Luca Maroni
Sensory analyst
• Luca Maroni was born in Rome on 19 September 1961.
• He graduated with honours in Economy and Business in 1986.
• From 1987 to 1989 he worked with Luigi Veronelli and set up “Ex Vinis” - first Italian Newsletter for sensory analysis dedicated to wine and was Editor in Chief of the publication for the first 4 issues.
• In September 1990 he founded his own publishing house, setting up the magazine The Taster of Wine.
• In 1993 he created the first edition of the Annuario dei Migliori Vini Italiani [Yearbook of the Best Italian Wines], a report on wine production by Italy’s best growers, now in its twenty-third edition.
• In 1995 he wrote Degustare il Vino [Wine Tasting], a handbook on the theory and practice of aware tasting of all types of wine, in which he presents his own scientific tasting technique.
• Also in 1995, he wrote the Wine tasting entry for the ENCICLOPEDIA ITALIANA TRECCANI.
• In 2000 he created the portal www.lucamaroni.com. This is the world’s most comprehensive wine portal, with 430,000 pages available for consultation.
• In 2012 he received an Honorary Doctorate in Oenogastronomic Sciences from the University of Messina.
• Since 1990, he has written and published 72 issues of his magazine and over 70 books on Italian and world wines, some of which have been translated into English and German.
•Between 1988 and 2015, he has tasted over 300,000 wines.
“Wine is pleasant when its taste genuinely recalls (consistently, with balance, and integrally) that of the fruit from which it was made; wines with a rating of 90 points and above are excellent and absolutely pleasurable all round.”
The rating method used by Luca Maroni:
The quality of a wine lies in the pleasantness of its taste. There are three parameters that affect this quality: the consistency, balance and integrity of the taste and aroma of the wine.
The Pleasantness Index (PI) rating for any wine is obtained by assigning a score from 1 to 33 to each of the three parameters that decide quality: consistency, balance, integrity.
PI = C + B + I
• consistency: the expressive volume of wine, decided by its richness
as a dry extract; the quantitative aspect of quality, persistence and potential longevity of the wine.
• balance: the harmony of the component parts, the proportions between the substances that make up the wine and make it as soft as it is acid+bitter on the palate.
• integrity: the absence in the wine's taste-bouquet of defects from the winemaking process (sulphurous, vinegar, lactose, stale, woody) or oxidation. The quality, purity, and fragrance of the components of wine; its technical calibre and potential longevity.