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• 1 media/AR-198-ACNoble.jpg 2021-04-29T14:18:48-07:00 Ann C. Noble, University of California, Davis (retired in 2002), Emerita, 1943 – 20 plain 2021-05-21T09:57:17-07:00 In 1929 F. Bioletti went against his colleagues’ recommendations and hired Helen Pearson, the first female geneticist, to continue his work in the grape breeding program that he started. Due to severe allergic reactions to insect bites, Pearson had to give up her research on making hybrid crosses in the vineyards. For the most part viticulture and enology remained a male-dominated department until Dr. Ann C. Noble was hired in 1974 as professor of flavor chemistry and sensory evaluation. After retiring in 2002, Dr. Noble now participates at national and international meetings in the fields of wine and sensory science, serves as a wine judge, and teaches short courses across the nation and abroad.
  
  While at UC Davis, Dr. Noble invented The Wine Aroma Wheel to help tasters enhance their appreciation and understanding of wine by providing a vocabulary of terms for various flavors and aromas that are frequently found in wine. Flavor descriptors are arranged in three tiers, "from the most general in the center to the most specific in the outer ring.” For example, if a taster detects fruity (center tier) notes in a wine, then according to the wheel, the taster can get more specific by going to the second tier to use common descriptors for fruitiness in wine such as citrus, berry, tree or tropical fruit, and dried or cooked fruit. On the third and final tier, the taster can name the exact fruit such as lemon, raspberry, apricot, lychee, or strawberry (jam).
  
  For anyone interested in The Wine Aroma Wheel, it is available in 7 different languages in the Ann C. Noble Papers in Archives and Special Collections at UC Davis Library, along with syllabi, laboratory manuals, and lecture notes for Dr. Noble's viticulture and enology courses.
  

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  The Grape Professors of UC Davis