I Can't Smell Anything

Filed in archive Wine Tasting on February 2, 2010

© pedrosimoes7


Swirl, sniff, swish, swallow. These are wine words to live by in the tasting world. To me, they are words I learned early on and grew quickly to appreciate. My family loved and shared wine with me, but not everyone grows up with the same experiences.

I have many friends in my age group who never learned about wine. I don't think that clicked for me until recently, when two friends of mine both asked me to walk them through wine tasting. (Ego points for me, I'm impressed they trusted me enough to guide them.)

Both of these friends carefully went through the steps, taking all the little tidbits of advice I gave them. And surprisingly both of them told me, "I can't smell anything. It smells like wine." And the same with taste. They could tell a little difference, the same way you can tell the difference between diet and regular coke. But any hints of berries or textures were out of the question.

This worried me a little. Is taste all made up in our heads? I had a friend do an unscientific experiment once with scotch. He poured a cheap scotch into a flask and went to a convention. At the convention he told everyone what an expensive high-end scotch he had in the flask. And without fail, everyone who tried it went on to elaborate on how they could tell it was expensive.

After that and after thinking for a while, I came to a conclusion. Sure, we probably look for the flavors explained on the back of the bottle and make up some of our own, but in the end, learning to taste different things in wine is more about how much experience you've had. When you first start tasting wine the important thing is that you like it, and not much else. Just like once you've had enough McDonald's fries you can tell if they turned out "right" or not, the same thing will happen with wine. For now, just enjoy it and don't worry about what it smells right.