Why do we nose our wine?

It’s been a non stop few months at 🦄 & The Vine with teaching and tastings, so it was wonderful to have an eve off and visit one of my favourite London wine bars @10cases for some delicious wine and food.

For my London friends who haven’t yet been, I really recommend; they only ever order 10 cases of any wine (hence the name), so there's always something new and interesting to taste 🍷

As you can see, i was having a « moment » with this Malbec and here’s a little info on why we « nose » our wine:

⭐️ For pleasure! The aromas that ooze out of the glass all add to the experience of tasting, and help us account for the quality of the wine 🍷

⭐️ For faults! There are certain aromas that we don’t want to smell in the glass, that alert us of problems such as:

⛔️ Cork Taint ~ this can give us aromas of damp cardboard and we lose the fresh and fruity flavours. Cork taint has nothing to do with bits of cork floating in your glass, instead it’s when the cork get contaminated by TCA and we get a nasty chemical reaction in the wine

⛔️ Oxidation ~ when a wine has not been stored / sealed correctly and oxygen enters; this can deepen the colour of the wine and give us aromas of toffee, honey, caramel or coffee and will lack fruitiness and freshness.

There are more but these are two of the key faults I teach my students on WSET L1 & L2. Luckily this Malbec was as fresh and seductive as hoped for ~ oozing it’s typical fruity characteristics of blackberries and black plums

Here’s to our noses! For enhancing the pleasure as well as alerting us of the dangers!

Hope everyone is doing well, santé my friends! 🥂