Glass and wine: the indissoluble marriage

The FBS model describes theoretically the design process of a product. Only few papers present real industrial case studies, which are generally finalized to illustrate theoretical concepts. The aim of this paper is to show a methodology and its testing on the design of new tasting glasses, based both on the FBS model and on experimental analysis. This is an interesting theme in the food design area. Indeed a tasting glass is the interface used to convey wine characteristics to human senses (sight, taste and smell). The glass influence on the evolution of sensory perception of wine is not fully understood and rarely evaluated. The analysis is composed of: (i) an experimental activity to understand the evolution of sensory profiles of a well-structured red wine maintained in different types of glasses through expert testers, (ii) the selection of one of the most important function carried on by the product, and therefore the study of the related behaviours, (iii) the identification of the correlation between the behaviours and the design parameters of the glass. Finally a method and tools to extract and measure the geometrical feature of the glass are presented