wine scents

by David Harney

When drinking wine, one sense plays a major role in our enjoyment -- smell. But we taste wine, you say. True, but that sense can only handle 4 common true tastes: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. To this you can also add umami, which is similar to MSG. On the other hand, our noses can smell between 4,000 and 10,000 aromas. So while the glass of pinot noir you’ve just sampled may taste extraordinary, it’s your nose that’s telling you so.

Wine technology classifies a wine’s smell into at least two different categories.

1. Aroma. The smell a new wine acquires from the grapes it was made from.

2. Bouquet. The smell the wine develops after aging in the bottle.

So if you follow the classic procedure of testing that pinot by putting your nose deep into the glass to inhale its fragrance, you smell the bouquet.

Smells have exceptional powers. They can stimulate emotions, moods, memories, and more. For example, if you smell the aroma of a flower it might bring to mind a summer’s day, or a perfume or cologne can remind you of a lover. Similarly, wine can evoke impressions in our brain. Try this exercise to develop your “wine sense.” When you inhale the wine’s bouquet try to create a first impression and ascribe a character to it. Don’t worry if it’s not what you’ve read somewhere. It’s what you think the characteristic of the aroma is. And for each person those characteristics can be different.

Oenologists have developed a tool to help classify what the olfactory sense tells us about a wine. It’s called the aroma wheel and was developed by Professor Ann Noble at the University of California at Davis in 1984. The wheel is broken down into a variety of aromas. They range from good smells, which are those said to demonstrate the positive traits of a wine, to bad odors, or a wine’s “faults.” The wheel is broken into rings. The inside rings are general characteristics such as different types of fruits. As you work through the outer rings each characteristic gets more specific. So “fruity” might narrow down to berries, which then moves to types, such as raspberries, strawberries, or blackberries. Similarly, all other attributes of an aroma can be broken down to help you describe your sense of a wine by what you smell.

You might have thought only a professional had the skills or talents to classify wines. But give your own “professional” nose a try. You may be surprised at what a great wine critic you are!

Note: Professor Noble’s aroma wheel is copyrighted, so we are unable to print it in RHL. However, visit www.rochesterhealthyliving.com for links to sites where you can purchase this valuable tool.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dave always had difficulty identifying a wine’s characteristics and marveled at the critics’ abilities to do so. But the wheel made it easier, and he hopes it will for you as well.