09. Bringing Aromas Back to Center Stage in Wine Tasting and Evaluation

Isabelle Lesschaeve Author

Explore the essential role of aromas in wine tasting. We share a sensory science point of view and insights for professionals and staff training.

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In this episode, we tackle a big question: do wine aromas really matter, or should we focus solely on taste and structure, like some professionals suggest?

Inspired by a candid chat with a winemaker and my experience as a sensory expert, I dive into the debate around wine language—from its cultural quirks to the challenges many of us face in describing aromas.

I unpack why aromas are crucial not just for personal enjoyment, but for professional wine evaluation and marketing.

If you’ve ever felt frustrated by your ability (or inability) to name what you smell in a glass, this episode is for you. I also share a practical, science-backed framework—the “N.O.S.E.” approach—to help anyone start building a better sense memory and become more confident describing wine aromas.

Whether you’re a curious wine enthusiast or a seasoned pro, you’ll walk away with tools to trust your nose and bring even more joy to your wine experiences.

Links from today’s episode:

• The N.O.S.E. Framework journal - Download it here.
• Gordon Shepherd NeuroEnology - Check it out here [paid link]
• Join here the priority list of my Masterclass, Ignite Your Sense of Smell,  to know when registration opens

Connect with Isabelle: 

• Learn more about working with me on my website https://www.innovinum.com/
• Connect with me on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/isabellelesschaeve
• Subscribe to my YouTube channel http://youtube.com/@innovinumacademy
• Leave Isabelle a message https://www.innovinum.com/contact

Transcript

[00:00:00] Isabelle: Am I the only one paying attention to wine aromas? You know these elusive perceptions you detect when smelling a glass of wine. A recent discussion with a wine maker made me wonder, this is what he said when I was probing him on the importance of wine aromas and flavors to guide his craft. Since apparently I'm fascinated by the complexity of wine aromas, he said, I feel like flavors and aromas are so prone to that BS debate analysis that I focus on the taste and the structure because it's more standard.

It's an easier language to converse with. It's an easier sound to create the composition with. So yes, Isabelle, you biased.

Yes, I am biased having been trained as a sensory scientist specializing in flavors, but when I see participants in my sensory tastings, when they discover the evocative power of wine aromas, I feel [00:01:00] obliged to bring back our sense of smell and wine aromas to the center of our wine appreciation and enjoyment.

So if you too wonder whether you should ditch wine aromas from our wine vocabulary or like me, if you rely heavily on aromatics to evaluate a wine, this episode is for you.

I.

Welcome to today's episode of We Taste Wine Differently. The podcast designed to help wine professionals connect with modern wine consumers through the power of sensory experiences. I'm your host, Isabelle Lesschaeve, wine sensory scientist educator and tasting coach.

Wine aromas. Should we discuss wine aromas at all? When tasting wine among professionals or when presenting wines to customers? There has been a lot of discussion chitchat in the past few years [00:02:00] regarding the wine language used by professionals, especially the language taught in certification programs.

Exclusive British centric, westerner, and not at all consumer friendly are the most common criticisms.

I agree that some of these terms are culturally dependent and not meaningful to many non-Western tasters.

For example. I didn't know what butterscotch was until I moved to the us. But are these arguments sufficient enough to dismiss the importance of aroma in our wine experiences? I noticed two schools of fault. The one arguing that texture and structure are critical characteristics that professionals should focus on, like the winemaker I referred to earlier on, believing that the texture language is more standard.

The over camp perhaps made solely of sensory [00:03:00] scientists, who knows? Argues that all sensory modalities are important to characterize the wine. Therefore, aroma is important to report on.

In today's episode, I will tell you first why aromas are more important than one thinks for wine professionals. And second, the one simple reason why wine pros are challenged by describing wine aromas like many people. And third, I will give you a simple framework to get over that universal hurdle. And of course.

A free resource to practice this framework. So listen to the end of this episode to grab this free resource.

But first, let's define aromas.

To me, a wine aroma is evoked by the perception of one or more volatile compounds. These compounds are very small molecules that are detected on the olfactory epithelium at the top of our nostrils, they generate an electric [00:04:00] signal that is rooted to the olfactory bulb and the higher central areas in our brain where the signal is interpreted.

If you have encountered that signal before, your brain may identify it. If you haven't, you may become curious about what it is, and that's how we learned.

Wine professionals like to segment aromas into three categories, primary, secondary, or tertiary, depending on the aromas known origins. Primary produced in the berry, secondary produced during fermentation wine making, and tertiary produced during maturation and aging,

but to flavor chemists. An aroma is evoked by volatile compounds, period. And so I have learned, so when I'm talking about wine aromas, I'm talking about any category of aromas. Not just primary, secondary, or tertiary, any aromas that your nose detect and your brain [00:05:00] interprets. I just wanted to clarify. Now, I'm amazed by the number of wine enthusiasts I meet who have never heard about the two ways we detect aromas.

Have you? Let's make sure we are on the same page here, because it's not a well-known fact actually.

We detect aromas in two ways. The direct route, when we smell, you know, wines directly from the glass, and the indirect route. When the wine is in your mouth as you breathe, the volatile compounds reach the olfactory detectors through the retro nasal pathway at the back of the mouth.

What most normal people qualify as taste is, in fact aromatic perception. That's one reason why wine aromas are so critical to our enjoyment. They contribute in large part of the flavor perceptions we have when we sip some wine.

Flavor [00:06:00] combines the perceptions of taste, the basic taste of sweet acid, salt, bitter, and umami. The texture or mouth feel the sensation related to chemesthesis that we experience in the mouth and the aromatic components, the aromas. So the overall flavor of wine is our brain's interpretation of the interplay between these three major wine components.

Therefore aromatic perceptions in mouth are important to consumers enjoyment and cannot be ignored. Gordon Shepherd, the author of the book Neuroenology wrote early in this book and I quote, wine is a food that is consumed almost entirely for its flavor since it has no real nutritional value.

So wine aromas significantly contribute to our overall enjoyment of wine, which is a personal experience. Does it mean wine aromas are not crucial to mention in professional [00:07:00] evaluations? My answer is yes. They are crucial to mention in the professional evaluation and for two reasons. First, to assess that.

Typicality of certain wine styles if typicality is an asset, valued in your wine marketing. And second, to identify off-flavors, fault and taints that make the wine non commercializable,

Aromatic typicity, or typicality makes a wine style distinct and identifiable. Some wine style have signature aromas that producers may want to keep consistent across production batches because it's part of their brand equity. For example, tropical fruits or grapefruits or boxwood in Sauvignon Blanc, black cherry in Pinot Noir rose in Gewurztraminer

despite people's different interpretations of these signature aromas, there must be consistency internally to define what [00:08:00] these aromatic notes smell like. The use of physical aroma standards is therefore critical in that respect.

Off-flavor is another reason, and off flavor training should be mandatory in all wine certifications. Most enology programs at the college or university levels offer such training in the enology class or the sensory course, but what about hospitality programs? Even if you learn the origins of these off notes in your courses, being able to spot them in a wine, knowing your blind spot is non-negotiable.

I discussed Blind Spot with my last guest, Dr. Hildegarde Heymann, professor at UC Davis, and you can refer to our discussion and why. Knowing your blind spots are critical. Refer to episode eight.

Let's pause here to recap. Wine aromas are an important component of flavor. The reason why many wine overs [00:09:00] enjoy consuming wines, aromas have been used as a differentiating factor for marketing certain varietal styles. And when wine processing goes wrong, it leads to the production of off-flavors.

So why do wine pros argue more and more that aromas are not that important? That we shouldn't talk about it or describe it to communicate? Because we don't have a universal inclusive language to describe aromas. I get it. We need to find better ways to communicate more effectively what sensory experiences consumers can expect when they buy, you know, a bottle of wine, and I can help you with that.

There are lots of tools and techniques to make sure that the liquid sensory benefits are communicated through your communication or even through the labels,

but to me, the fundamental reason why wine professionals are uncomfortable describing wine aroma is simple. Like many of us, they never learn to describe smells. [00:10:00] We. Again, all of us have never learned at school to pay attention to smells, scents, fragrances, maybe only when it was unpleasant. We learned a lot of things to recognize shapes and colors, but not smells or even taste for that matter.

Pascaline LePeltier the world renowned French sommelier shared this hard truth during her keynote at the Pangborn Sensory Symposium in 2023. She said, nobody ever taught us how to use our sense of smell, and that's probably why many professionals use texture and basic taste to evaluate wine.

These components seem easier to identify, although we could have another episode on how texture attributes are challenging to agreed upon in sensory evaluations. But yes, texture and basic tastes are less elusive. They might be more familiar and probably easier to identify. You know, the more you taste wine [00:11:00] and the more you're exposed to wine.

But the good news for aromas is that it's never too late to learn how to pay attention to scents and develop your sense of smell and aroma language. So how can you start? And the answer is, deceivingly easy. You have to listen to your nose every day. That's what my friend and mentor, Dr. Ann Noble has told her students and anyone willing to listen.

It's about paying attention, paying attention to the scent in your environment daily. And I'm going to share a simple framework with you. I call it the N.O.S.E. framework. Each letter representing a step to follow. So here's what you're going to do every day when the scent reaches your nose. You will have first to notice it.

So N notice the smell. Then you will observe the source of the smell. So O [00:12:00] observe the source of the smell so that you can link the source and the scent, and then smell again, associating the scent and the source. And E stands for encode. It's about doing a task to memorize this association. And the best task is to write about the experience you just had.

But you can also doodle if it is your thing. And if in the moment writing is inconvenient, take a photo of the source with your phone and record a short voice memo. Be creative because it's a very important step in the N.O.S.E. process to memorize, and therefore remember the scent and the name later when maybe you will encounter it in your glass of wine.

Do this every day for a week.

And if you're not convinced, let me tell you about Bob. I just want to share how effective this single practice is. Bob did it [00:13:00] for a few days and shared that with me. One of the key learning moments thus far has been to recognize that for the most part, have been ignoring the aromas around me, hence losing the opportunity to broaden my repertoire of scent associations he mentioned to have never paid attention to smells outside of his kitchen because that's what, we told, pay attention to the spices and the smells of food, but paying attention to the scents and fragrances outside of your kitchen is also important. Then his garage revealed a whole more sensory discoveries. And to bring you context, Bob is not a normal wine consumer. What we would call a naive consumer. He is a very talented wine maker, a wine judge, and a wine educator.

So. If you have been struggling describing wine [00:14:00] aromas, train your nose, listen to it. Every day I've created a journal for you to take notes, especially the encoding part. It'll help you memorize the association between the scent, the object source, and the name you associated with it. I added the link to the journal in the show notes, and you can do that for a week or as long as you want.

The N.O.S.E. framework is one of the techniques I teach in my masterclass. Ignite Your sense of smell. Create your wine aroma training blueprint in four weeks if you're interested. Registration is coming soon, and you can join the priority list to be first notified when the masterclass doors open. You will find the link to join the priority list in the show notes.

Alright, I hope by now I have provided enough arguments to put wine aromas back at the center stage of your attention when it comes to wine characterization. Wine aromas are part of the flavor experience that wine will [00:15:00] create. While I agree, we need more consumer friendly ways to communicate wine sensory benefits to consumers, wine professionals also need to be able to describe wine aromas with a defined language, and this would be the topic of the coming episode on how to define and learn this technical language that is not the technical language that you're used to. That is the sensory language of wine. But before that, you need to awaken your sense of smell.

And I gave you today a simple framework, the N.O.S.E. framework, to start paying attention to your olfactive environment. So practice, practice, practice. That's the first step to take.

And that's it for today's episode of We Taste Wine Differently. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe. Follow the show wherever you listen to podcast and leave a review to help others discover the podcast. If you want to learn more about how I can help you and your team implement a sensory driven tasting experience, [00:16:00] visit my website sat innovinum.com..

That's INNOVINUM

I-N-N-O-V-I-N-U-M.com. Thank you and A bientot

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