What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [4]
The Wine Aroma Wheel resembles a dartboard: three concentric circles divided pizzalike into a dozen slices of varying width. On the innermost circle, the pointed end of each wedge is an aroma category, such as fruity. In the middle circle, the wedge may be split into subcategories such as citrus, berry, or tree fruit. On the outer circle are specific materials, examples of each aroma subcategory. Thus you can follow the fruity wedge through the berry subslice to the outer circle; there you’ll find blackberry, raspberry, strawberry, and blackcurrant. The beauty of Noble’s wheel is that it links sensory concepts to actual everyday stuff—it connects Riesling to raspberries. Wheel in hand, it is possible to sniff your way to sensory enlightenment. This commonsense approach lets anyone grasp the esoteric innerwedge category microbiological and its arcane subdivision lactic. It’s only baffling until you sniff the examples: yogurt and sauerkraut. Then it clicks. The wheel even demystifies the wine-snob term wet dog: it’s an example of sulfur aromas in the chemical category (along with skunk, cabbage, and burnt match).
There is no place on the wheel for the wine critic’s gaseous adjectives. You will find “orange blossom” and “black olive” and the less flattering “soapy” and “cooked cabbage.” But you will not find “an impertinent little Pinot Noir” or a “flabby, overripe Cabernet Franc,” à la Miles Raymond. These free-form prose poems say more about a wine lover’s pretensions than about the character of the wine. To use the wheel, all you need is a glass and grocery store.
A PRACTICAL SMELL classification for beer was created in the 1970s by a Danish flavor chemist named Morten Meilgaard. His Beer Flavor Wheel has now been adopted worldwide. It uses fourteen categories and forty-four sensory terms to describe the smell and taste of any style of beer—lager, ale, or stout. Most of the descriptors deal with aroma; others involve taste (bitter for hops; sweet for malt) and sensory factors like carbonation. Meilgaard’s system includes reference standards, but unlike Noble’s wine wheel (which was inspired by it), one needs access to pure chemicals to create them. For example, to mimic the “papery” aroma of oxidized beer, one doses a pitcher of beer with trans-2-nonenal.
A brewer’s best friend is his nose. Desirable aromas tell him when the product is on target. By identifying off-smells in the product, a brewer can correct problems in the brewing process. For example, the smell of wet newspaper indicates that a beer has oxidized. Sunlight-damaged beer has a skunky smell. (Many years ago, Corona beer from Mexico was poorly made and oxidized easily. The acid in a slice of lime was an effective way to chemically neutralize the off-odor. Today Corona is made as well as any beer in the world, but the lime tradition lives on.)
Meilgaard’s beer system is less satisfying for the lay drinker than the Wine Aroma Wheel. Because the reference standards are made with single chemicals, they can be prepared with great precision. However, they don’t reproduce complex aromas like raspberry or asparagus, and they are not cheap and easy for the amateur beer enthusiast to make at home. An added frustration is that the descriptive terms for