Wine Tasting: Nose
The next step in the tasting process is to smell the wine. Swirl the glass around to release as many flavour molecules as possible and then take a deep sniff. You can learn how to do this by watching the red wine and white wine tasting tutorial videos.
Smelling the wine is important as it will enable you to assess the following:
Condition of the wine
You will be able to smell whether there is a fault with the wine, the most common being cork taint. This can range from a wine which is slightly tainted and has lost its fresh, fruity aromas to a pungent musty or unpleasant damp smell in a badly affected wine.
Oxidation can also be detected on the nose with toffee, caramel or burnt aromas. However, this does not always indicate a fault as some wines, such as Sherry undergo deliberate oxidation during production.
Intensity of aromas
When smelling the wine, you will need to decide how intense the aromas are. Some wines have aromas which are light, subtle and sometimes fairly hard to detect. At the other end of the scale, there are wines which are extremely intense with particularly pronounced, and easier to detect, aromas.
Aroma characteristics
This is perhaps the most subjective part of wine tasting as it will depend on the aromas you already know and can recognise. Some aromas are easy to detect, such as vanilla, butter, blackcurrants and red fruits. Others are more difficult to identify but you will become more familiar with these once you gain more tasting practice. For the benefit of anyone who has not tasted the wine, it is important to remember to be clear and as precise as possible when describing the aromas.
Use the list of aroma and flavour characteristics included on the WSET SAT (PDF, 165KB) to help familiarise yourself with some of the recommended aroma descriptors.