The wine aroma wheel, developed at U.C. Davis, is an excellent tool for training the nose to detect aromas in a sampled glass of wine. The wheel allows an inexperienced wine enthusiast to go from the general to the specific, picking out the aromas of a particular grape as well as the bouquet created by the fermentation and aging processes.
The three classes of aromas are identified in an outside ring that distinguishes varietal aromas, bouquet, and “off” aromas created by faults in the wine. The innermost circle contains segments of broad classifications of aromas, such as fruity, floral, and spicy varietal aromas, nutty, caramelized, and woody bouquet, and chemical, oxidized, and microbiological aromas of flawed wines.
The focus here will be on bouquet and varietal aromas, as faults are, fortunately, few and far between. How few and far between? Tricloranisol is a defect resulting from a contaminated cork and occurs in 3% of all wines sealed with a cork, rather than a screw cap or synthetic fastener. It is best described as “moldy newspapers”, and unless one spent the better part of their youth delivering newspapers in the rain, is intensely offensive.
Under the category of fruity, the next circle breaks this down into citrus, berry, tree fruit, and others. Assuming the scent isolated is closest to berry, the outermost circle divides this into blackberry, raspberry, strawberry, and cassis. Attempting to deduce what region the blackberry came from is going much too far, however.
Under the bouquet category of woody, the next circle separates this into resinous, disinfectant, and burned. While these may not sound promising, selecting resinous now divides into oak, cedar, and vanilla. Vanillin is a substance found in oak that is created when the staves are burned to permit bending them to shape for the barrel. Wine aged in the oak barrel then picks this up as vanilla, probably the most common bouquet aroma of wines aged in oak.
Most wine consumers can pick out broad classifications of scents such as woody and fruity, and can tell when a wine is bad. The beauty of the wine aroma wheel is its ability to refine the user’s sense of smell to discern far more of a wine’s aroma elements and thereby enhance the appreciation for one of life’s greatest pleasures.
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