Wine is all about smells, it is all about the nose of a wine. If smells don't take you somewhere else, I don't know what will.
Whether it be the scent of orange blossoms wafting down a hill from home, or the smell of chocolate chip cookies from your grandmother's oven. Smells are an important part of memory. Because of this, we each have the ability to travel with the nose of wine.
Some good rules of thumb with different types of wine though are:
Red Wines-typically smells of berries, such as cherry, blackberry, raspberry and strawberry. Their most common vegetable is bell pepper and violet is also common.
White Wines-typically smell of citrus (lemon, lime and orange), tropical fruits (mango, pineapple and lychee) or stone fruit (pears, peach and apricot).
If you keep these scents in mind, it can help you at least head in the right direction. You may find berry in a white, but start with citrus or stone fruits.
In order to learn these different smells, you need to train your sniffer. You can do this in a couple of ways:
Buy a scent case-there are several different cases. I think the essence based are best because they seem to last the longest. My preference is Le Nez Du Vin (translated Nose of a Wine), by Jean Lenoir. He calls himself a child of the vine and he has designed a scent case that brings to mind grandma's jam. You will see what we mean.
Want an entertaining way to train your palate? Watch this video. It is long and 100% worth it. Gary Vaynerchuk is hilarious and if you don't want to watch it all, fast forward to the last 5 minutes. He eats a jalapeno and dirt (terroir anyone?). I hope he inspires you to explore your palate.
If that didn't inspire you to explore your palate, I don't know what will. If you want to check out some more of his videos, you can find him here.
So, go find out what the common scents involved in wine are and learn them on your own. This can be hard in the case of scents like truffle. You could spend as much on the truffle as you would on a scent box.
Whatever you choose to do, start sniffing. Once you do, you will find that the nose of a wine will begin to bring back memories and eventually create them. Have you ever tasted a wine and it took you back to a vacation, or Thanksgiving? That is the type of memory you will begin to build. Your wine and scent history.
The following is a list of some common scents associated with wine and the category they fall in:
Orange Blossom Hawthorn Violet Rose Acacia Honey Linden Vanilla
Vegetable:
Green Pepper Truffle Hay Grass Mushroom Tobacco Olive
Spice:
Saffron Clove Cinnamon Black Pepper White Pepper Rosemary Thyme Anise Licorice Lavender Paprika Smoked Paprika
Animal:
Leather Musk Butter Barnyard (Gamey)
Toasted Aromas:
Roasted Hazelnuts Dark Chocolate Coffee Caramel Cedar Oak Toast Sulphur Cork Smoke Roasted Almonds Paper
Minerals:
Slate Granite Sand Rock
A good way to test your sniffer is to close your eyes while smelling, or in Gary's case tasting, these different scents and seeing if you can identify what they are. Be sure to do it with someone else so they can clue you in on whether you are right, without opening your eyes. Then keep guessing. Some of the similar flavors can be hard to tell. In the nose of a wine, one of the hardest tastes to detect can be vanilla. It is one of the most commonly missed scents.
Now, get back to drinking and smelling and building memories! This time the olfactory ones.
Do you want to know what wines I am smelling now? Check out my monthly e-zine and find out. My quest for great wine will never be over, so join me on it!
