3 ways to use the Wine Aroma Wheel in your business | 2

Isabelle Lesschaeve Author

The Wine Aroma Wheel is an iconic tool in the wine education world – I’m sharing how you can make the most of this tool in your wine tasting room.

3 ways to use the Wine Aroma Wheel in your business | 2

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The Wine Aroma Wheel, developed by Dr. Ann Noble in 1984, is an iconic tool in any wine tasters’ journey. It’s so deceptively simple that in fact you may not even be using it in your business as much as you should be! In today’s episode, I’m outlining three ways you could start to implement the Wine Aroma Wheel in your tasting room, tasting events, and internally with your staff.

Full disclosure: Ann is a dear friend of mine, and I purchased her Wine Aroma Wheel business back in 2019. That’s probably why I know so much about it and love using it so much. I’m also including actual snippets from a conversation Ann had with a group of my clients back in 2020, so you can hear directly from the maker why it’s still such a relevant tool in today’s wine world.

In today’s episode, I’m talking about:

• The origin of the Wine Aroma Wheel

• Why it revolutionized wine research and education

• Criticisms of the Wine Aroma Wheel – and are they valid?

• Three ways you can start to use the Wine Aroma Wheel in your wine business

• The SENSES framework for developing knowledge of aroma standards

Links from today’s episode:

• The Wine Aroma Wheel website

• Fallis, C. Origin of the Wine Aroma Wheel, Dr. Ann Noble, Planete Grapes, May 22, 2014

• LaTour, K. A., & LaTour, M. S. (2010), Journal of Consumer Research, 37 (4), 688-697

• LaTour, K., & Deighton, J. (2018). Learning to become a taste expert. Harvard Business School Research Paper Series #18-107.

• Teague, L. The Tool That TransfoThe Tool That Transformed Wine Tasting - WSJrmed Wine Tasting, WSJ, October 2, 2020

• Bosker, B. Is There a Better Way to Talk About Wine? The New Yorker, July 29, 2015

• Hunt, M. How Ann Noble and the Wine Aroma Wheel Revolutionized the Industry Wine Enthusiast, June 6, 2022

Your Free Resource:

• Your free resource to discover the five mistakes turning your guests away – and how to fix them!

Connect with me, Isabelle:

• Learn more about working with me on my website

• Connect with me on LinkedIn

• Follow me on Instagram

• Subscribe to my YouTube channel

Transcript:

Isabelle Lesschaeve: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to today's episode of We Taste Wine Differently. I'm your host Isabelle Lesschaeve, a wine sensory scientist, educator and tasting coach. You know, the wine aroma wheel is one of my favorite tools for training wine enthusiasts. The more they use it, the more confident they become in picking up wine aromas. And I also saw multiple times how pulling it out of my bag at a tasting event creates high engagement from novice tasters, and even from the most educated ones.

In today's episode, you will hear all about the origin of the wine aroma wheel, and why we sensory scientists think it changed the nature of wine research when Dr. Ann Noble created it, and you will hear from Ann herself, she had kindly participated in a discussion with an international group of my clients in December 2020. I have inserted some [00:01:00] snippets from this discussion to include her testimonial. Although this tool can qualify as a millennial being born in 1984, I will tell you why it is still very relevant to today's wine's world.

By the end of this episode, you will have three practical ways to add the aroma wheel to your operations, plus a special offer to thank you for being one of the early listeners of this new podcast. So listen until the end. Ah, one more thing, like my favorite detective would say, full disclosure, Dr. Ann Noble is a very dear friend of mine and I purchased her wine aroma wheel business in 2019.

That's probably why I know so much about the wine aroma wheel, and that's why I'm so thrilled to share it with you today, in today's episode.

Bonjour and welcome to We Taste Wine Differently. [00:02:00] The podcast designed to empower you, wine professionals, and help you truly connect with today's wine consumers through the power of sensory experiences. Each week, we will explore practical science-backed methods and actionable insights rooted in sensory and consumer science to transform how you taste, talk about and present wine, ultimately enhancing the tasting room experience and building long-term relationships with your consumers. Are you ready to taste wine differently and adapt to today's changing dynamics? Let's dive in.

Let's dive in and start with this real question. Why did Ann Noble create the wine aroma wheel? Like many breakthroughs, the wine aroma wheel came out of months of frustration and the need to solve the problem. The problem was a [00:03:00] communication disconnect between wine experts and non-experts. Dr. Ann Noble was a sensory chemist and professor at the University of California Davis.

When she developed the wheel in the late seventies, early nineties, she wanted to get beyond the vague and subjective language commonly used at the time to describe wine. Phrases like harmonious, elegant, or unique were often thrown around leaving wine descriptors open to interpretation. Dr. Noble recognized the need for precision in the sensory evaluation of wines, especially because the subjective wine language was a hindrance to her wine research, and thus this handy tool was born.

See, her research focused on understanding how specific practices in the vineyard or in the cellar could impact the wine aromatic profiles. Meaning all the sensations tasters could experience through their [00:04:00] senses of smell. So she needed precise descriptors that she could correlate to the wine aromatic composition, and she found evidence that certain aromas were the signature of varietal wines or the way the wines were made.

So she decided to help wine tasters basically help her with her research. She developed a tool to help people categorize wine aromas in a more systematic way. Let's hear from Ann.

Ann Noble: How did I even begin the wheel? That was, I was lobbed into the course teaching at UC Davis not knowing much about wine. Dr. Maynard Amarine was my predecessor.

He was telling the students, oh, smell the Cabernet. I'm going, sure, we can smell it. But this was in 1974 and we didn't have the words at that point. You know, if you don't describe things as a matter of force, then you don't have the words, you don't have the [00:05:00] vocabulary.

So I had to start accumulating that vocabulary, which I did through the classes that I taught at UC Davis.

Isabelle Lesschaeve: The first iteration of the Wine Aroma Wheel was published in 1984 in the American Journal of Enology and Viticulture, and it underwent a revision in 1987 to include a broader spectrum of descriptors to describe white and red wines.

The wine aroma wheel was created to facilitate communication among wine drinkers and wine professionals. This tool is a framework for novice tasters to decompose the aromas perceived in a glass of wine into defined categories. The list of 83 aroma descriptors is organized in three tiers on a circle, the wheel.

First: 11 categories located at the center of the wheel, describe the generic aroma, families, fruity, [00:06:00] floral, chemical, et cetera. These categories break down into the middle section with 25 subcategories. For example, fruity breaks down into tree fruits, citrus, berry, and so on. And the most specific terms are on the outer tier of the wheel.

The wheel was used to train one professionals and future professionals to communicate with a structured language, which is quite consumer friendly. You don't see any technical words or jargon. Well, let me correct this. Not exactly. There are still a few chemical words listed, especially in the fault, uh, category.

Yes, I'm a fan of using the wine aroma wheel to train novice tasters. I know it has received criticism mainly due to, dare I say, miscommunication. Let's try to address this criticism here. First of all, the aroma wheel doesn't intend to force feed the [00:07:00] lexicon to its users. It doesn't pretend to be the universal aroma language, the way I see it as a guide to help people feel less intimidated or pressured to find the right word to describe wine.

Yes, it was created after tasting many American wines. The language has several American references like butterscotch or foxy. For a non-native speaker, that's an issue. But here's another example of Ann's testimonial and what she says about it.

Ann Noble: There's another problem with the wheel, and that is it's very focused using vocabulary for English speakers. And the words that are on there are words for, I want to say North America. Because for example, when you think about canned green beans, that's a North American thing.

And probably, I don't know in Australia, do you have, you [00:08:00] have must have canned green beans? And maybe in Brazil, but, in France, usually you're thinking about haricot vert, you know, just barely blanched, not killed. So the vocabulary depends on what we were experiencing.

Isabelle Lesschaeve: That's why all the aroma wheel training Ann has been doing, and I continue to host, include working with aroma references to give tasters examples of the different aromas people could perceive in wine.

And, in my practice, if they use the word green bell pepper or the word capsicum, I don't care. As long as we understand, they speak about the green veggie note, they may perceive in Carménère or certain Cabernet sauvignon. Another criticism I heard is that they are missing descriptors. Yes, that's true. The list only contain 83 descriptors, but it was never meant to be exhaustive.

Ann would say, there is so much [00:09:00] real estate on an 8.5 inches circle. Let's hear more with her.

Ann Noble: So from my classes, when I was first beginning, I was accumulating words and accumulating words. And so the aromas that we most often encountered in wine were the ones that I put down. There are others that are perfectly good, but that aren't on the wheel.

And before the age of computers, which is when we did this, you know, we didn't have the ability to take a little section of the wheel and blow it out and then break down again and again into more words, which you could do now and you'd be able to read it.

But you know, in the old wheel, if you squinched in more words, you wouldn't be able to read them. So we were limited by what you could put on the wheel physically and still see.

Isabelle Lesschaeve: But let's see the positive outcomes of using the wine aroma wheel, especially for novice tasters or tasting room staff in training. [00:10:00] Research studies conducted by Professor Kathryn Latour and collaborators when she was a professor at the University of Las Vegas and later at Cornell University, have demonstrated the efficiency of the wine aroma wheel in enhancing people's wine education.

The research highlighted two main positive outcomes. First, using the aroma wheel to describe wine and take notes facilitates the memorization of the tasting experience through a more structured approach to wine taste description. That's what we call the encoding process, how we memorize perceptions, descriptions, and the tasting context overall.

The second benefit is that the aroma wheel guides tasters through the description process so they understand what to look for during a wine evaluation. When you are new to wine, this is a huge advantage and the whole tasting [00:11:00] experience is less intimidating. I would add a third benefit, this one. By identifying the different aromas, people are more able to recognize and express what they like or don't like in a wine.

Making their future wine selection process easier and more enjoyable. So what if you could deliver these amazing benefits to the customers at the various testing events you host on site or on the road? Let me illustrate my point with this true story.

I belong to a local chapter of the American Wine Society here in Atlanta. On one weekend, I joined a group of 19 wine lovers on a day tour in the Georgia wine country. I was new to the group and didn't know the level of involvement these people have with wine. Were they starting their journey or were they what we called aficionados? Highly engaged, highly educated with a lot of experience tasting [00:12:00] wine.

I was going to find out. After a two hour ride, we arrived at the first winery, a cute farmhouse with a beautiful view of the rolling vineyards. We entered the farmhouse and the group split around four tables. As we got settled at my table, we got acquainted talking about our backgrounds, small talks, very nice people.

Then the host brought the wine flight, four stemless glasses, served on a wooden tray. There was one white, one rosé, and two reds. So the host, you know, welcomed us and got us started with the first wine, the Vidal Blanc. We all sniffed and sipped, and as it is my habit, I was taking notes. Mark was sitting beside me.

He saw me juggling notes and asked about them, and then he asked, how do you find all these words? That's where I popped my secret weapon, the wine aroma wheel from [00:13:00] my bag. I always travel with a few and handing them to my table companions, everybody got excited. I gave them a two minute crash course on how to use the wheel, and that was enough to see them all sniffing, turning the wheel, pointing their fingers at words, matching the smells, discussing their perceptions, and coming to some consensus on their experiences.

We continued the tasting, everyone using the wheel, adding their tasting notes on the half page provided by the winery host. Then Mark turned to me and say, well, you made my day, Isabelle. I don't feel stupid for not knowing what I'm doing. Wow. When the time came to leave, my table companions checked their notes and went to the counter to purchase their favorite bottles of wine.

That was as simple as that. The wine aroma wheel is a great and efficient icebreaker for people new to wine tasting. It gives them confidence [00:14:00] to talk about the wine without the fear of feeling stupid, naive, or inappropriate. So how can you add the magic of the wine aroma wheel to your tasting experience?

Here are two ideas. You can take notes now, or you can download the one page document I prepared for you. It contains all the instructions and practical tips. You would find the link to download in the show notes. So two example. For a stand up tasting at the wine bar, you can provide these instructions to your guest.

Smell the wine first and ask the following question, what does it evoke to you? Look at the wine aroma wheel. The inner circle words represent the generic aroma category. Pick one and follow along that category to settle on a subcategory and maybe a more precise word. It's okay if you cannot go further than the middle.

Smell again. Do you pick up another [00:15:00] note? Look at the wheel again to guide you. Have a sip. Is something new coming up? Then as the host, share your own tasting notes, acknowledging that we all have different perceptions so that there is no right or wrong answers, and your guest may want to smell again or sip again to check if they pick the aroma as you got.

Then you can segue into the origin of your wine styles, what makes them what they are, the winemaker's philosophy, the distinct nature of your environment and climate. You can go deeper into the technicalities if your guests are very curious. Let's take another example for a more curated experience.

Let's say a seated tasting. You might start the tasting the same way, presenting the wheel. It's your time to share your tasting notes. Have some aroma references prepared on the site for an educational component. Let's say your Cabernet has a distinct cassis aroma, an [00:16:00] aroma not many people are familiar with.

Prepare a small glass jar with a cassis liquor, like a creme de cassis for people to smell. Adding aroma standards helps your guests understand your tasting notes and create a unique learning experience. It also allows you to anchor their memory on the unique aromatic profiles of your wines. Again, it's an opportunity to create an unforgettable tasting experience.

And here's what Ann Noble shared with my students in 2020.

Ann Noble: After I retired, I went and taught short courses, really, which were aha, ah, this is how you do it, about smelling and tasting wine. What I always found is at every tasting, I'd be presenting wines blind, the standards blind, somebody in that tasting would come up with something that none of us smelled in that wine.

That was perfect, [00:17:00] just perfect. And so everybody got totally jazzed that we had just learned that that doesn't mean it's always going to be in that variety, but it was. This is how easy it is to do and how exciting, if you're like me and listen to your nose.

Isabelle Lesschaeve: Here is a side note on aroma standards and aroma kits.

You might be tempted to use commercial wine aroma kits. You know these beautiful coffrets with small flasks, each illustrating one wine. Yes, they are beautifully presented. My problem with these standards is that each little flask contains a highly potent aroma composition, which is a blend of different aroma compounds.

They are very potent, meaning they have a very strong smell. I don't like using this aroma standard flask during a wine tasting for these two reasons. They are too intense and often not true to the natural [00:18:00] aroma. If you take a sniff out of one of the jars. You can saturate your olfactory receptors very quickly, which means you can't smell anything else, and the wine will be practically odorless.

We call it sensory adaptation, and if your guests let, you know, some of the flasks open during the tasting, the scents will quickly pollute the air in your tasting area, compromising the taster's ability to smell anything in their wine glasses. That's why I prefer to present real products as aroma standards, a fruit or juice, an essential oil.

The smells are not too intense, but perceptible and more true to nature. So using the wine aroma wheel in your tasting events helps build rapport with your guests, helping them feel comfortable commenting on your wines beyond, you know, it's pretty good. It's also an opportunity to learn from your consumers and how they speak about your wines [00:19:00] without influencing them.

Which leads me to the importance of training your staff to speak a consumer friendly wine language. And yes, you can use the wine aroma wheel for that too. We've all been to a wine tasting where the host delivers a very scripted tasting experience. It's all about the products, not how the products make people feel.

And if you listened to episode one of this very podcast. You know that it's time to change scripts. Most of the time hosts are very hospitable. No question about that. Wine people are passionate and very generous with their knowledge and time, but what does it mean to be hospitable? According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, being hospitable means given to the generous and cordial reception of guests, promising or suggesting generous and friendly welcome, offering a pleasant or sustaining [00:20:00] environment.

So it's about being generous, cordial, warm, and pleasant. Again, no question about that. Wine people are very hospitable, but there is a fourth point in the definition. Hospitable means readily receptive, hospitable to new ideas. So if you are a hospitality professional, I hope you will be hospitable to this new idea.

To change the tasting room scripts and the consumer experience, we need to move from being product focused to being consumer obsessed. And it starts with the staff training. Your staff needs to relate to the wines they present, like a normal person, not like a 20 year experienced wine maker or wine expert.

Your staff need to be able to talk about the wine tasting profiles, what I call sensory profiles with words that normal people understand. Aromas are the most difficult sensations to describe because nobody is taught how to [00:21:00] do that when we grow up. That's why wine tasting notes can be so intimidating and obscure.

So to be a hospitable host, one needs to acknowledge this challenge and be at ease conducting a tasting and speak a consumer wine language. To do that, I recommend including a short aroma training using the wine aroma wheel in your staff onboarding program. What does it look like? Well, select the key aroma descriptors of your wine using the wine aroma wheel to find the terms most appropriate to describe your wines.

No technical jargon, just descriptors of products most people will know. For example, instead of saying bottle aged aromas, be more specific. Do you mean leather or dry fruit, like prune or raisin? Let's say you have 12 signature aromas you want to communicate to your guest, you will prepare aroma standards for [00:22:00] each of them.

Don't worry if you don't know how to prepare a standard. There are standard recipes that are included with the wine aroma wheel, so you have prepared your 12 aroma standards. Now, every day for two weeks, you will host an aroma training session with the new recruits. Really, you know, everybody from your winery is welcome to attend this training.

It's beneficial for everyone. So let's say every morning the new recruits will sit at a table with these 12 standards. They will smell each jar, take notes to memorize the aroma and its name. It's called the familiarization process. I use the SENSES framework to deliver this aroma training. The trainees take two standards at a time.

They smell the first one, so S from the framework, they smell the first one. E, they encode the perception, meaning using the wine aroma wheel to characterize [00:23:00] the aroma and writing down their description, N, neutralize their nose, meaning that they need to have a break, maybe smell a glass of water or their hand to remove any lingering odor in their nose.

Then, the last part of the SENSES framework, SES, they smell the second jar and encode again, and assess side by side the two aroma standards to define how similar and different these two aromas are. For example, if you have blackberry and raspberry aromas, the perceptions have similarities and differences.

Blackberry might be more jammy and the raspberry may have a floral tone. One needs to be able to perceive and memorize those to be comfortable using these descriptors. So they do this SENSES approach for two of the aroma standards, and then they move on to the next pair, rinse, and repeat. [00:24:00] And believe me, it won't take more than 10 minutes at the most.

Every morning, at the end of the two weeks, you can set up a, a challenge, present the standards without the name on them. Have your staff identify each aroma. It might be a nice, friendly competition among your staff. Once everybody is comfortable with identifying all the standards, host a tasting of your wines.

Let the trainees find these aromas in your wines. Using the wheel as a guide, it can be as simple as matching a descriptor with a wine, and of course, a descriptor can be present in several wines. So what does this training do for you? It'll help your staff speak about your wine aromatic profiles in a similar manner, but a genuine way, not a rote memorized way.

Let's say you adopt one of the two scenarios I described earlier, to use the wine aroma wheel during your testing event at the [00:25:00] testing bar or the seated event. Once your staff has let the guests use the wheel to take their own tasting notes, they can start sharing about their experience and how it relates to the product making or wine making philosophy.

Your staff will be able to describe what a blackberry note in your wine evokes to them beyond the word, a memory, a particular product, a seasonal event, maybe a wine making practice. It'll help build rapport with the guests and help them find their personal analogies. All in all these interactions engage the senses and the memorization process, which will create a positive memory of this tasting experience.

By the way, the efficiency of aroma standards as a training tool is also backed by sensory research. Most sensory scientists know that aroma standards are essential in our practice to align the lexicon among tasters and ensure that they understand each other when they describe food products. [00:26:00] It's nice to have some backup with sound research.

So yes, aroma standards are essential to help people develop a wine language. This outcome came from a study conducted at UC Davis by Dr. Hildegarde Heymann's lab. The study showed that exposing participants to aroma reference standards led them to use more descriptors to describe wines. This was true whether the participants were experienced tasters or beginners.

There you have it. To recap, today, I shared with you the history and rationale behind the creation of the wine aroma wheel by Dr. Ann Noble at UC Davis. I gave you three opportunities to use the aroma wheel in your business. To break the ice with new visitors at your tasting room, to engage in conversations and education at a testing event.

Finally to train your staff, develop a consumer [00:27:00] friendly aroma language. The wine aroma wheel is more than a lexicon spread on the colorful and laminated circle. It's a catalyst for engaging conversations with your guests and onboarding your hospitable staff.

And that's it for today's episode of We Taste Wine Differently. If you enjoyed it please subscribe or follow the show wherever you listen to podcasts. If you want to learn more about how I can help you and your team implement a sensory driven testing experience, visit my website at innovinum.com. It's I-N-N-O-V-I-N-U-M.com. And I have a gift waiting for you there. It's a free resource to discover the five mistakes turning guests away, and how to fix them fast. It includes a tool to assess practices in your testing room, you will also [00:28:00] find the direct link to download this paper and the tool in the show notes. À bientôt.

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