Learn
Smelling and tasting wine
Most of what you taste is smell — and describing it is a skill, not a gift.
The short answer
Most of what you call taste is smell. The tongue reports five things — sweet, sour, salt, bitter, savoury — and everything else reaches you through the back of the nose while you swallow.
Overview
Your tongue detects five tastes. Everything else you think you are tasting, you are actually smelling, through the back of your nose. Blocking your nose and drinking wine makes this obvious immediately.
That is why swirling helps: it releases volatile aromatic compounds. It is not a performance.
Describing wine is a matter of practice and vocabulary, not a natural gift. People who are good at it have mostly learned a list of reference smells and attached names to them.
A useful starting framework: is it fruity, and which kind of fruit — citrus, orchard, stone, tropical, red berry, black berry? Then is there anything that is not fruit — herbs, spice, flowers, earth, vanilla, toast?
There is no correct answer. If you smell blackcurrant and someone else smells plum, you are both reporting your own perception honestly, and individual sensitivity to specific compounds genuinely varies.
Where you can see it
- Testing it
- Hold your nose, take a sip, then let go. The rush of flavour when you release is the part your nose was doing all along.
- Descriptors are analogies
- A wine described as smelling of blackcurrant contains no blackcurrant. The compounds simply overlap with ones your memory has filed under that name.
Go shallower or deeper
The beginner page and the chemistry page are both correct, and neither substitutes for the other.
Go deeper
Where wine aromas come from
Four origins — the grape, fermentation, oak and ageing — and why a tasting note is not a list of chemicals.
Go deeper
Tertiary aromas: what develops with age
The dried fruit, nut, leather, mushroom and honey characters that appear in bottle — and why they are possibilities rather than guarantees.
Sources
Sources consulted
- WSET educational materials and the Systematic Approach to Tasting — Wine & Spirit Education Trust