Smelling Your Wine, an Intro

There's lots of info on wine aromas on the Internet and it can get kind of complicated. Let's keep it simple with an overview to help you figure out what you're smelling.

Aroma and Bouquet

This is how wine smells are grouped at the highest level. Simply, aromas come from the grapes. Bouquet is defined as anything coming from fermentation and later. That is, the winemaking process and aging. It isn't necessary to worry about what is an aroma vs. bouquet. Many people refer to anything from the wine as an aroma.

Here are some common descriptors, but this isn't anywhere near a full list.

Aromas

They fall into categories like herbal, floral or fruity. Within fruity you might find apricot, citrus, strawberry or green apple, for instance.Wines will have different aromas depending on the grape variety, whether they're grown in a cooler vs. warmer location, and even in what soil they were grown.

Bouquet from winemaking

From barrels you can get a sweetness, like vanilla and caramel, or nuttiness, such as hazelnut. Toasty and woody are other descriptors that that can be more of a flaw than something you want unless they're very subtle.

Bottle bouquet from aging

White whites wines you often terms like nuttiness or honey. With reds mushroom, earthy, leather, and dried fruit.

Deciding what you're smelling

Keep it simple. Fruit smells. Red fruit, maybe black fruit, plums, citrus? An herbal component? Floral? Others. Are there lots of different components (complex) or one overriding smell (simpler, maybe out of balance)?

The Aroma Wheel

There is something called the Wine Aroma Wheel that breaks these down nicely into many categories. It can be a nice reference to use while you have a glass of wine in your hand. The Aroma Wheel is copyrighted, but you can find images of it with a Google search.