Our sense of smell makes up about 80% of what we perceive as taste. So don’t taste wine if you have a cold. You will be missing out on 80% of the experience. But what do you do if you don’t think your sense of smell is very good? How can you improve your sense of smell to improve your wine-tasting experience. Today, we’ll check in with several experts to see what they have to say.
Napa Valley Wine Academy
The key to improving your sense of smell is to smell EVERYTHING. And not just edibles. Smell cardboard. Smell wet earth. Smell your leather belt. The sky is the limit.
Napa Valley Wine Academy tells us: “Don’t be shy. Rest the rim of the glass just beneath your nostrils. Take a few short sniffs, then one long inhale. Then try adjusting your distance slightly. Some aromas burst out when your nose is deep in the glass, while others reveal themselves a little farther away. Keep your mouth slightly open as you inhale.”
Start by looking for big smells – like fruit, floral, spice and earth. Then go deeper. If it’s fruity, what kind of fruit?
Wine pros break aromas into three main categories:
- Primary aromas: from the grape itself (fruit, floral, herbal)
- Secondary aromas:from winemaking (yeast, oak, butter, cheese rind, vanilla, toast)
- Tertiary aromas:from bottle aging (dried fruits, nuts, tobacco, earth)
Unpolished Grape
Unpolished Grape has two important recommendations:
- Invest in an Aroma Kit. These kits usually have between 10 and and 100 samples of common aromas you can learn to identify. They contain the basic white and red fruit aromas. More extensive kits also include floral, herbal, dairy, spicy and animal scents. The kit the writer uses is by Le Nez Du Vin, and it has 54 scents. This kit is $479. Definitely an investment.
- Purchase an assortment of Jelly Beans. I didn’t realize you could smell Jelly Beans. They say you can. And they say that if you buy an assortment of jelly beans, you get both basic and complex aromas. They recommend smelling the beans often and blind-testing your ability to correctly guess the aromas. I think I’m going to do this. How about you?
