Where Wine's Smells Come From

Last time you finished the palate. You can now name all six parts of structure: sweetness, acidity, tannin, alcohol, body and finish. That tells you how a wine feels. This lesson is about what a wine smells like, and why. Then it puts the two together, so you can judge how good a wine is and write it down in a few short lines.

Here is the idea the whole lesson rests on. Every smell in a glass has a source you can name. Some smells come from the grape. Some come from what happened in the winery. Some come from time. If you can say which source a smell came from, you are no longer just saying "I like it." You are describing the wine, and you are starting to explain how it was made.

Wine people sort these sources into three groups. Primary aromas come from the grape. Secondary aromas come from fermentation and the winemaker's choices. Tertiary aromas come from aging. Lesson one only gave you those names. Now you get what is inside each one.

Three sources for every smell

Start with the grape. A grape is not just sugar and water. Its skin and pulp hold aroma compounds, which are small molecules light enough to drift up out of the glass and into your nose. Which compounds a grape has depends on its variety, the climate it grew in, and how ripe it got before picking. These grape smells are the primary aromas. They show up as fruit, flowers, herbs and green notes.

A few families of compounds do most of this work, and their names are worth knowing because each points to a different kind of smell.

Terpenes give floral and citrus smells. Think rose petal, orange blossom and lychee. A grape rich in terpenes smells perfumed, almost like a flower shop, even before anything else happens to it.

Thiols give sharp tropical smells. Passion fruit and grapefruit are the classic ones, along with a green, leafy smell tasters call boxwood. Thiols are strong. A tiny amount fills a glass.

Pyrazines give green, vegetable smells. Green bell pepper is the textbook example, along with cut grass and asparagus. Pyrazines are highest in grapes that are not fully ripe, and they fade as a grape ripens in the sun. So a strong green pepper smell often tells you something about ripeness and climate, not just about the variety.

Then there is plain fruit: apple, pear, cherry, raspberry, plum. Much of this comes from the grape too. But one group of fruity compounds is worth a careful word. These are esters. Esters form when an acid and an alcohol join together. In wine, most esters are made by the yeast during fermentation. They give fresh fruit smells like banana, green apple and the candy smell people call pear drop. So esters smell like fruit, but they are made in the fermenting tank. That makes them a link between the first two groups. A wine that smells bursting with fresh, bright, almost candied fruit is often showing the grape and the yeast at the same time. For sorting, you can keep it simple: fresh fruit belongs to the young, primary side of the wine, and when it smells like banana or candy, think of the yeast.

Now the second group. Secondary aromas come from fermentation and from the choices a winemaker makes. Each choice leaves its own trail.

The first trail is yeast and bread. After fermentation, dead yeast cells sink to the bottom of the tank or barrel. You met these in lesson three. They are the lees. When a wine rests on its lees, it picks up smells like bread dough, biscuit and toast from a bakery. If a white wine smells a little like fresh bread, the lees are a good guess.

The second trail is butter. You already know malolactic conversion from lesson two, where bacteria turn sharp malic acid into softer lactic acid. That same step makes a compound called diacetyl. Diacetyl smells of butter, cream and butterscotch. It is the same compound that gives some movie popcorn its buttery smell. Ricochet's 2023 Pinot blanc went through full malolactic conversion, so that wine is the kind where a taster might look for a creamy note. When you smell butter in a white wine, think of those bacteria.

The third trail is oak. Barrels are made of wood, and wood gives up its own compounds into the wine. One is vanillin, the same compound that gives vanilla its smell. Others, called oak lactones, give smells of coconut and wood. Barrel makers also toast the inside of a barrel over a fire. That toasting adds smells of toast, smoke and sweet spices like clove and cinnamon. New barrels give the most. A barrel used for a few years has given most of its flavor away, and winemakers call it neutral. So the amount of oak smell is a choice: how much new wood, and for how long.

The fourth trail is whole clusters. Lesson three explained that some winemakers ferment grapes with their stems still on, called whole clusters. Stems add more than tannin. Ripe stems can add a lift to the smell, with floral notes like violet and dried rose, plus black tea, dried herbs and cracked pepper or exotic spice. Stems that are not ripe enough can add harsh green smells instead, the pyrazine kind. So whole clusters are a bet on the stems being ready.

Now the third group. Tertiary aromas come from aging. That can happen in the bottle over years, or slowly in a barrel over a long time.

The main force here is oxygen, working slowly. A sealed bottle still holds a little oxygen, and a barrel lets a tiny amount through its wood. Over time, that oxygen and the wine's own chemistry change the aroma compounds. The bright fresh fruit fades. In its place comes something that smells cooked or dried. Fresh cherry becomes dried cherry. Plum becomes prune. Grapes become raisins and figs.

Next to that dried fruit, new savory smells appear. In red wines these are leather, tobacco, damp earth, mushroom and the smell of a forest floor after rain, with its wet leaves. In white wines aging brings honey and roasted nuts, and in some grapes a smell like petrol. None of these were in the grape or the tank. Time made them.

Fast oxygen is a different story. Too much air, too quickly, ruins a wine rather than aging it. That is a fault, and faults are the next lesson. Here, think slow and steady.

So now you have three groups. You need a quick way to sort them in a real glass. Here is one test, built on three questions.

Does it smell of fresh fruit, flowers or green things? That points to the grape.

Does it smell of toast, vanilla, spice, butter or bread? That points to the winery, and toast most of all points to the barrel.

Does it smell of dried fruit, earth, mushroom, leather, nuts or honey? That points to age.

Walk through it with a made-up glass. Say yours smells of fresh raspberry, a little vanilla and a hint of clove. The raspberry is fresh, so it is primary. Vanilla and clove point to oak, so they are secondary. Nothing smells dried or earthy, so there is little tertiary. You have just learned three things without being told: the grape gave red fruit, the winemaker used some oak, and the wine is still young.

Now say a different glass smells of dried cherry, mushroom and a little cedar. Dried cherry and mushroom point to age. Cedar is a wood smell, so oak is in there too. This wine has spent years changing. The test works because each group has a clear home.

It will not always be clean. Some smells sit on a line, like the esters that smell of fruit but come from yeast. That is fine. The goal is not a perfect score. The goal is to ask "where did this come from?" every time you smell something.

That brings us to quality. Once you can describe a wine, you can start to judge it. Tasters use four measures, and you already know two of them.

Balance came up in lessons two and three. A balanced wine has no part that sticks out. Acid, sugar, tannin, alcohol and fruit all sit in proportion. A wine that burns with alcohol, or tastes thin and sour, or dries your mouth so hard the fruit disappears, is out of balance.

Length came up in lesson three. It is how many seconds the pleasant flavor lasts after you swallow or spit. Remember the condition: only pleasant flavor counts. A lingering burn or bitterness does not.

The two new measures are intensity and complexity.

Intensity is how clear and strong the aromas and flavors are. Some wines leap out of the glass. Others make you hunt. A faint wine is not always bad, but more intensity, with clear and defined flavors, usually counts in a wine's favor. The test is simple: how close do you have to put your nose before you smell something?

Complexity is how many different kinds of smell the wine has. This is where today's three groups pay off. A wine with only fresh fruit is simple. A wine with fruit, plus some spice from oak, plus a little earth from age, has layers from more than one source. Complexity is really a count of how many sources you can find, and how many smells within each.

Tasters often use these four as a rough scale. A wine that shows all four, balance, length, intensity and complexity, is outstanding. Three of the four makes it very good. Two makes it good. One makes it acceptable. A faulty wine scores nothing at all. This is not a law of nature. It is a tool that keeps your judgment honest, because it makes you give reasons.

Now you can write a tasting note. A short note follows the same order every time, and the order matches the way you tasted.

First, appearance. Clarity, how deep the color is, and its hue. You learned this in lesson one.

Second, the nose. How intense the smell is, the aromas sorted into their groups, and how far along the wine seems. Tasters call a wine youthful when it is all fresh fruit, developing when some aged notes are showing, and fully developed when the aged notes lead.

Third, the palate. The structure from lessons two and three: sweetness, acidity, tannin, alcohol, body, and the length of the finish, plus the flavors you find in your mouth.

Fourth, the conclusion. Your quality verdict, built on the four measures, and whether the wine is ready to drink now or could age.

Here is what a note might look like. Say yours is a young red. Say yours shows a clear, pale ruby color. Say the nose is medium in intensity, with fresh red cherry and raspberry from the grape, and a little vanilla and clove from oak, and no aged notes yet, so it is youthful. Say the palate is dry, with high acidity, medium tannin that feels fine and smooth, medium alcohol, light to medium body, and a finish of about eight seconds. Then the conclusion: it is balanced, the length is fair, the intensity is moderate, and it has two layers, fruit and oak. You might call that good to very good, ready to drink now, with room to age a few years.

Notice that this note never says "I love it." It describes the wine, and every word has a reason behind it. Someone else could read it and know what to expect in the glass.

If you want to try this, here is an optional exercise with ordinary bottles. You can follow everything in this course without drinking a drop, and if you do taste, small pours and spitting are normal practice.

Pour an unoaked white, such as a stainless steel Sauvignon blanc or a basic Pinot grigio, next to an oaked Chardonnay. Smell the unoaked one first. You should find mostly fresh fruit and maybe green notes. Then smell the Chardonnay and look for vanilla, toast, or butter. That difference is the barrel, and maybe malolactic conversion.

Then pour a young red next to an older one, perhaps a red at least eight or ten years old. Look for fresh fruit in the young one and dried fruit, earth or leather in the older one. That difference is time. Write a four-part note for each.

Whole clusters and oak in Holmes Gap

Ricochet, the show's home winery in McMinnville, gives a good real case of secondary aromas in the making. You met its 2022 Holmes Gap Pinot noir in lesson three, when the subject was tannin. Today the same wine shows the other half of those choices: what they do to the smell.

First, a quick reminder of how this wine came to be. Ricochet owns no vineyards. It buys grapes from growers it names. For this wine, the grapes came from Holmes Gap Vineyard in the Van Duzer Corridor, and they were all one clone of Pinot noir, called Pommard. A small winery like this works by building relationships with growers, agreeing to buy their fruit, and then making decisions in the cellar once the grapes arrive. That cellar is where the secondary aromas are set.

Ricochet's technical sheet for this wine lists three choices worth noticing. About 30 percent of the grapes went in as whole clusters. Fermentation used native yeast, meaning the yeast that came in on the grapes and lived in the cellar, not a packet of yeast bought for the job. And the wine spent eleven months in French oak, with a quarter of those barrels new.

Take the whole clusters first. Nearly a third of the fruit went into the tank with its stems. As you heard earlier, ripe stems tend to bring lift, floral notes like violet and dried rose, black tea, dried herbs and a peppery spice. So a taster smelling a Pinot noir made this way would know to look for those notes, sitting next to the grape's own red fruit. The risk is also part of the decision. If the stems had not been ripe, they could have added green, harsh smells. Choosing 30 percent instead of all whole clusters keeps the stems as one part of the wine rather than the whole voice.

Now the oak. Eleven months is a fair amount of time in barrel. But only a quarter of the barrels were new, and new barrels give most of the oak smell. Three quarters were older, closer to neutral. Partly new French oak like this tends to give vanilla, baking spices like clove and cinnamon, toast and cedar, while still letting the grape's fruit come through. That is the point of a quarter-new choice. The oak frames the fruit instead of covering it.

Put the two choices together and you can predict the sorting. The primary layer would be the red fruit of Pinot noir. The secondary layer would come in two strands: floral, tea and pepper notes from the stems, and vanilla, spice and toast from the new wood. A young bottle would have little tertiary character yet. Over time in bottle, dried fruit and earth could join in.

This is what it means to read a wine's smell back to the cellar. You do not need to be told how it was made. The smells point to the choices.

The wine has also drawn critical notice. The magazine Decanter scored the 2022 Holmes Gap Pinot noir 94 points. That is Decanter's judgment, and it sits next to the same magazine's 95 points for Ricochet's 2022 Eola Springs Pinot noir, a wine Ricochet fermented with whole clusters and some new oak as well.

How Willamette Pinot noir changes with age

Holmes Gap is one Pinot noir from one spot in the valley. It helps to know the path Willamette Valley Pinot noir usually takes as a group, because then you can place any bottle on it.

Young, it tends to show fresh red fruit, and sometimes darker fruit too. The common words are red cherry, Bing cherry, cranberry, raspberry and black plum. You often find flowers as well, like rose petal and hibiscus, and sometimes a light sweet note of herbs or cola. In today's groups, nearly all of that is primary. It is the grape talking.

When winemakers use oak, the secondary layer joins in, with the vanilla, clove, cinnamon, toast and cedar you heard about with Holmes Gap. When they use whole clusters, the stems add their tea, pepper and floral lift.

With age, the fruit steps back. Fresh cherry turns to dried cherry. In its place comes the savory side: damp earth, forest floor, fresh and dried mushroom, sometimes truffle, along with cedar and leather. This is the tertiary layer, made by slow oxygen and time.

That earthy, forest floor side fits the place. The valley has a cool climate, which you learned about in lesson one. Cool weather lets grapes ripen slowly and hold their acidity. Acidity helps a wine keep fresh as it ages, so the fruit can fade gently while the earth and mushroom notes grow, rather than the whole wine going flat. A young valley Pinot noir and an old one can smell almost like different wines. Now you know why. The grape spoke first, the winery added its voice, and time wrote the rest.

So here is something to do with this lesson. Book a visit to Ricochet in McMinnville through ricochetwine.com. It belongs to a friend of the show. Sort the aromas of one of its wines, perhaps a Pinot noir, into grape, winery and age, and write a four-line note: appearance, nose, palate, verdict. Spit as you go, or bring a designated driver, and take your note home with you.