Mmm peaches, roses.. maybe a hint of cinnamon…?

I love talking to people about what they smell in a wine—there are so many different nouns and descriptive adjectives you could use, so many directions you could go: fruits or flowers, exotic spices, feelings or sensations.. maybe even a memory comes to mind—aromas can trigger the most unexpected associations, something you might not have thought about in years.

This “wine talk” has played a huge part in my falling in love with wine.  Between attending the AIS lecture on the olfactory examination and the numerous tastings I’ve been to at vino roma, I’ve accumulated a fresh set of tools that have forever changed the way I talk about wine.‘L’esame olfattivo’— the olfactory analysis, is the standardized evaluation of the famous ‘nose’ of the wine.  This is what might make a wine, as an Italian would put it, un vino da meditazione—a wine you could meditate on.

Our noses are incredibly powerful instruments; we can literally pick out and distinguish up to 12,000 different smells.  I remember a California winemaker once telling me that 90% of wine tasting was just in the smell of it.  Each wine we try tells such a different story; it’s through the nose that we’re able to interpret what it’s saying— subjectively of course— then after we’ve come to our own conclusions we can translate those thoughts to the objective evaluation system.  This standardization is important; it ensures that other sommeliers and wine professional can understand what we taste, too, and just makes communicating about a wine a whole lot more effective.

There are four categories to consider when evaluating the nose of a wine: intensity (think of a vertical analysis, it judges the power of all the aromas perceived at the same exact time), complexity (think horizontally— the range of different aromas you may concurrently smell), quality (the synthesis of intensity, complexity, finesse and elegance), and finally description.

It’s the description guidelines that have been especially helpful for me.  There are ten description groups, and every aroma you could possibly perceive would theoretically fall into one or more of them.

Aromatic—this adjective would describe the bouquet of a wine made from aromatic grape varieties, ONLY (and here I’ve been throwing this around loosely for years).

Vinous—this refers to winery smells, fermentation aromas, generally found in younger red wines.

Floral—these essences can be numerous, and come from a variety of factors such as soils, grape varieties, and the age of a wine.  You might note white and yellow flowers for fresher young wines, red flowers for deeper colored wines, and dried ones for those who’ve got some age on them.

Fruity—various fruits can be perceived, depending again on factors like soils, varieties, and age.  A fresh white wine bouquet might give off green, white, or yellow fruit aromas, or maybe exotic, tropical, or citrus notes.  A red might show darker berries, red or black fruits, and you may detect dried or ripe fruits in mature ones.

Grassy—green vegetal aromas that are often reminiscent of.. grass!  This could also be bell peppers, tomato leaves, or dried hay aromas.

Mineral—Salt and mineral aromas, flint, gunpowder, or river stones.  This is the category I’ve found most eye opening— Hande has poured some Italian wines that actually taste salty!

Fragrant—two meanings, it’s most commonly used to talk about fresh and lively wines in general, but it’s also a term for sparkling or still white wines that have had extended contact on their lees, giving off a bread-like, yeasty smell.

Frank—this one I’ve never used, but frankly, it makes sense.  This would be a clean, well-defined scent that stands out from the other smells.  Say that you have a wine that smells just like a green pepper, this would be written: grassy, frank (bell pepper).

Spicy—this category stretches from sweet to hot spices, and can be found in any type of wine, especially those aged in oak barrels.

Ethereal—this is another term that I hadn’t heard of before starting the class. It’s derived from the alcohols, acids and aldehydes, and gives off a medicinal, estery, sometimes soapy or waxy aroma.  Think about inhaling Vick’s vapor rub, and you’ll get the idea.

So here’s your homework guys: go out and buy yourselves a bottle of ITALIAN wine, and get to work.  Use these olfactory guidelines and you’ve basically got what it takes to evaluate a wine like an inexperienced professional.  If you’re like me and enjoy coming up with the various correlations between what you smell and what it reminds you of, this is the perfect exercise to build up your “wine talk”.  Go through the categories and ponder each one for a few seconds, you’ll actually be surprised how easy it is, and how good at it you already are!  Of course, even better yet - book a tasting with vino roma next time you’re in Rome; nothing compares to analyzing a wine with the guidance of a sommelier smelling the same exact wine as you are!

Amelia

Observing a wine in our glass can tell us a lot about it.  Color is a good clue as to how old a wine might be; as it gets older it oxidizes, turning more golden for whites, darker for rosés, and rustier looking for reds.  Of course color might come from other factors too, it depends a lot on the soils and climate, the production process, and what type of grapes are used in the first place, but a wine’s color gives us a general first impression to start working with.

Before I started working with Hande, I had never really taken the time to contemplate the color.  I’ve learned that regionality plays a large role in the color of Italy’s whites, we can actually get an idea of where it might come from based on the color we see.  It’s not an exact science or anything, but if the color is light, we can make an educated guess that the wine we’re evaluating comes from the north of Italy, and if the wine is darker or more golden, then we can deduce its origins are in the south.  I learned this theory at my first Vino Roma tasting back in December, and have accurately tested it out on many of the wines I’ve had since.  It makes sense logically, as northern Italy is mountainous and cool, while the south gets hotter and hotter the further down you go.

 AIS’ only female presenter, Daniela, has led the lectures on wine examination.  She’s an Italian architect, probably in her early 50s, and one of the most poised public speakers I’ve ever met.  Her palate is impeccable - I scribble down notes like a mad woman on whatever she’s talking about.  Her tangents and side notes turn into intriguing facts and anecdotes, all of which she so eloquently ties back to her original point.  Her first lecture was dedicated to ‘l’esame visivo’ – the visual exam.  We learned the standard set of colors used to describe white wines, rosés, and reds.  There actually aren’t that many options to choose from along the color scale.  For whites there are four: greenish-yellow, straw-yellow, golden-yellow, and amber; the rosé category has three: soft rosé, cherry-red, and dark rosé; and for red wines we have four again: purple-red, ruby, garnet, and orange-red.  This vocabulary alone has been insightful.  You can mix colors a bit, for instance a white wine can be greenish-yellow, tending toward straw, or a red wine could be garnet, with hints of orange-red. 

Before smelling the wine, sommeliers evaluate a few other factors: it’s limpidity, consistency, and if bubbles are present, it’s effervescence.  Limpidity corresponds to the absence or presence of suspended particles in a wine, a limited amount of which can be OK, but generally speaking it’s frowned upon to see bits and pieces floating around in your glass.  We measure this by choosing one adjective along a scale of five that best describes the wine we’re evaluating: veiled, quite limpid, limpid, crystal clear, or brilliant.  A wine’s consistency can be observed as a wine’s structure, or thickness in the glass, measured again along a scale of five: flowing, scarcely consistent, quite consistent, consistent, or oily.  If we are evaluating a sparkling wine, we look at its effervescence, the presence of carbon dioxide bubbles.  We are evaluating the size of the bubbles, the number there are, and how they persist in our glass.  The size of the bubbles can be measured as: large, quite fine, or fine; the number of bubbles as: very few, quite numerous, or numerous; and the persistence of the wine as: fading, quite persistent, or persistent. 

The evaluation system we use is internationally standardized; my Italian textbook also prints the glossary in English and French, so we can reference all three—perfect for people like me who’d also like to contemplate a wine in one or both of the principle wine languages of the world.

Stay tuned for part two!  Coming soon on the joys of evaluating the nose of your wine…

Amelia

I’m about halfway through the first segment of the AIS sommelier program, and so far it’s been terrific.  I didn’t really know what to expect; to learn about Italian wine, of course, but after 10 meetings we’ve barely even touched on regional specifics (though we have tasted quite a few palatable examples throughout the process).

We started off learning the basics; the correct way to present and open a bottle, how best to serve it at the table, which stemware to serve it in… quickly we moved into grape growing though, the physiology of the grape and the biological cycle of the vine (this is definitely not a group of scientists though).   By lecture three, we’d started a four-class series dedicated to wine making: the basic methods of processing still and sparkling wines, as well as fortified, infused, and late-harvest ones. The lecturers have been very thorough, but by no means is this a course on wine making, and they’ve been very clear about that from the get-go.  The AIS course is primarily aimed at your average wine enthusiast and/or restaurateur.  Its purpose is to teach how to evaluate the finished product, not to focus on the method in which it came to be that way (although of course, good working knowledge of this is essential in understanding what it is that you’re tasting). 

 The presenters are all really knowledgeable, though none seem to work as sommeliers professionally, rather as educators or architects, there’s even a TV personality!  This is representative of many Italians taking the course though; it’s seen as a cultural education more than anything else, a long seminar on the art of ‘good living’– a nice accompaniment to their nicely polished art of ‘good cooking’.  The lecturers have all been men except for one woman– and she’s got the best palate of all, anyone there would agree.

I’d estimate 9 out of 10 people attending are Italian, maybe even more.  The men outnumber the women, but female representation makes up around 30-40% of the class.  Ages vary anywhere from 25-70, but the majority fall into the 30-50 range.  I generally attend the afternoon session, which has about 50-75 people in it.  It’s mainly restaurant industry workers, housewives, and others who can afford to take time to meet in the afternoons.  The other option is to attend the evening session, a repeat of the afternoon one, but with double the amount of attendees, mostly coming from work I imagine, as it starts at 8:00.

Each lesson has a specific theme, and along that theme a group of olfactory aids are presented in order to support it.  For instance, the first class was dedicated to ‘la figura del Sommelier’ the role the sommelier plays in table service and good living.  We started off with an introductory toast, a glass of sparkling wine from Lombardy—a Franciacorta Brut from Bellavista made in ‘metodo classico’.  To highlight the floral components of the wine, each of us was presented with a white rose (that didn’t actually smell of anything, but it got their point across).  A couple more examples that we’ve seen: the viticulture class had 4 different types of apples to smell; the still wines class had pieces of banana, pineapple and papaya; the sparkling wine theme was aided by a cup of activated yeast, bread crust and an opened butter cube; and the fortified wines were presented alongside dried apricots, raisins and almonds.

We generally taste three or four wines per class, and do so in the last hour of the lecture. The wines that we taste aren’t opened up for group discussion; we are guided through the tasting by the presenter, who then conducts a public assessment of the wine based on their own evaluation.  I initially found this strange, but I’ve come to love it (seeing as the lecturer generally knows more about wine than my neighbor does).  Really though, we’re still in the initial stages of the course, and having a professional sommelier guide the tasting is much more helpful in learning the standardized evaluation system than talking about it amongst ourselves would be.

Besides missing out on some of the finer points in the lectures (it’s all in Italian!), I’ve really gotten a lot out of the class.  I will say though, THANK GOD I have a background in wine production, or else I would have been completely lost at certain points– and mostly I’m referring to the science sections, but those could  have lost me in English, too :)

by Amelia

After some seriously dedicated years of making my rounds at wine tastings, given all the incredible wines I’ve managed to tilt my glass under, I’ve got to say— I have never tried so many cult classics in just one sitting.

This was THE wine auction extravaganza, the one I’ll be bragging to all my wine friends about (until I find another one to go to).

Ideally, I would have contemplated each wine for a bit longer than 5 minutes but— it was kill or be killed out there— you either got your glass in for the pour right then and there, or else you missed out on its potential splendor entirely. We were racing through the wines, literally speed-tasting before bids opened and the evening’s events were underway.

The venue was in the back of a random antiques shop in Flaminia, a residential neighborhood in the northern part of the city.  There couldn’t have been more than 40-50 people there. There were more than 300 wines up for bid, mostly big name Super Tuscans, Barolos and Bordeauxs— all generally pretty far from my price range.  That said, there were some unbelievably reasonable starting prices, although some bidders (present and absent) had submitted silent offers prior to opening bid.  For this reason, the starting price of a wine was often read out as higher than what was printed in the 72-page booklet.

Upon arrival I was quickly ushered through the crowd and up to the tasting table to get my first pour.  The man serving attempted to slip me the 1979 Tignanello, though Hande promptly fixed that— she had him pour me the ‘79 Sassicaia instead, as she’d just tried them both.  Apparently nobody else wanted to admit that the Tignanello was already on the decline (if not totally dead).  But my god, the Sassicaia was delicious!  It was quite cloudy, a garnet color with an orange tinge, but so bright and fresh— way more acid than I’d expect from a wine of it’s age from a sub-par vintage— then again, at this point in the evening, it was the oldest Italian wine I’d ever tried.

I tasted a 1986 Masi Amarone next, followed by a 1985… and it was truly night and day.  The ‘85 was so alive.  It had beautiful earthy sulfides on the nose and totally shocked the palate by being so clean and fresh.  Absolutely the opposite of the ‘86, whose acid had turned a bit volatile, hitting you in the mouth like a fistful of stewed tomatoes.  That’s pretty harsh, it was actually ok—if you could just get over how oxidized it was.

It was the Solaia’s turn, a 1991 and a 1990 following suit.  The 1990 was so much more balanced.  It had beautiful floral notes, so smooth and elegant while the ‘91 was a total tannin bomb.  It was still an impressive wine, but probably in need of another decade in bottle before I’d want to try it again (who am I kidding, I’d try it again tomorrow).

 There was a series of less impressive wines that came after—that is, very impressive on an everyday level, but given the outstanding range of vintage material, they were easily overshadowed.

The 1995 Brunello from Poggio Salve Villa was painfully, obviously corked but again— nobody there wanted to admit it.   I’ve heard that Italians are like this about wine flaws— in denial that they actually exist.  I can’t imagine why… maybe out of respect for the wine?  The people and all the work that go into producing it?  Like that has anything to do with the cork carrying TCA.  In this case at any rate, they likely just didn’t want to open another bottle :)

I felt sorry for the man who had been hired to pour for us— he was trying so hard but failing so miserably at opening all these bottles with weathered corks.  Luckily, Hande was there— nothing beats having a sommelier around when you’re about to push a cork into a ‘66 Margaux.  She asked if anyone near the table had a wine opener, and of course I had one strapped to my body, as always (well, in my purse, strapped to my body, but close enough).

 The 66’ Chateau Boyd-Cantenac’s cork was completely wrecked, but the wine itself had somehow managed to survive.  It was extraordinarily creamy, with a toasty marshmallow nose, so incredibly intact and vibrant over 40 years later.

The St. Julien from Chateau Gloria was full of sediment, but appeared so clear in color and taste that you hardly even noticed the dark bits floating about in your glass.  There was a strange funk on the nose though, almost a pickled character, but the acid was still very present, and albeit a bit odd, I thought it was pretty nice.

The Margaux from Chateau Durfort Vivens was the winner of the 1966’s.  It too had an initial pickled, almost putrid acid on the nose, but anything unfavorable blew off once it got some air, lending way to savory spice and toast notes, and soft pleasant sulfides.  It was the palate that stood out with this wine though— it tasted so different from the way it smelled.  It had unbelievable balance, and beautiful persistence, such a long graceful finish.  It was still going strong, and seemed like it would have a considerable amount of time left in bottle— then again, I didn’t get to see how any of these wines developed in glass over time, so who’s to say they didn’t just fall apart entirely after 15 minutes.

A great first wine auction in Rome.  Why do I get the feeling this one’s going to be hard to top? 

Gelardini & Romani Asta Vino Roma

WINES AVAILABLE FOR TASTING:

Wines from the 1960s:

1966 Chateau Boyd-Cantenac, Margaux Grand Cru

1966 Chateau Durfort Vivens, Margaux

1966 Chateau Gloria, St. Julien

1968 Masi Amarone, Valpolicella

Wines from the 70s:

1971 Masi Amarone, Valpolicella

1973 Chateau Timberlay, R. Giraud, Bordeaux Superieur

1979 Tenuta San Guido, Sassicaia, Bolgheri IGT

1979 Antinori Tignanello, Chianti Classico IGT

The 80s:

1985 Masi Amarone Mazzano, Valpolicella

1986 Masi Amarone Capolongo di Torbe, Valpolicella

And the 1990s:

1990 Antinori Solaia, Chianti Classico IGT

1991 Antinori Solaia, Chianti Classico, IGT

1993 Antinori Prunotto Cannubi Barolo, Alba DOCG

1995 Poggio Salvi Villa Brunello di Montalcino DOCG

The 2000s:

2004 Sant’Emiliano Barbera d’Asti, Superiore, DOC

2004 Fattoria di Rignana, Chianti Classico DOCG