Wine 101: Wake Up and Smell the Wine

Aroma and Bouquet in Wine
The smell of the wine is the most important and most often misunderstood aspect of wine tasting. Our sense of smell is much more extensive, perceptive and reliably accurate than our sense of taste. When we taste, our tongue picks up only the four main taste sensations: sweetness, acidity, bitterness and saltiness. Since there is little or no salt in the wine we drink, and only a few of the wines we drink with meals are sweet, we are left to taste only the acidity and bitterness in wine. As much as eighty percent of the flavor qualities and nuances in wine (fruit, oak, spices, earthiness, etc.) are sensed through the nose more than perceived on the palate.

The smell of wine can initially strike you as open or closed. If the aromas are apparent, distinct and easily sensed when you take a good sniff of the wine, the wine is considered open. On the other hand, if you can smell very little, the wine would be considered closed or tight. Generally, this occurs with wines that are young or immature and may need some time to breathe in the glass. This allows the wine to open up and release more of its aromas and flavors. Breathing, of a young wine, allows it to be more revealing of aromas but it does not replace the development and complexity that comes with increased time aging in the bottle.

Wines continue to change and mature in the bottle, which helps develop more nuance, complex flavors and aromas over time. But at some point, the changes of aging are not improvements and at this point when the wine has gone a bit too long, the wine might give off unpleasant aromas. This could be a first sign of a wine gone bad. You may not want to drink that bottle.

As you develop your wine tasting palate even more, you will begin to have a better sense of the aromas in wine. Interestingly, these all occur naturally depending on the grape variety, area of origin, winemaking technique and age. As odd as it might sound to smell "mushrooms" or "granny smith apple," in wine the aromas may actually be that distinct.

Most wine aromas fall into three general categories: Fruity/Floral, Earthy/Vegetable and Wood.

Fruity/Floral
Fruit aromas can be defined simply as those aromas that remind you of fruit: apple, berry, grapefruit, lemon etc. Examples of floral scents might include rose, violet, and perfume. Fruity and floral aromas are usually the sweeter side of aroma possibilities.

Earthy/Vegetable

If the aromas do not fall obviously into the fruity/floral spectrum, they most likely will fall in the earthy and vegetable category. A few examples might include cut grass, hay, mushrooms, olives, tea or leather.

Wood

The range of wood smells stem mostly from the practice of aging wine in oak barrels. The obvious aroma is oak, in addition to noticeable scents of vanilla, cedar, smoke, toaste and honey.

These are three very broad categories, which encompass the most important aroma families and represent distinct characteristics. (A complete flavor profile is presented later, which will acquaint you with a much greater vocabulary of descriptors used for the sensory analysis of wine’s aromas and flavors.)

Tagged as: wine 101, wine and wine tasting

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Laura Levy Shatkin served for 10 years as food and wine critic for the Chicago Reader. Later, she became an Emmy-nominated executive producer for Taste, a 30-minute food and wine show on NBC-5 Chicago, which later merged into www.WineTasteTV.com, where Ms. Levy is a partner/owner. Today, she teaches private wine classes and hosts wine parties for consumers and firms, and continues to tell the video stories of wine, girlfriends and wine travel on her TCW blog, Wine…ing Women.