Passing the sniff test: when you ferment grapes you get wine and a whole world of scents. Molecules and mysteries lurk behind those aromas and sensory pleasures.

Wet Dogs and Wine

“Popcorn, pencil shavings, burnt rubber, Noxzema, Band-Aids, rubber bands, dust, peanut butter Captain Crunch, strawberry Chiclets, wet fall leaves.”

Those are a few of the scents in wines mentioned by Chris Miller, a director of the Sommelier Society of America and a wine writer and consultant, in an e-mail response to a recent column I wrote asking why we can smell so many things in a wine—but almost never smell grapes. “The aromas of other fruits we smell in wine actually are molecularly the same as those fruits, as the fermentation process has re-aligned the molecular matter of the wine,” he explains.

This information provides a scientific explanation to something we all sense but usually cannot explain. If I am reading Mr. Miller correctly, when we smell, for example, citrus in a white wine, or currents or cherries in a red wine, the fruit aromas actually derive from molecules that match those in citrus or currents or cherries. So when you smell a forest floor or a tropical fruit, it’s not your imagination. This is quite an interesting thought, one that lends credibility to the idea of sniffing and sampling and making the associations we use to describe wine. And I think the more exact we are in identifying the characteristics of a wine, the more pleasure we will find in drinking the wine.

Mr. Miller goes on to say, “The best advice I could give someone trying to improve their tasting (really smelling) ability for wine is to think out of the box. For instance: I have smelled Sauvignon Blancs from Friuli that remind me of sweat or even a wet dog. Odd I know.”

So if an expert like Mr. Miller smells wet dog, it means that anything you or your wine drinking buddies detect, no matter how silly it may seem at first, is real. It also means there is no one correct answer to the sniff test. Everything we perceive is valid.

“In general, taste is mainly a function of smell. Humans have the ability to detect about 10,000 different odors—out of an estimated 100,000 that exist in nature,” Mr. Miller points out. “The average person can be trained to distinguish up to 1,000 different odors...and wines only contain about 200 different ‘odorous compounds’ (this will probably be revised up with more research).”

“The main problem in recognizing those 200 ‘odorous compounds’ is getting the information from our nasal passages to our brain and then getting our brain to do more than ‘ooh, I recognize that smell’”.

His message is simple: pay attention to what you’re smelling and tasting. You don’t need any special knowledge, and you certainly don’t need to know about vintages or specific wineries. It’s useful, I think, to know the general characteristics of the most common grapes, and then let your nose be your guide.

His comments also make me realize how remarkable the wine grape is. When you ferment apples, you get cider, and it smell like, well, apples. When you ferment grapes, you get wine, and you open a whole world of sensory pleasures.