Train your nose and your palate to understand wine.

Training and tasting are essential to understand wine, and I recently received a wonderful “sniffing” kit from my sister, the family sommelier.
Just like perfume creators, developing your nose is key to fully appreciating a good wine, and for the bad ones, don’t bother, there is rarely anything worth the effort.

I learned that more than 1,000 aroma molecules have been identified in wines so far. These little bottles in my kit contain 24 basic aromas commonly found in white and red wines.
The exercise is simple: smell and guess the aroma, getting it right is harder than it sounds. I immediately recognised blackcurrant, grass, and pineapple, but confused strawberry with raspberry!

Why sniff the wine? With a trained nose, you start understanding a wine even before tasting it. Some wines are expressive on the nose but delicate on the palate, or vice versa.

There are three types of aromas:
Primary (you sniff them first): vegetal, spicy, floral, fruity
Secondary: from fermentation, like banana, pineapple, hazelnut, butter
Tertiary: develop with ageing in oak barrels, such as vanilla, leather, chocolate

Sicily’s diverse terroirs create an incredible range of aromas and flavours. Etna wines show mineral, fresh, savoury notes, while other areas produce clay or dusty nuances paired with rich fruit.

So, next time you enjoy a good wine, put your nose into the glass, close your eyes, take your time... and guess the aromas!