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As silly as it may sound, smells are ninety percent of what we remember about a wine. The smell is essentially the flavor. The only information our brains are lacking when it comes to smells is texture, some bitterness, and acidity. Any formidable differentiation in mouthfeel is sensed by out tastebuds. The rest, is retronasal. That means, behind the nose - or from the nostrils in your mouth, which often sense flavor differently than the opposite end of the canal on on your face - orthonasal.
When you’re reconciling smell to a notepad, remember to be careful to leave room for how that smell may materialize in the mouth upon being tasted. I may smell raspberries in the glass, but taste more cherry upon drinking the wine. Best practice is simply to write only what you smell, then add anything additional that you notice when you taste.
Just because you don't taste the flavor that you smelled doesn't mean its not there, it just doesn't present itself on the tongue, which can be ever so common. In the vast majority of wines that I taste, I get very little differentiation between the nose and the tongue. The tasting portion then for me is simply to solidify or add retronasal characteristics to my orthonasal predetermination. Taste, then, is relegated to affirmation of the previous senses, and determining harmonization of the flavors - between sweetness and acidity, and texture. Frankly, these two things I can often guess from smell, too.
Be extremely fortitudinous about your sniffing of the glass. Take your time, and take as many whiffs as you need. The more often you inhale the glass, the more differentiation you will be able to perceive in flavors. Some wines need descriptors and adjectives out the door, and off the page as they are so complex. This is generally a good problem to have. Other wines, maybe not so much. This can serve you quite well as the more experience nosing the glass that you get, the easier this process becomes as time goes on, and the more keen your nose becomes to tackle even the most complex wines quickly.
There are a lot of smells that simply are too difficult to put your finger on. The word might be on the tip of your tongue, but you just can’t hack it. Sometimes it’s best to just simplify down to the closest but perhaps long-winded explanation, and hope the word comes to you at a later time. Say for example, “This Barolo has notes of that time I stalled my transmission in the Wendy’s drive-through on a hill and couldn’t hill start because the car behind me was too close.”
That would be burnt clutch. Yes, I know from experience - and I did recall this phrase at a later date. A lot of this process of continuous smelling is memory-based, so sometimes you need to go and delve back into some memories to pull out something you hadn’t thought if for a while. This can be a fun, and tactile game to play amongst other people as often great stories come back to light and funny memories. Others can also help you identify more complex smells in fewer words. Alas, the more you taste and note, the shorter your notes become.
Let’s talk notation. It helps me tremendously when remembering a wine and contemplating all of its flavors in the moment, rather than write by some assigned formula of what I notice when, to instead use a stream-of-consciousness approach to notation: i.e, what do I notice first, what is uncharacteristic, what do I like, and how does the whole package fit together this is more along the lines of what I’m considering when sniffing a wine. This makes it easier for me to remember a bottle, and gives me a series of recollection keywords.
We know the old spearmint during the finals trick - that is to have a stick of Orbit when studying and then another the next day when taking the test. It helps our brain immensely to recollect when our olfactory is processing familiar smells, and you can program yourself to remember keywords using this cheat as well. The olfactory, is the sum of all of the parts of out nasal passage. Below is a brief smell category guide, that you can use to help you as you begin notating. It lists all of the categories that I look for when smelling, and gives a few examples of each.
The chart above contains category examples, and there can be more wafts hidden in a wine than just these, so just because you don’t see something listed that you’re smelling on the chart below, does not mean it’s not there. The more complexity a wine has, the more exciting the tasting becomes. I love opening a bottle, and jamming my nose right into the neck, and smelling the wine as a whole to get a sort of amuse bouche to prep me for what I can expect (when I’m enjoying a bottle alone, of course.)
Take a whiff of the two wines and write down five things that stand out to you. Keep sniffing until you can muster five. Then, combine these things into one key phrase. For the Santenay by Vincent Girardin and La Tour de Bessan, respectively, it may look something like this:
"Bright ripe red cherry, cinnamon potpourri, strudel, dry clover, button mushroom: Cherry Danish"
"Blackberry jam, ripe blueberry, caramel, pipe tobacco, lavender, pencil shavings: Blackberry pencil"
Next time I see either label, I can recall these key phrases, and I’ll know relatively what to expect. This can help you categorize regions, varietals, and wine producers once you begin to taste a lot of wines. The more you taste, the more your stream of consciousness notes can be refined and excised to note only the oddities between the bottles, and vintages. Don’t worry about how strange something might sound on paper, if you smell it, and it will help you recall the wine, it’s good enough to write.
There are thousands of descriptors people use when describing a wine. Thirty-six thousand five-hundred something, to be a bit more precise. All of this tomfoolery can seem a bit of a drip, but in reality our sense of smell is totally subjective and personal. Smells can illicit memories from childhood, special occasions and just about any coming-of-age experience you could imagine.
Due to wine’s complexity, I often find myself taken aback by memories washed years earlier as I nose the glass. On one such occasion, I had just opened a bottle of Banyuls and instantly was brought back to my elementary school hallway, bathroom pass in-hand, by the smell of cinnamon graham crackers. I was then introduced to the smell of modeling clay and art supplies - essentially, I got to time-travel back to first grade again.
Our bodies were designed to sense problematic in-edibles before we put them in our mouths, that’s why feces smells foul, and chocolate smells sweet to us: those intranasal smells. When you are smelling, take intervals to stop, smell your sleeve, or a glass of water, or something neutral, and then return to the glass several minutes later with a clear head. Run down the various smell categories checking for Earthiness, Organics, Fruit, etc., if you consciously seek a flavor profile, every time you take a whiff, you’ll be training your brain to be more keen to the smell, and you’ll need fewer whiffs to detect the undetectable smells now.
Some smells however, with greater strength, are easier and more noticeable, as they become entangled in a wine due to some process in the winemaking timeline. These can be good or bad, faults or just common practice. It’s also important to note that just because a wine smells a certain way, does not mean necessarily that it has one or more of these affectations, it could simply be a combination of factors, but once you come to know these smells, you’ll be able to tell when they are present. Below, are some notable common descriptors attached to their probable cause, from strongest descriptor to least. This is my guide to the causes of faults and flavors, you can click the italic embedded links for more information about wines, and regions mentioned.
Manure, barnyard, horse, farm, straw, feed: Brettanomyces (Brett)
"Barnyard" is the most common descriptor here, and this can be a favorable trait commonly found in high-quality Burgundy, and Southern Rhône wines, where it commonly materializes as a slight hint of straw. Too much of this fungus is a wine fault for sure. Anything smelling mostly of poop is probably best left untouched.
Wet dog, wet cardboard, mildew, newspaper: 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA)
When a waiter comes to the table and opens a bottle of wine, pouring a small bit for the host, this is the fault he or she is expected to be looking for before approving the bottle. Another word for this fault is "corked," because this chemical hides out in tainted corks and can infect a whole winery, destroying entire vintages. The famous 2me Cru, Ducru-Beaucaillou once had this problem in the nineties, and solved it by replacing their winery and re-corking salvageable bottles.
Chocolate, vanilla, almond, allspice, honey: Oak
Too much of anything can be an issue. In some cheaper wines from even the highest regarded areas, oak is needed to cover up other faults, or add flavor to a flavorless batch. In the nineties and oughts there was a surge in rich, oaky wines with dull flavor and unpleasant jammyness, especially in Barossa, though most winemakers now have self-corrected, and are using moderate amounts of this potent aging after-affect.
Popcorn butter, margarine, cashew, milk: Malolactic Fermentation
Malolactic fermentation is the process by which acetic acids (think granny smith apple) become malic acid (think buttermilk.) This is encouraged in reds to soften acid generally, but brings about the above flavors in whites, which some oft enjoy. To halt this process, the vintner can cool the wines down below sixty-eight degrees, and rack them early - that is, clarify them by draining clear liquid off the top, thereby separating them from yeast, and cold-holding them. Malolactic fermentation was a wine fault when bottling early Vinho Verde, which partially carbonated wines!
Red vinegar, marijuana, balsamic, citrus (red): Oxidation
Slight oxidation is desirable to keep a wine from being too tight. This also occurs in the bottle when allowing wines to age. But too much can turn wine rank, smelling of red wine vinegar, as acetic fermentation takes place, turning them into actual vinegar.
Crushed rock, wet stone, minerals, slate: Fermentation Esters
This one is confusing, but when wine folk pontificate about a wine's "minerality," this doesn't have anything to do with mineral content, or the rocks in the spoil it was grown in. Rather, these are smells and flavors of rock, or pea-gravel, or even mineral water that come about due to esters (chemicals) released by the yeast during fermentation. These gentle esters disappear if a wine is boiled, or oxidized - some are so sensitive they fade during travel periods, which is why it is important to wait a few weeks before opening a shipped bottle, you could be missing some complexity!
Lavender, rosemary, thyme, sage, oregano: Organic Farm Practices
While certainly not in all cases, I find that a lot of organic and biodynamic vintners are using garrigue (lavender and herbs) chamomile and other plants to fertilize, and protect their vineyards from pests by planting them in between rows of vines. These oils and pollens are then strewn throughout the vineyard by bees, winds, rains, and wildlife, and can end up creating herbal or floral essences in the wine, due to the wines contact with the skins in red wines.
Garlic, Egg, Nettles, Balsamic: Reduction
This can be an easy fix. Reduction happens when a wine has lost liquid and has not been able to oxidize properly. It can happen in barrel, bottle or even during bottling. These wines need a decant. This flavor can also be describes as, "tight," referring to the fact that it's not able to release all of its flavors without some exposure to oxygen. Young wines, as well as old wines can suffer from this. I find that young Cabernet Franc can especially do with a decant.
Acetate, bleach, sharpie, white vinegar: Volatile Acidity (VA)
VA is a tough act to follow. It's totally normal to experience this compound in high-acid
reds like Amarone della Valpolicella, but in other wines, it can be devastatingly gross. In Amarone, this is a result of the dried grapes prolonged exposure to oxygen and sunlight while they are raisinating. In other wines this is usually a wine fault caused by a winery using too much sulfer-dioxide to stop fermentation.
Soil, Truffle, Mushroom, Earthy, Forest Floor: Geosmin
This is a chemical alcohol found in mud, aboveground freshwater, and beets. It is what gives all of these things their Earthy-dirt smell. It can also get into wine production via natural yeast strains, and grape skins. It is highly sought after in wine, and adds intricate complexity to fruity Burgundy. Like anything else, it is best in moderation.
Now that we’ve covered the preliminaries, it’s time to swirl the glass again, this time with further concentration on exposing more of the wine to oxygen and follow this process up with a taste of the wine this time. It’s good practice, if you’re alone or amongst fellow travelers, to lower your chin slightly, pucker your lips and begin to inhale the wine, keeping the fluid low in your mouth and inhaling the aromas toward your internal nasal cavity. This will activate those retronasal smells, and allow you to keep the wine in your mouth for longer.
The longer we expose our olfactory and taste buds to a compound, the more flavor esters are likely to present themselves, so we get a fuller picture of the product. It’s like staring at a painting at an art museum for an extended period of time. You will often begin to pick up on techniques and brushstrokes that perhaps you didn’t see upon first inspection.
It’s important to bear in mind, that as stated prior, taste buds are barely a quarter of the overall picture. Contrary to popular belief, the tongue is not divided into specific sections of taste buds that specialize in various flavors, but all taste buds accomplish relatively similar jobs, and the variation in flavor profile between one area of the tongue and another is simply due to what part of the mouth these edible substances spend the most time in.
For example, bitter peanut butter does not activate taste buds only in the rear of the throat. Instead, it activates all taste buds, but since the enzymatic proteins contained in saliva are responsible for breaking the substance down, the sticky substance seldom is able to spend much time anywhere but towards the opening of the throat, and top of the tongue, away from the salivary glands underneath it. This is why we swirl the wine around in our mouths and take our time tasting.
Despite the long and list of flavors and expressions, most experts are able to profile them down into three distinct groups: Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Characteristics. Primary characteristics are fruit characteristics, which are generally a result of grape type. Though fruit character can vary wildly, most Chardonnay harbors flavor of yellow pear, most Sangiovese, that of red cherry, and most Cabernet Sauvignon, blackcurrant.
The nugget at the center of all of this, is that generally these primary characteristics are noticeable in wines of comparable grape types - this is what makes stream of consciousness notating so effective - eventually you really don’t need to go into much detail about fruit-forward wines. Primary characteristics always begin to reveal secondary characteristics as the wine is activated retronasally, and secondary characteristics eventually reveal tertiary characteristics, which then begin the finish of the wine by returning the attention of the observer back to the fruit.
Secondary characteristics are influenced primarily by terroir: that is, they can be from the effects of fermentation, and vineyard conditions. One example would be minerality - this is often wrongly confused with the effects of soil type on wine flavor. Minerality itself is not actually a proper English word, as my word processing software is ever too keen to remind me. It’s thrown around loosely to describe odd perception of mineral flavors, similar to what one might experience in mineral water. Some use terms like, dust, gravel, and slate to describe these sensations.
Not only is minerality not a word, this series of flavors has nothing to do with soil at all, and everything to do with the yeast on the outside of the grape skins, that causes these odd flavors through the creation of alcoholic byproducts called esters. These esters are contained within the glycerin of the finished wine, and are often a result of the reaction of organic matter (natural chemicals, soils, juices) around the grape skins with the yeast.
Another example of secondary characteristics is the herbaceous descriptors: Thyme, Rosemary, Chamomile etc. These are also often caused by esters, but in some cases can be a result of plants such as lavender that fill in between the rows to protect the vine from various pests. Bees carry pollen around the vineyard from lavender and sage, depositing it throughout the rows of vines, and wind can blow herbaceous oils into the skins of the grapes.
Tertiary characteristics are those influences of wine that are due to both law, and perspective. From a legal standpoint, we have already touched on how different regions have different labeling standards. Those regions may also require that a wine is aged in oak for a certain time, or forbid vintners from additives like sugar (called chaptalization) to raise richness levels. These are legal implications - in order to bottle a wine with a regional label, the vintner must comply with these requirements.
Wine law standardizes the regional flavors and helps to bolster regional reputations, in most cases. When wine makers are forced to comply with old-fashioned standards that are often catered to large industrial manufacturers rather than high-quality wine production, this is a major problem for those of us that enjoy high-quality wines, and a burden on regional producers making them. Most laws exist to standardize quality and consistency, and this overall can be helpful for consumers.
That being said, a lot of the practices required in regional labeling often change the flavor profile of the wine. Barolo, a northern Italian red, for example, has to be aged in oak for for years, and in bottle for one. This adds considerable tannin to these wines, but softens fruit flavors.
Perspective on the other hand, is all influences that a winemaker has over his product. In the Southern Rhône, producers have the ability, for example, to decide whether they want to age in oak at all, or what their Cépage (grape blend) will be, as long as all the grapes in the blend come from the list of approved thirteen, and represent mandatory minimum quantity. This means that every producer has more of an opportunity to express his idea of fine wine.
When it comes to tertiary characteristics, perspective can be seen in wine-making methodology generally. For example, most producers in Willamette Valley use rustic tools, and old-fashioned methods to cut into a vein of old-world style wine, resulting in some Brett flavors, and spicy oak. Monterrey is quite the opposite: Large-scale winemaking operations, irrigation and state-of-the-art facilities located in warehouses and sheds are not uncommon.
Tertiary characteristics are more subtle, and are the result of age, and winemaking process. Usually flavors like those of, forest floor, dead leaves, and, cured meat, come to mind. But tertiary characteristics are anything that touches the palette after fruit, oak, herb and stone, and tend to be more organic in nature, often arriving on the palette due to age. When you’re taking notes on a wine, try to seek out the more difficult to spot flavors - the tertiary ones - this may a few sniffs.