Determining the Importance of Physicochemical Properties in the Perceived Quality of Wines

Abstract

Wine is a relevant part of the diet in many countries, showing significant nutritional properties, providing health benefits to consumers, and having a significant weight in economy. Also, wine plays an important role in many cultures as a part of their social relationships, feasts, or religion where some of them may become a sign of luxury and distinction. For those reasons, objective and subjective quality of wines is an important issue in their production and marketing. To improve wine excellence, some production methods try to relate its physicochemical properties to the quality as it is perceived by humans. Then, modern data prescriptive analysis can be applied to measure the importance (the influence) of each wine attribute. This paper examines and compare several metrics of the attribute importance and its application to the quality-aware design and production of wines. Moreover, for the cases where the perceived quality is characterized using a discrete value, a novel importance metric, based on the Jensen-Shannon Divergence (JSD) is introduced and compared to the existing ones. The results show that JSD clearly overperforms other metrics previously proposed in the literature. Also, it can be asserted that JSD properly reflects the importance of discrete multivalued functions. The results, using this metric in an importance performance analysis of a public wine dataset, show that the main physicochemical attributes of a red wine are citric acidity, alcohol, sulphates and fixed acidity. As for the white wine case, the main attributes are alcohol, free sulfure dioxide and pH.