Tag Archive: basics

Lesson Three: Studying wine’s aromas

Written on August 17, 2008 by William Wilson in Your Wine Education
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“What do you smell?”

I’ve asked that question of students many times. At first, it strikes fear into their hearts, almost as if I am putting them on the spot, requiring the Correct Answer or else.

The hardest thing to get across is that there is no Correct Answer. It takes quite a leap of faith to accept that premise. We are all used to believing that what other people perceive is what we perceive as well. If I point to a sunny sky and say that the sky is blue, everyone’s perception is the same. If I smell the rotten eggs smell of a poorly adjusted catalytic converter and mention it, everyone else knows what I’m talking about. We all know what chocolate tastes like.

But when it comes to wine, it becomes more complicated, more confusing. Wine often has many aromas in the glass, and it can be hard to distinguish them. Further adding to the challenge is the fact that aromas can be ghost-like–a particular aroma will be noticeable one moment, and gone the next. It may return, or it may not. And then, of course, is the stumper–”I know this aroma, but I can’t put my finger on it.” It can be maddening. Reading tasting notes doesn’t help either–what do toasty melons smell like anyway?

It’s time for some sanity. Here’s my take on the idea of aromas.

First, don’t worry about it too much. Instead of trying to identify each aroma in the glass, study the intensity of the aromas. Are they non-existent? Subtle? Moderate? Powerful? Overpowering? Just enjoy the aromas in terms of their strength.

Second, decide whether the aromas are pleasant. If you find the aromas attractive, that’s a good sign. If there’s something the puts you off–swamp gas, musty or moldy smells, etc.–that can be a bad sign.

Third, try to generally describe the aromas. Are they floral? Fruity? Spicy? Earthy? Something else?

Once you’ve narrowed these issues down, then you can use a tool to help you better identify the aromas. One great tool happens to be free, the Wine Aroma Card published by Vinography.com. To be frank, I wish I had thought of this. But I’m glad that Alder Yarrow did and made it available to everyone. This card is something you can print out, cut to size, fold and carry in your wallet. No larger than a business card, it’s almost perfect. You can take it with you to wineries, tasting events, or just use it at home on a Tuesday evening.

A second tool is not free, but it’s well worth the low cost. The Wine Aroma Wheel is the creation of Ann C. Noble, a professor in California. It organizes aromas by broad and then increasingly narrow categories. This format works well for some, not so well for others. The disadvantage to this wheel is that its size precludes you from carrying it in your pocket, but it seems to be a bit more organized than the aroma card.

Okay, so you have a better idea now how to identify and describe wine’s aromas. But why the #!%@$ do we even care?

This is a great question. For most wine drinkers, it probably doesn’t matter if you can identify the aromas in a glass of wine. Even for most enthusiasts it may not make a difference. If you want to enjoy wine and not become too serious, don’t sweat it. Just enjoy the experience and don’t give it a second thought.

The important point here is that you do not have to be able to pick out every aroma in order to find pleasure in wine. If you want to work toward being able to identify particular aromas, then practice doing it. But if you can’t seem to get the hang of it, you can still be as much a wine enthusiast as anyone else. My own olafactory senses are not that great, but that doesn’t stop me from drinking and having fun with wine. Sometimes I can pick out an aroma, most of the time I don’t. But I don’t care.

And you don’t need to care, either. Just enjoy the wine. Over time you’ll find yourself becoming more interested in trying to distinguish the wine aromas. Maybe you won’t. But you’ll definitely enjoy the wine more if you pay some attention to the aromas.

I know my “don’t worry about it position” disagrees with many others. What do you think? Leave a comment and tell me if I’m all wet or if I might be on to something.

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Lesson Two: Studying wine’s colors

Written on August 15, 2008 by William Wilson in Your Wine Education
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Have you finished your two weeks without wine? No? Then stop reading. No working ahead here. Finish those two weeks and then come back. I mean it. Stop..reading…right…now!

Aw hell, how am I going to keep you from reading ahead? Let’s go ahead with this chapter.

What gives a wine it’s color? Pigment.

Pigment is not a word we encounter very often. People who study skin colors probably use it a lot. So do people who work with paints. But we wine enthusiasts don’t typically think about pigment.

Fortunately, we won’t have to think about pigment for very long. As long as you can grasp the fairly simple concept here, you’ll be able to leave pigment behind. I should also point out that I have no scientific data that backs up what I’m about to say. A scientist (a chemist maybe) will tell me that I’m wrong. But what I’m trying to do here is explain a concept, so pigments are a useful tool.

Consider an aboriginal tribe that uses colored paints to decorate their faces. They get the colors from different natural sources: roots, leaves, and so on. They can crush those roots up, mix them with some water, and voila! We have a basic paint. (All paints are really made up of two things: pigment, for the color, and a binding agent that sticks to the pigment and to the surface that gets painted.)

Imagine, if you will, that a tribe member is responsible for creating a yellow paint. The tribe knows that if you dig up a particular root and mash it up, it will produce the appropriate shade of yellow face paint. Our tribe member digs up the proper root and grinds it into a perfect deep yellow color.

Before he can mix the powder with water to create the paint, however, he is interrupted by something. (We need a bit of a delay, so the interruption can’t be one of his tribe mates asking him a question. It needs to be something a bit more substantial. A stampede of some kind that causes our paintmaker to be out of commission for a few days. How about a stampede of aardvarks? That should do it.) A stampede of aardvarks kicks up immense amounts of dust, causing our tribe member’s asthma to kick up. The tribe’s shaman prescribes three days of bed rest, and our yellow powder waits patiently.

If you’ve ever left a piece of fruit sit for too long, you know what happens–it changes color. The same thing happens to our tribe’s yellow powder. After our paintmaker is well again, he goes over to his yellow powder and discovers that it has turned from deep yellow to almost a dark mustard color. What caused this? Pigment. Pigment that changed due to exposure to air for a few days. Like our changing fruit, this particular root changes color when left alone for a while.

Please say goodbye to our paintmaker and think about this. As time goes by (I hear a song in there somewhere), the pigments in the powder change and the color changes as a result. Because wine’s color is caused by pigments, you can bet that with time, the color of wine will change. That’s a good bet to make!

The color of wine gives us some information about it. Deeper, murkier colors usually accompany more flavorful wines. This, of course, is no surprise to anyone who drinks tea or coffee–if it looks watered down, it tastes watered down. The same goes for wines–if a wine looks watered down, it will more than likely taste watered down.

The color of a wine can also tell us something about the age of the wine. For a moment, we need to consider red and white wines separately. As you might guess, the two types of wine have different colors.

White wines can be described by thinking about a color spectrum. Instead of the red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet that we see in a rainbow, we have a narrower spectrum of colors. White wines can go from being almost clear to slightly greenish with hints of yellow to pale yellow to deep yellow to gold to amber to brown. A younger wine should be closer to the clear end of that spectrum. An older wine should be making progress toward the amber end of the spectrum. A young white wine that appears brown in the glass probably has something wrong with it. It will usually end up being poured down the drain (although the bacteria in your waste treatment system will probably thank you for helping them throw a party).

Red wines, on the other hand, usually start out very deep and dark purple. From there they become more like a ruby color, then garnet, then brick red, then brown. Like with white wines, a young wine that appears to be brown may end up saving the bacteria from having to make a beer run. A young red wine should be more toward the purple and ruby end of the spectrum. Don’t forget, too, that the more intense the color, the more intense the wine should be.

Are you ready for your next homework assignment? Brace yourself–you’re going to need two different wines of the same color, i.e. two whites or two reds. Get two wine glasses while you’re at it. Pour yourself a glass of wine and study the color. Many people tilt the glass at a forty-five degree angle and look down through the wine where it is not very deep against the glass. That, along with a nice white background, will often help you see the colors better. Where would you put the color of this wine on our color spectrum? (If your eyes cannot tell the difference between a red wine and a white wine, please go have your vision checked by a competent and qualified medical professional. Seriously. Go ahead, the rest of us will wait.)

Now pour the second class of wine and study its color. Is it different from the first wine? Hopefully it is. If you remember back to grade school, you wrote plenty of papers where you were told to compare and contrast two things. Write yourself a mental paper comparing and contrasting the color of the two wines. Or, if you want, write it down on real paper. Or in your word processor. Whatever. Are you able to explain the differences and similarities using words? Good!

Okay–this is the last time I will ask. Did you finish your wine-less two weeks yet? If so, you get to drink one or both glasses that you poured for this exercise. If not, you’re going to have to be patient and wait until the two weeks is up before you get to taste the wines. Sorry–but you really need to stick to the program!

Leave a comment or two to let us know how your color study is going. Or are you just blowing it off?

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Lesson One: Preparing to learn about wine

Written on August 14, 2008 by William Wilson in Your Wine Education
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Welcome to the first article in the educational series of Wine For Newbies 2.0! I’m glad you’re reading this, and I’m practially bouncing up and down in my chair at the thought of the good things that lie ahead. (People around me are going to look at me a bit weird, however, if I don’t settle down and sit still.)

Back in the 1970s, a guy by the name of Richard Bach wrote and published a book called Jonathan Livingston Seagull. For those who never read the book, it’s about a seagull. (Big surprise there.) But unlike just about every other seagull on the planet, Jonathan lives not to eat but to fly. His passion is flying. For other gulls, flying is just a way to get to the next meal spot. For Jonathan, flying is life.

(By now you’re thinking, what the hell does a seagull have to do with wine? Hang on, we’re getting to the point quickly now.)

One day, Jonathan meets another seagull who also yearns to fly for flight’s sake. A guru gull, if you will. He takes Jonathan under his wing (literally) to teach him how to really fly. Jonathan can’t wait to get to high speed aerobatics and pushing the envelope. Jonathan is bummed when his instructor says, “Let’s begin with level flight.”

If you’re reading this, you are probably a budding wine enthusiast. The magic of this beverage has captured your imagination. You’ve dabbled around some, had some wines you’ve really enjoyed, maybe even started building a modest wine collection. Excellent! (Be sure to leave a comment about those good wines–everyone is always happy to hear recommendations.)

But we need to begin with level flight. We need to begin with re-training ourselves in terms of how we perceive wine with our senses. In a way, we need to unlearn some of the things we’ve taught ourselves so that we end up with a tabula rasa (that’s lawyer-speak for “blank slate”).

To do this, we’re going to put the wine away for a while. Yes, you heard me. For two weeks, you will drink no wine whatsoever. You will, however, exercise the senses we use to perceive wine: sight, smell, taste and touch. Not just use them, you’re going to exercise them. No, you won’t have to eat peppers that are rated “volcanic” on the Scoville Scale. But you are going to have to do a little work.

So here is your first assignment: Go find or buy a notebook that you can carry around with you. Moleskine notebooks seem to be very popular with people, but it doesn’t have to be anything fancy. Small size is the only requirement. It doesn’t need to have a lot of pages, just about fifty or so.

Do not, however, spend too much effort on this assignment! The goal here is to get the notebook, not become paralyzed with indecision. Just get the damn notebook. You’re not going to keep it as a wine journal or anything like that. Just get a notebook in your hands.

Here is your second assignment: for the next two weeks, pay attention to some things:

  • Colors. Look at the color of the sky during the day. Is it a light blue, or a deep blue? Look at the color of the grass–kelly green? Forest green? Kentucky blugrass-green? Look at the color of cars–is it firetruck red? Ferrari red? Brick red? Why would you describe a particular red as candy apple red and not some other shade?
  • Smells. Step into a store and notice the aromas in the air. If it’s a hair salon, notice the chemical aromas. If it’s a bakery, notice the smell of baking bread. If it’s a lumber yard, take in the smell of sawn wood. When you encounter an aroma, does it remind you of something else? Pick some fresh fennel and then smell your hands–is that fennel or black licorice? How would you describe the aromas around you so that someone else would understand you?
  • Flavors. Study the flavor of the peanut butter in your sandwich. Yes, it tastes like peanuts, but anything else? Eat a potato chip and an M&M together–how does the saltiness match up with the sweetness? Are there two or more flavors at work, a peanut butter and chocolate sort of thing? (Can you tell I grew up loving Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups?) Try to identify what produces the flavors. If there’s a combination of flavors, try to identify them separately. (I think this is an excellent excuse to go eat a Reese’s.)
  • Textures. Study the way foods and liquids feel in your mouth. Are they slimy? Sharp? Lifeless? Burning? Heavy? Light? What words would you use to describe them?

While you’re doing this sensory study for the next two weeks, every day you should make notes to yourself. Smell the food you’re eating. Is that oregano you smell? Write it down. Can’t quite put your finger on it? Write it down anyway. Describe it somehow, even if it’s just “tangy tomato sauce at Fazzoli’s.” Write down more stuff than you think you should. Describe every meal in terms of its colors, aromas, flavors, and textures.

Go wild, if you want. Use this as an excuse to nibble on things. (Do not, however, do this while shopping at the grocery store. If you do, it is likely that you will be writing notes on how the cold metal handcuffs feel around your wrists. You may also get to make notes on all sorts of interesting smells at your local jail.) Sample flavors and become familiar with them. Write them down–I don’t care if it’s brown sugar on your oatmeal in the morning. WRITE IT DOWN.

Why are you going through all this, ahem, stuff? The answer is simple.

You need to be used to thinking in terms of descriptors–words that you can use to, well, describe things. While I hope that you never, ever have to look at a kelly green wine, being able to describe colors is important. The same goes for those other senses. You write them down so that you force yourself to think about them and translate them into words.

Believe me–it will be easier to describe wines if you’re used to describing other things already. Plus, by abstaining from wine for a couple of weeks, you will “reset” your senses with respect to wine’s particular colors, aromas, tastes and textures. You give yourself a fresh start when it comes to describing a wine. (There’s that tabula rasa idea again.)

The point of this exercise is not to get you to the point where you can write a wine tasting note that rivals Wine Spectator in its multitude of adjectives. The point is to get your brain thinking about these characteristics in a descriptive way and by separating them out.

Now it’s your turn to tell me what to do. Leave a comment with feedback about this article. Think I’m full of, er, barnyard contents? Did I mess up something grammatically? Have a better idea? Leave a comment and let’s talk about it.

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