The ability to smell and untangle the complex aromas of wine can be extremely difficult. Understanding and recognizing various aromas take time and practice to acquire, even for a self acclaimed foodie or culinary professional. However, once you are able to understand a wine’s profile the description of a wine becomes a reality!

Getting Started

Beginning to learn wine tasting requires time and effort, but the end result is rewarding and very fun. The more fine-tuned your sensory abilities, the better you’ll be able to understand and enjoy the details and flavours of a great wine. We recommend a Wine Essence Aroma kit to help get you started.

The Benefits of a Wine Tasting Kit

The Oenotravel Wine Essence Teaching Kit

A comprehensive kit will help you identify the aromas and tastes of wine to help be on your way to being a true connoisseur. An aroma kit comes with a variety of wine aromas, an aroma guide, appellations and regional maps for where wines are produced. The complete kit will help you to develop extensive background knowledge on wine regions and vocabulary, but most importantly will help guide your understanding of wine aromas and isolating flavours.

If we hold our nose and sip a mouthful of wine, the majority of the flavour is muted. This means the key to your palate is your nose. Often when smelling a wine we can recognize a flavour or smell, but we may not be able to pinpoint it exactly. Since the Wine Aroma kit comes with bottled fragrances often found in wine you are able to train your nose in identifying a flavour. Once you feel comfortable with the smells, you can test your knowledge by smelling the fragrances “blind” to further develop your palate.

By being able to better recognize the scents in a wine we are able to develop a flavour profile. This is essential when pairing wines with foods.

How to Taste Wine

1. You need to be methodical and focused when developing an approach that works for you- and stick to the one that works!
2. Make it a habit to take a minute and focus your attention to a glass of wine when you have one.
3. Take away all distractions and focus on the wine’s characteristics, scents, and flavours.

Why Learn Differences in Wine Flavours?

It is important for both foodies and professionals in the Food and Beverage Industry to have an understanding of a wine’s profile. With a good background knowledge of wine, we are able to more accurately describe and communicate a wine’s profile to customers or to pair a wine with food.

The Oenotravel Wine Essence Teaching Kit featured in this Blog Post is available on our website in Canada & USA.