The best wine question isn’t “what can you smell?”

You take a sip of wine.

Someone asks what you can smell.

And suddenly a perfectly pleasant drink has become a test.

Cherry? Leather? Violets? Wet stone?

You smell it again.

Wine, mainly.

This is one of the quickest ways to make people think they are bad at wine.

They are not.

The problem is that we have confused noticing something with being able to name it.

Those are not the same skill.

Your nose is doing more than you think

Smell is fundamental to what we experience as flavour.

Some aroma reaches us when we sniff the glass. More reaches the nose from the back of the mouth as we drink, a process called retronasal olfaction.

So this is not an argument for ignoring aroma. It is an argument for enjoying it without immediately demanding a vocabulary test.

You can experience a smell very clearly and still struggle to find the word for it.

Research on wine expertise makes this particularly interesting.

Experts can become better at recognising and remembering wine-related smells. But studies do not support the simple idea that expertise is just a dramatically more sensitive nose.

Naming is its own skill. Wine experts tend to become more consistent and specific in the language they use because they have spent a lot of time learning both the sensations and the words attached to them.

That does not mean the novice cannot smell what is there.

It means the expert has practised translating the sensation.

Imagine doing this with music

Play someone a piece of music they have never heard.

They might immediately say, “I like this. It feels melancholy. It is quite sparse. That bit feels tense.”

They may not be able to tell you the key, chord progression, time signature or exact instrument producing a sound.

Nobody concludes that they failed to hear the music.

Wine is oddly less forgiving.

We have created a culture in which identifying blackberry can seem more impressive than saying, “I like how fresh this feels.”

But if your aim is to understand what you enjoy drinking, the second observation may be far more useful.

Start with what the wine does

Instead of immediately asking “What can I smell?”, take a sip and ask: does this feel fresh or soft? Light or substantial? Smooth or drying? Bright or heavy? Does it make my mouth water? Does anything feel too much?

These are not inferior beginner questions. They are information.

Acidity contributes sourness and freshness. Tannins can create the drying, gripping sensation you notice particularly in many red wines. Alcohol, sugar and other components influence the weight and feel of a wine.

You do not need to know the chemistry to notice the result.

If you keep saying, “I like reds, but not when they dry my mouth out”, you have learnt something useful.

If you realise, “I keep preferring whites that feel really fresh”, you have learnt something useful.

These observations can help you choose another bottle.

Correctly identifying gooseberry might not.

Then ask the simplest question of all

Do I want another sip?

It sounds almost too obvious.

But wine culture can make us forget that pleasure is part of the exercise.

You can recognise that a wine is complex, unusual or technically impressive and still not particularly want to drink it.

You can also love a wine without being able to produce a sophisticated explanation for why.

“Do I want another sip?” is not a complete tasting system. It will not tell you what the wine is, how it was made or whether someone else would consider it exceptional.

It tells you something more immediately relevant: do I enjoy this?

Then work backwards. What might be making you enjoy it? The freshness? The weight? The lack of sweetness? The texture? The fruit? The savoury character?

Now tasting starts to become useful rather than performative.

Aroma words become useful when they do a job

Once you start recognising patterns, aroma descriptions can be brilliant shorthand.

Perhaps you realise that the whites you love often remind you of citrus rather than tropical fruit. Perhaps you repeatedly enjoy earthy, savoury reds more than obviously fruity ones. Perhaps vanilla is the thing that keeps bothering you in heavily oaked wine.

Now those words are helping you recognise your taste.

That is very different from searching desperately for a peach because somebody told you there ought to be one.

Wine descriptions work best when they help you remember, compare and choose.

Not when they become a scavenger hunt.

You are allowed to disagree

Two people can smell the same wine and reach for different words.

Human flavour perception is not a barcode scanner. Experience, memory, attention and language all play a role in how we recognise and describe aromas.

One person says cherry. Another says raspberry. A third says red fruit. Someone else just thinks it smells good.

The useful question is not necessarily, “Who got it right?”

It is, “Did the description help them understand what they were experiencing?”

Wine vocabulary should make perception easier to communicate. It should not become a marking scheme.

Try this next time

Pour a wine you have never tried. Do not look up the tasting note first.

Smell it if you want to, but do not force yourself to name anything.

Take a sip.

Ask: do I like it? How does it feel? What stands out? Is anything bothering me? Do I want another sip?

Only then see whether any flavours or smells come naturally.

Maybe you get lemon. Maybe cherries. Maybe smoke. Maybe nothing specific at all.

That is fine.

You have already done the more important bit. You paid attention.

The point of tasting

Learning more about wine can sharpen what you notice. That is worthwhile.

But the aim is not to become better at producing impressive nouns.

It is to understand your own reactions well enough that the next bottle becomes easier to choose.

Start with the experience. The vocabulary can catch up later.

And if all you can say about a glass is, “I really want another sip of that”, you have still learnt something useful.

Sources

• Wendy V. Parr, David Heatherbell and K. Geoffrey White, “Demystifying Wine Expertise”, Chemical Senses, 2002.
• Ilja Croijmans et al., “Not All Flavor Expertise Is Equal: The Language of Wine and Coffee Experts”, PLOS ONE, 2016.
• Ilja Croijmans et al., “Wine experts’ recognition of wine odors is not verbally mediated”, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2021.
• Erin M. Goldberg et al., “Factors affecting the ortho- and retronasal perception of flavors: A review”, Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition 58(6), 2018: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27646486/
• UC Davis Waterhouse Lab, “Tannin”: https://waterhouse.ucdavis.edu/whats-in-wine/tannin
• UC Davis Waterhouse Lab, “Fixed Acidity”: https://waterhouse.ucdavis.edu/whats-in-wine/fixed-acidity