The hardest part of becoming a “pinot expert” will always be finding the money or the time to taste a lot of wine. One way you can help yourself along is by focusing on tasting just pinot for a time and training your nose to detect the aromas common to the cultivar. Knowing the basic scents allows you to better pick apart a muddled or mixed bouquet of aromas so you can understand what you are smelling in a wine.

Below is a list of many commonly occurring smells in Pinot, along with some suggestions on how to create a standard, or example of the smell, using cheap boxed wine. The wine should be room temperature and you may need to adjust the recipes depending on if you want to really illustrate a particular note, or if you want to train your nose to detect the aromas at a level you might actually find in a wine. Both approaches are valuable.

Generally any boxed red will do, the less fragrant and distinct the better. For most of the recipes, let the standards sit for 30 minutes. The information below is taken from a Research Note by Noble, Arnold, Buechsenstein, Leach, Schmidt and Stern. The complete list of recipies is online at Cornell’s website.

The good:
Cloves – Soak one whole clove for 10-20 min and remove
Violet – Petals from 10 crushed violets
Rose – crushed petals from one rose (or 1 mg of 2-phenylethanol/150ml)
Raspberry – 1-2 crushed fresh or frozen raspberries
Strawberry – 1-2 fresh or frozen strawberries
Cherry – 10 mL brine of canned cherries
Strawberry Jam – 1 tsp strawberry jam
Prune – ½ fig or 5-10 mL brine from canned figs
Tea – 3-4 flakes of black tea
Tobacco – 3-4 flakes of tobacco (least aromatic possible)
Smokey – 1 drop smoky flavor extract/150mL wine
Oak – 2-3 mL of Oak flavor (Oak Mor, toasted is best)
Vanilla – 1-2 drops of vanilla extract
Pencil lead – pencil shavings

Note: The following are smells typical of Bret, and it may not be worth your time to make a standard for them. Most people can detect the various smells of Bret at low levels, and the smells are quite distinctive. If you’ve never encountered Bret before though, it might be worthwhile to track down the chemicals listed below.

The perhaps not so good (Bret):
Mousey – 0.5-1 mg 2-ethyl-3,4,5,6-tetrahydropyridine/L of wine
Horsey – 1 mg p-cresol/100 mL of wine

After you’ve trained your nose, head over to Hospices of Sonoma and buy the one day $75.00 barrel tasting ticket and see how many of the aromas you can pick up. Its great fun!