The aroma wheel provides a framework for describing wines.
Dr. Anne C. Noble invented the wine aroma wheel in the 1980s at the University of Davis, California. The aroma wheel gives a visual structure of the different categories and aroma components of wine. It provides an objective framework in which to judge wines and a common vocabulary with which to describe them.
The Aroma Wheel
The aroma wheel is of a similar structure to the color wheel. It is composed of three tiers. In the center are segments for the 12 major categories to describe how wine smells. These include fruity, spicy and floral. The next tier has 29 sub-categories of these, including blackberry and raspberry under the category 'berry', and yeasty and lactic under 'microbiological'. The outermost tier has 94 specific words to hone the description. Some of these are cedar, medicinal and butterscotch.
Use the
The wine taster should focus on the smell of the wine and relate it to a previous smell she has experienced. Selecting one of the words on the inner tier of the wheel, the wine taster then looks at the middle tier words associated with the general term chosen on the inner tier. She selects the most relevant word and, moving outwards from the middle tier, she then selects the best descriptive word from the outermost tier.
Ten Unusual Descriptive Terms
The outermost tier contains standard terms with which to describe wine which may seem strange to the wine amateur. These include: artificial fruit, yogurt, sweaty, sulfur dioxide, acetic acid, plastic, wet dog, burnt match, cooked cabbage and skunk.
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