Le Nez Du Vin

As a wine taster you learn a lot about the sense of smell. In fact, one of the first things you are taught in any introductory wine course is that the sense of smell is the one most closely tied to memory.

Smell is a chemical sense, aromas are simply a chemical reaction that creates a vapor, which is then detected through the mucous membranes in your nose and that information is translated by the brain. The human being is capable of recognizing over 10,000 different smells. Now, I realize this an over-simplification of the sense of smell, but the link above goes into a lot more detail.

Jean Lenoir has made a career out of isolating the various scents in wine and bottling them so people can better appreciate the aromas in their wine.




A friend of mine got me the red wine kit for Christmas, and I have spent a lot of time playing with it. Its weird, it is almost like learning a new language. Isolating the smell of pepper, vanilla, smoke, or truffle is much more difficult than it seems, but training my nose I think will help with my wine tasting. I've read that some of the best wine tasters can reliably isolate 4 aromas in a wine (which means when you see reviews that list 7-8 different scents they may be full of crap ;)). I can usually differentiate one or two, hopefully, I can improve this.