The Wino's Nose Does not Know

The Wino was certain she’d be a star in the Survey of Wine class she took with her husband a few years ago. After all, she prides herself on her sensitive nose. I mean, The Wino can smell cat pee from 100 feet away and season a pot of stew by simply smelling it. And she was sure that she would have an innate ability to pick out different flavors and scents in wine and that it was going to be her ticket out of her dead end job and set her on the path to fame and fortune in the wine industry. At last, she would be really good at something useful instead of something obscure and vaguely disturbing, such as being able to put her entire fist into her mouth. (Don’t ask.)

So there she was, nose deep in a glass of wine surrounded by other eager wine novices, swirling, smelling, and tasting her little heart out. But while the other students said they smelled chocolate, stone fruit, vanilla, pencil shavings, leather, and blah, blah, blah, all The Wino could smell was, well, wine (and raisins). All the wines smelled different of course, but The Wino could not pinpoint a single scent or flavor. Not one. (Well, except the raisins, but you can’t say you smell “raisins” in a wine class. You will be laughed at. The Wino promises.)

Her dream, while short-lived, was shattered like a cheap Ikea wine glass at keg party.

But The Wino liked to drink and she still liked wine, so she just started drinking the stuff. Lots of it. All different kinds. And she started reading about it. Snippets, really. A wine newsletter here, a blog there, and a barrel of Wikipedia articles. If she liked Viognier, she would find out what flavors she should be tasting. If she liked Zinfandel, she would find out what scents accompany the average Zinfandel. Some of it stuck. Some of it didn’t.

Then one day, she tasted grapefruit. Big, fat, juicy grapefruit. Boozers, it was the very best day. The Wino was sipping a glass of Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc at the Dahlia Lounge with her dear husband and she tasted grapefruit!

So for a whole summer she drank bottles and bottles of different Sauvignon Blancs, tasting the citrus, vegetal, and herbal flavors. (She’s still working on identifying the supposedly present nose of freshly mown grass.) And now she’s pretty good at describing a Sauvignon Blanc’s nose and flavor profile when she has a glass. Other varieties still throw her for a loop. She’s still learning.

Apparently, it's not just The Wino who has struggled with developing a wine nose. The popular Wine Wench blogger, Freda Mooncotch, had a similar inability to identify scents and tastes when she first started drinking wine. When asked to describe what she tasted, she couldn’t. “I couldn’t smell or taste anything. For a long time, I even thought they infused fruit into wine to get those smells.” In her recent, very validating article, Mooncotch describes this experience and provides tips for building a mental wine tasting database of your own.

So it may take a long time to develop your wine nose, fellow boozers. And it looks like it's going to be years before The Wino develops hers. In the meantime, she will have to fall back on her ability to put her whole fist in her mouth as her one talent. But at least she usually has to drink wine in order to be persuaded to do it. So really, they’re kind of related and totally support each other, right?

Judge for yourselves, prudent boozers. Judge for yourselves.