One of the great beauties of wine - the thing that attracts so many of us to wine - is the almost infinite variety of scents that wine imparts to us. Wine offers a broad range of olfactory experiences across a notable spectrum of grape varieties and, beyond color, it is aroma that often characterizes our first honest impressions of a wine. From berry fruit and jasmine petals to dirty socks and wet dog hair, it is possible for a wine taster to smell hundreds, if not thousands, of scents in a glass of wine. 

As a writer, I am quite fond of words. And yet I often find myself grasping for the right words to describe the aroma I’m smelling or flavor I’m tasting. Without a handy tool to assist with bridging that tongue-brain connection, I find that my tasting notes can sometimes be incomplete. Fortunately there is such a tool, and many wine tasters, novice and expert alike, use it regularly. We owe much to the wine scientists at the University of California at Davis, one of the nation’s leading winemaking and grape-growing schools, where years ago a wine aroma wheel was developed.

The ‘fruity’ section of the wine aroma wheel. Copyright A. C. Noble 1990, 2002, and used with permission.

Back in the day, an oenologist at Davis, Dr. Ann C. Noble, consulted with scores of wine lovers and wine tasters to list all the descriptive terms they could imagine for the smells of wine. After organizing, categorizing, and eliminating all of the terms that seemed ambiguous, Ms. Noble produced a list of 12 major categories of wine smells, subdivided into 29 subcategories and 94 specific terms. Toward ease of use while tasting wine, this list evolved further into a circular table, with relatively similar smells placed close together around its circumference.

A number of aroma wheels have been developed since the good old days at Davis, including two from the Deutsches Weininstitut, written in German, for red and white wines. There’s even an aroma wheel just for Zinfandel wines. And, if you’re truly serious about an olfactory experience with your next stack of pancakes, check out this Flavor Wheel for Maple Products.

There are even some wonderful online tools for learning about the scents and flavors of wine. If you have time to kill this weekend, pour yourself a glass of something aromatic and delicious, then sit down with your favorite PC for an afternoon with The Aroma Wheel Big Spin Game from Trinchero Family Estates, or step through how to identify wine with the interactive Experience the Aroma Wheel from Turning Leaf. Both are quite educational, and I recommend you browse them if you wish to understand more about your tongue-brain connection, if not also enhance your wine knowledge. As a handy tasting aid, you may find it helpful to have your own colored and laminated wine aroma wheel; purchase one online from Dr. Noble herself for only six bucks, or visit the UCDavis Bookstore.

Happy tasting!

~winehiker

This entry was posted on Friday, April 27th, 2007 at 1:38 pm and is filed under grape squeezins, technical stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.