin, Tennessee and Iowa. The other three were pinot noirs from Burgundy, Oregon and the Finger Lakes. Participants did not know which wines were which when they rated appearance, predicted enjoyment from color and then tasted each sample.
Lighter wines and those with more yellow or brown tones generally received lower appearance scores and weaker expectations. A Finger Lakes pinot noir, a Tennessee Norton and a corot noir from near Albany were the three lowest-ranked wines visually, showing that the response was not confined to hybrids.
Once participants tasted the wines, appearance was a weak guide to what they liked. The relationship between appearance liking and overall liking accounted for about 8% of the variation in responses, the researchers reported. Color intensity had no meaningful correlation with actual liking.
Catherine Dadmun, a Cornell food science doctoral student and study co-author, said taste and aroma mattered much more to participants' overall assessment than color. The pinot noirs and hybrid wines largely shared the same range of appearance ratings rather than separating into two clear groups.
St. Croix, a hybrid variety, tied a Burgundy pinot noir for the highest overall appearance score. The Burgundy wine contained none of the pigment compounds called diglucosides that are found in some hybrid grapes, while St. Croix had a high proportion of them.
Chemistry offered no simple quality signal
To examine that issue, the team analyzed pigments in 17 wines, including the eight tasted by participants and additional hybrid samples. The researchers confirmed that hybrids have a broader range of anthocyanins, the compounds that give red wine its color. Some hybrid pigments are less deeply colored and may be more prone to browning over time.
But the chemical differences did not produce the consumer rejection some winemakers had anticipated. The results suggest brownish or yellow-tinged hues, rather than hybrid origin or lighter color alone, may explain some lower visual ratings. They do not establish that every hybrid wine will be received the same way.
The study used commercial wines, whose color also depends on vintage, winemaking and vineyard practices that the researchers could not fully control. The team said future work should track how hybrid wines change as they age and whether consumer responses shift as the varieties become more familiar.
The New York Wine and Grape Foundation supported the research. Instrumental color analysis took place at Cornell AgriTech, while collaborators in Dijon, France, profiled the wines' pigment chemistry. Mansfield said she hopes growers can focus less on making hybrids look like traditional wines and more on the traits that make a wine enjoyable.
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