Friday, June 18
7:00 – 8:00 pm
Wine Aroma Sampling: Training Your Nose
With Linda McEneany Colvin
Why do aromas matter? From a winemaker’s point of view, aromas are key to the essence of the wine. Aromas are of course accompanied by flavors, though they don’t always align.
Linda McEneany Colvin ’71 leads a fun and interactive online introduction to training your nose and developing a vocabulary for what you sense.
The variety of aromas offered by a glass of wine (even other beverages) is vast and often defies description. Alcohol is not required for these aromas to be present, although the fermentation process helps create the compounds we so readily detect (esters). We often simply don’t have the vocabulary to name what we detect, or we don’t recognize familiar aromas in the complex setting a glass of wine presents. But with some guidance and the isolation of one aroma at a time, we can learn to define and describe aromas once we get back to the complexity of a good wine.
How to prepare for this virtual program
This experience is an opportunity to create for yourselves a set of standards that contain only one aroma at a time in a base of an inexpensive red and/or white wine, or even a nonalcoholic beverage.
I will provide you ahead of time with instructions on how to prepare your standards using commonly obtained substances, usually kitchen flavors, although there may be some items you have to purchase if you don’t have them on hand. While our instruction and conversations will be conducted virtually (and with great enthusiasm, I am sure!) and we will all have the “same” standards, you will experience the aromas personally and individually with your own standards.
Training your nose consists of having a set of named standards to first experience and then compare to. Developing the vocabulary that describes what you experience then will allow you to explore and describe the beverage. You can even detect flaws if we set up standards that contain substances reflecting those flaws. To help us find the words, we will use a tool invented by Ann Noble in the ’80s called the Wine Aroma Wheel. It will be among the resources I will forward to you if you choose to participate. It was the combination of linking wine flavors with food flavors – pairing – that brought husband Steve Colvin and me to the point of planting a vineyard and crafting the resulting wines. And ironically, it was several professors from Washington State University who introduced to us the fun of wine with food while we were completing our Master’s in Chemistry.
Esther Bricques Winery and Vineyard came about very gradually while Steve and I were teaching high school science and math. Now that we are retired from teaching, the vineyard and winery have taken the forefront. Winemaking is a perfect blend of science and art; I have continued to train through WSU in both the winery and the vineyard.