Smelling the Wine - Wine Love
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WINE TASTING EDUCATION How to Taste Wine
Step 2: Smelling the Wine You've just finished swirling the glass, the tears are falling, so what now? Its time to sniff. Swirling wine aerates it, causing vapors from the wine to rise. Put your nose right into the glass (not in the wine!) and inhale deeply. You made need to swirl and sniff several times to get sufficient aromatic data. As you become more experienced smelling wines, you will notice a wide array of aromas. Red wines are often associated with smoke, cherries, chocolate, mint, tea, tobacco, leather, bell peppers, and a variety of other earthy smells. White wines may exhibit flowers, pineapple, fresh apples, mown grass, or similar crisp aromas. Winemakers and wine tasters alike have developed a whole vocabulary of terms to describe wine smells. To further complicate this, wine aromas are broken into two broad categories. "Nose" is a common term describing smells developed from the grape and the fermentation process. "Bouquet" describes aromas developed through the aging process, either in casks or in the bottle. Worse, some tasters use different words to mean the same thing and lengthy debates often ensue regarding whose terms are more accurate. Smell is our most acute sense. A human can smell over 10,000 compounds, some too small even for scientists to measure. So it stands to reason that smell would be our best tool to appreciate wines. The key point is that wines have many layers of aromas, and learning to identify them will help you better understand and appreciate wine. Just as with color, wine's aromas offer insights into character, origin and history. Swirl and sniff, try to identify the aromas, and then revel in the joy of the wine. ON TO STEP 3
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