Stop and Smell the Rosés
How to Develop Your Own Sensory Wine Aroma Archive
Our primal sense of smell is more important in becoming acquainted with individual wine grape varietals than our sense of taste. Understanding your sense of smell and learning how to attach wine vocabulary to individual scents is the best way to develop your own sensory wine aroma archive. As you lay down new memories and associations, your wine smelling ability will soar and your wine enjoyment with it.
Learning to smell is unusual for USAmericans because we sanitize our world of most scents. Even roses no longer exude their signature perfume. We live in a binary of extremely scented “deodorizers” such as room sprays, detergents, fabric softeners, candles, and body deodorants, juxtaposed with the desire to Febreeze our worlds to eliminate scents we deem noxious and nefarious. We frantically deodorize everything from our bodies and homes to our cars and places of work. If ever there were a culture that is aroma-phobic, it is the United States.
Marcel Proust wasn’t the first to lament about the power of scent and tied memories, and he surely won’t be the last. Neurologists and neuroscientists have long since proven that scent is the most primal sense and lasting memory is dependent on carving scents and aromas into our brain’s memory files. Using this sense memory approach, I learned to fill in the…
