Wine Wheel Aroma

Today I wanted to share a very practical tool that can help us to identify aromas in wine, the Wine Aroma Wheel.

When we taste a wine we use various senses that are going to give us information about the wine that we have in our glass. The sight will be our first contact, it will mainly give us information about the age of the wine. With the sense of smell, first we get to know if the wine is correct or not, we do this with the glass resting, without swirling it. Secondly and swirling the glass we detect other aromas. These can be of various types; fruity, floral, herbal, herbaceous, wood, spices, cocoa, leather, etc. These are due to many factors like the grapes used in the production of the wine, fermentation in concrete or wooden vats, ageing in barrels, etc.

Sometimes it happens to us that we can’t identify an aroma, we can recognise it but we can’t give it a name. It has happened to me, in a wine tasting with a group, that I’m swirling the glass, the aroma reminds me of something but it isn’t until the moment someone says ‘smells like leather!’ that I say that’s right!
For these times the wine aroma wheel is most useful. It can help us to remember aromas while we’re developing our smells library.
The wheel is structured in categories and sub-categories to be able to find the aroma. For example we can find a tropical fruit aroma. It doesn’t smell the same a banana, a pineapple or a melon.

If we keep turning the wheel we see various categories like Autolytic, Dairy, Animal, etc.

I hope it was useful and you can practise with your wine. If you would like to have it please send me an email and can send it to you. My address is: hola@pamplonafood.com

Cheers!