by Sandy Hemphill

Created on: July 22, 2008

There is absolutely no better path to understanding the wine aromatics other than to simply stick your nose into the glass and smell your wine. It's as simple as that!

Our mouths experience only four taste sensations - sweet, sour, bitter, and acid - and they all occupy separate areas of the tongue and mouth, with just a few straggling taste buds overlapping here and there. All the flavors that we love are a blend of these four flavor sensations. There is also the Japanese concept of umami, a perfect balance of all four flavor components that is often described as the fifth flavor but the debate over flavor versus concept remains unresolved in most cuisines of the world.

Whether you follow the four-flavor or the five-flavor camp, that's still a very limited number of flavor factors to attribute to your grandmother's lasagna, your favorite kung pao chicken, a perfectly aged blue cheese, or the smell of bacon sizzling and coffee brewing over a outdoor camp stove in that marvelous moment just before the sun rises. Or a freshly opened bottle of rich, boldly fragrant burgundy wine.

Our remarkable noses, on the other hand, put our taste buds to shame. Our wonderful noses contain more than 10 million scent receptors that allow our brains to identify more than 10,000 individual aromas. Freshly baked bread tastes fantastic, especially when slathered with a generous dollop of warm sweet butter gently oozing into every divine crevice but it's the spell-binding aroma of the baking of the bread that makes most people absolutely swoon.

Many experts of sensory perception say that it's when you smell your wine that about 80% of the tasting experience comes into play. This situation is quite easy to understand, since we all know that during times when the sense of smell is impaired, like during our own colds or bouts of hay fever, we don't often seem to have much of an appetite. When our noses are so distressed that we simply can't smell, we can't taste much of anything either. Without the aromas, there just isn't any awareness of flavors, either.

Understanding the wine aromatics adds a dimension to the experience that is beyond the depth of all the other senses combined. Understanding the wine aromatics is a fascinating exploration of the wonderful world of wines even though some of the descriptions seem daunting, puzzling, and even pretty far fetched sometimes. Never let it intimidate.

There are no hard and fast rules as to what aromas are found in what bottle. Wines change too

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