4 Techniques to help you smell wine (without being a pro)

It smells like red wine. That was all I could smell the very first time I did a wine tasting with a bunch of wine professionals. They were all shouting out aromas. I could not for the life of me spot a single aroma. Finding aromas in wine is extremely difficult. It takes some training. It takes developing your sense of smell. I'm going to talk about that in just a minute. But it also takes practicing finding those aromas in wine because obviously in wine they don't come isolated. They come blended with a bunch of other aromas. So it's difficult. What I'm going to show you in this video is four approaches for you to find aromas in wine very quickly. Four approaches that you can start doing the next time you taste wine and that are going to reveal quite a bit about the wine that you're tasting or drinking. Now, why do we try and spot aromas in a wine? Basically, when you go out and you see a beautiful landscape or you see a beautiful building, seeing as your eyesight is very developed, our memories of sight are pretty good. We are good at remembering what that's going to be like and being able to describe it. And if you're talented enough, probably repaint it once you're not in front of that landscape anymore and you've reached home and you want to recreate it. You're able to do so because your memory of sight is quite good. Now, remembering a wine is a lot more difficult. Most of it is going to be around our sense of smell isn't very developed. So how can you approach this? There are four different approaches that I'm going to teach you to really look into a wine. Maybe you're not going to be able to spot those single aromas. We're going to talk about that in a minute. But there are other things you can do. Firstly, you're going to look at the families of aromas. So maybe you can't spot strawberry or blackcurrant, but what you can do is smell, hmm, it's fruity, it's a bit floral, or it has a nose of, it's a bit gamey, or there are a few burnt notes, can't really describe it, but kind of something burnt or that kind of thing. Finding aroma families is much easier to do. Now, there are lots of aromas that you can find in wine and thankfully they've all been arranged in families. If you download our aromas of wine sheet or you have one of those aroma wheels or aroma sheets from tasting events or you found on the internet, you're going to see that aromas are broken down into families. Find out what families you can find in the wine and it's going to reveal a few things about the wine. Firstly, if we are on fruity and floral, so flowers and fruit dominant, we're in front of a younger wine. If on the other hand, we don't have too many of those notes and we're going towards more dried, so if we're going to dried fruit, dried nuts, this is going to tell us that it's a wine that's aged. This is how the wine's aromas develop with age. If we're on the freshness, imagine summery kind of smells, then we're on a young wine. If we're later, the kind of Christmas pudding kind of smell, dried fruit, if we've got hazelnut, almond, honey, those are going to be notes that the wine is aged. If you smell them, it's going to tell you that the wine is aged. Number one, try and spot families. Number two, once you've got those families, say you're in front of a younger wine, this is easier to do with a younger wine, wines that are on a floral and fruity dominant. The main aromas are going to be fruit and flowers. What we're going to try and understand is, are we more on the freshness of the fruit or are we more on a really ripe fruit? This is going to tell us about the climate the wine comes from. If we're on that apple and it's the crunchy apple, the zingy apple, or the fruit that you could bite, an explosion of freshness, we're on cooler climate wines. While on the other hand, if we're on the super ripe, imagine a mango that's super ripe, or peach that's super ripe, or a raspberry jam, or a blackcurrant jam, then we're in front of a wine from a warmer climate. From that, if we're on fruity dominant, let's try and pick out from a warm climate or cool climate, and this is how you go about it. Thirdly, are there a lot of aromas or are there just a few aromas? Do you feel when you're smelling the wine that there's a lot happening there, that you've got fruit, you've got a game, you've got floral, you've got lots of different aromas, or does it feel like an explosion of blackcurrant, and that's all you can see, or an explosion of just black fruit, you know, that kind of very simple nose. That is going to tell you about the complexity of the wine, and in turn, it's going to tell you about the quality of the wine. The more complex the wine is, the better the wine is, because there's more happening. A little technique you can use to see that clearer is to leave the wine out so you smell it. Imagine taking a snapshot, a photography of that smell, and you're going to drink the wine or you're going to leave the wine aside. You're going to come back to it five minutes later, and again, you're going to smell your wine. Has the nose developed or is it the same? Is it the same bunch of aromas? Does it smell exactly the same, or has it developed? If it has developed, it's most probably a wine that has some complexity, and you're in front of a quality wine. So that's number three. Number four is to use the first nose. Now, too many people overlook the first nose. So what's the first nose? First nose is you're being served wine. It goes into your glass, so you look at it, and before you start swirling your glass to open up the aromas, you smell the wine without swirling it. Remember, smell the wine. That's the first nose. Photographic memory of that smell. Then we swirl the wine. You can put it on a flat surface, on a table, and swirl it, which is easier, or you can do it in your hand, holding the stem or holding the foot, and you smell the wine again. And what that is going to tell you is where in its lifespan the wine is. What do I mean by that? So a wine has a potential for so many years of life. So looking at it from your side, it's going to come out, it's in a bottle, it's going to improve, and then it's going to be at its peak. That's when it's drinking at its best, and then it's going to start declining, and then it's going to die. So that curve can be one year for wines that are unexciting, or even six months, it's going to go like that. Or for quality wines, that curve is going to be high, and it's going to be long. So to understand where you are, we remember, first nose without swirling, second nose you've swirled. Now if your second nose is more intense, so if it's more coming out of the glass than the first nose, you're on the upward direction of the curve. So the wine is improving, second nose is more intense than the first nose. Now, second possibility is that nose number one and nose number two are equal. If this is the case, it means that your wine is at its peak. And then lastly, a wine that's declining is when you open it, smell it, and then you swirl it, and the aroma feels like it's fading away. That is a wine that's on a downward direction of the curve, it's declining in quality, and you should drink it quickly. So there you are, four techniques that you can use, even if you can't spot singular aromas. Now, I told you about how I'm going to tell you about a technique for you to improve your sense of smell, and that's simply to smell things again and again. So you can do that, as I always say, going to the supermarket, fruit mongers, smelling things, florists, etc., or by getting a training kit. But I do insist, do that, because it's going to really boost your understanding of wine and what you get out of it, and it's going to help you very quickly find those particular aromas, spot the black currants, spot the violet in a wine. And I do mean very quickly, we've got our own at Intervino, we've got a training kit that's our own, that's very much on the fun, enjoyment side of wine, but there are many out there, so I do recommend that you go out there and you develop your sense of smell, because it's going to bring out a lot for the aromas. But before you do that, you've already got four things that you can go and do when you're tasting wine, four approaches, four techniques that are going to reveal a lot about the wine already. I hope you enjoy those, leave comments, questions in the comments section below. I look forward to seeing you in the next video, and until then, Santé!