in wine today

Nose on the wheel

By Georges Meekers

Only a small quantity of wine consumed today actually manages to deliver all the messages it’s capable of. Numerous litres are poured down the hatch without a thought or even a sniff. And yet, it really does make sense to deliberately get a whiff of a wine before you taste it.

In fact, we smell most of the things that we think we taste. It’s the nose that’s capable of distinguishing thousands of subtle variations. A hay fever attack – with its attendant loss of the sense of smell – will bring this theory out of the laboratory into the real world.

What we picture as taste is much more than our taste buds simply recognising the four basic flavours: sweet, sour, bitter and salty.

It’s a complex sensory experience, the quality of critical judgement that separates us from animals at a trough. We taste the joy of victory, the bitterness of defeat. We savour life, so why not wine?

Almost anyone can be a wine taster. All it takes is a nose and a will to recognise the subtleties that set one wine apart from another.

Since we don’t use smell or taste nearly as much as sight, hearing and even touch, telling others what we taste is not always that natural to us. Some will describe wine often with a delightful, thought-provoking lack of precision while others mouth fancy talk that makes people think they are wine snobs.

In practice applying words to wine is a complete free-for-all. The wines of the world offer thousands of scents, all to be encapsulated by your personal and almost infinite battery of ‘tastes like’ words.

Years ago, professor Ann C. Noble at the University of California at Davis came up with something called the ‘aroma wheel’.

She attempted to encourage some precision into the use of tasting terms. The ‘wheel’ is so called because it is displayed as a circular table that places similar smells close together around its circumference.

It is an organised summary of all descriptive terms one can imagine for the smells of wine with the exception of all those that are ambiguous or less than clear.

The wheel can be viewed on the ucdavis.edu website, but you don’t need a wheel to get rolling. Wine is still a necessity though!