Classic Wines

The Systematic Approach: The Nose of Your Wine

Analyzing the complexities of a wine's nose and palate is perhaps the most challenging task for a wine lover. Training our minds to look for fruit and non-fruit characteristics in a glass of grape juice takes lots of practice. This article will hopefully offer some guidance with that. Continuing from my last article with a look at how wine professionals judge wine, we will discuss the nose of a wine using a systematic approach.

Before a drop of wine touches our lips, the aroma of the wine is the first real taste we get. Our sense of smell is so closely related to our taste buds that we can taste things in our mind by smelling them. When judging the aroma of a wine you first want to determine whether the condition is clean or unclean. This is where you look for faults such as TCA (corked wine), excessive sulfur dioxide, oxidation, and volatile acidity. TCA results from a chemical reaction between mould and the chlorine that is generally used to clean corks and barrels. It will make the wine smell of wet wood or cardboard. Excessive sulfur dioxide is very easy to detect because it smells like burnt matches. You will find this mostly in cheap white wines as it's used as a preservative. Oxidation is characterized by notes of caramel and/or a sour nuttiness, much like aromas in Sherry and Madeira. However, some wines will have this quality on purpose, for example Nicolas Joly's Coulee du Serrant, one of my favorite Chenin Blancs from Loire. Volatile acidity, or "VA", leaves nothing to be desired. It is marked with aromas of nail polish and vinegar. These wines must be immediately tossed as they will sting your palate as well.

After the wine passes the condition test, note the intensity of the aromas. This is a simple call of high, medium or low. Next, look for clues on the age of the wine by judging the development. With the aromas, decide if the wine is youthful, developing or aged. Younger wines smell very fruit forward and older wines tend to be more subtle. Then there is the famous question of "What do you smell?"

The ability to identify characteristics of smell differs from person to person. Everyone's memory capacity is limited in some way so don't get discouraged if you do not smell what everyone else does. Try to pick out a specific aroma from the following categories: fruit, floral, spice, vegetal and other. Examples for these are things you come in contact with probably everyday but are not used to associating them with wine. Here in Grenada, I am getting very familiar with nutmeg and many other local spices along with local fruits such as passion fruit, guava and mango. With fruit and floral descriptors, anything is game. Just don't be like one of my friends and start pulling out stuff like hibiscus and sultana, two of which he nor I know nothing about. Stick to the basics like citrus, red, black and tropical fruits. The same for floral notes, orange blossom, violets and rose are good ones. Spices are either pungent or sweet. Black and white pepper and black liquorices are pungent; cinnamon, clove and nutmeg are sweet.

Vegetal aromas are separated into many options but focus on scents of fresh vs. cooked vegetables along with herbs, kernels and wood. The last note you will make on the nose pertains to the "other" aromas. You can get quite creative here as there are options ranging from leather, biscuit, butter, rubber, petrol and marmalade.

Continuing with our systematic approach to describing the 2006 Australian Shiraz from Barossa Valley, we will now add the nose description. The wine is clear with an opaque dark purple color, no rim variation and is highly viscous. The nose is clean, pronounced and youthful with aromas of white pepper, blueberries and spice. Next we will complete the description with notes on the palate.