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 much over the course of their lifetimes. That's one of the beauties of the beverage. The aromatic differences from one varietal to the next is enough to keep most of us quite busy swirling and sniffing. And then there are the differences of vintage, vineyard, vintner, and a thousand other vexing details that influence the entire tasting experience. Why, even the shape of the wine glass influences the aromas of the wine it holds.
Entire classes and seminar agendas have been developed to help us in our mission of understanding the wine aromatics. There are charts, exercises, and cheat sheets galore but all of them, combined, only tap the surface of the subject.
Certainly the most pleasant way, and probably the very most effective way, too, is to quite simply smell your wine. Smell it deeply. Smell it often. Smell it the instant the cork pops off. Breathe deeply as the aromas come wafting out of the bottle. Pour a bit into a wine glass and smell it as it sits idle on the table. Swirl the wine gently and smell your wine again. Refresh and enliven your aromatic memories with each glass poured, since the first glass will undoubtedly impart aromas different than the last glass poured, even when pouring from the same bottle. Soon you'll see that it smells different at every stage of the game.
As you learn more about wines in general and aromas in specific, you'll surely feel compelled to learn more about this exciting elixir. As your base of knowledge grows, so will you ability to detect more aromas, from the simple to the extremely complex. This knowledge will increase the pleasure to be derived from the quest of understanding the wine aromatics.