Making sense of aromas

My favorite part of wine tasting is swirling the glass and picking out the aromas one by one. With an exceptional wine this could take minutes, dissecting and analyzing the aromas without taking the first sip. Its like when you receive a present, slowly undoing the ribbon and carefully unwrapping the gift so the experience lasts longer. It’s the same with wine; it takes time and the more time it gets, the more memorable the experience. Of course, I know some people find it silly when they hear someone say they can smell coffee, cigars, leather, or even their grandmother’s homemade jam in the glass of wine. ...

But there is no denying it’s there. And you don’t need to have some kind of superpower to be able find the aromas in wine. All you need is a little bit of patience, to pay attention, practice, and a lot of wine. And why is smelling wine so exciting? As with anything we put in our mouths, if we hold our noses, we are limited to four primary tastes. These are salty, sour, sweet, and bitter. Our noses, on the other hand, are able to sense over 2000 aromas. That is why we are able to pick out so many flavors, which are basically a combination of taste and scent. If we plug our noses, we would be able to tell that salt is salt, but we might not be able to tell the difference between fried chicken and fish sticks. But how do they put raspberry in the wine? Once, when shopping at the local grocery store, I overheard a conversation between two women. They were in the process of picking out a bottle of wine and were reading the back label. They were particularly excited about the wine they held in hand, “Let’s get this,” one said “it has cherries and blueberries in it. It must be good.” Naturally, they put no such fruit in the wine. The grape’s juice contains esters which, in the case of this wine, shares a similar molecule structure to that of cherries. This is why we can detect the various aromas if we train our noses properly. And what are some ways we can practice? I always try to pay attention to all the aromas and scents around me like flowers, fruit, fresh baked bread, trees in bloom...I even choose my shower gel based on scents I could find in wine like pomegranate or pear. Your mind memorizes these aromas and adds them to the data base that is ever expanding and from which you will be able to retrieve information easier as time goes by.

And what kind of aromas can be detected in wine? There are many aromas and bouquets in wine, the simplest to detect are fruit aromas like cherries, sour cherries, raspberry, currant, black currant, green apple, blueberry... There are also floral notes such as roses, violets, wild flowers, the bloom of the linden tree... Then there are vegetables like peppers or paprika, geraniums, or even gas and other wacky aromas like diesel fuel, cat piss, or even PVC plastic.