[MUSIC] Just to show you how useful a teaching and learning tool the aroma wheel is, we're going to make up some odor reference standards that you would find on the aroma wheel, and use them to Improve our aroma identification abilities. It's very, very simple to do. You have to decide which aromas you want to use, and then find those food items, either in a food store or occasionally, you might have to look online. I remember a while back, I was trying to create a gooseberry standard and I actually had to order some gooseberries online. Canned gooseberries, because they were not available in my local grocery store. I've poured six glasses of white wine today and six glasses of red, in order to show you how to make these aroma standards. If you ever read the aroma wheel paper, you'll see that the original purpose of that was to instruct scientists and researches and tasters around the world, how to make aroma standards that they might use in research projects. We're going to do it slightly differently here. Instead of using 25 or 30 milliliters of wine, I've actually poured 2 ounces of white and 2 ounces of red, rather generous portion. The wines that I've used are the same wines that we used in module one for our practice tasting. In other words, I've used the simple, nondescript white wine that we tasted and on the simpler side, red wine. These are good base wines to use for making aroma standards. What you want to choose are wines that are, of course, not bad, wines that don't have any defects. But these wines should also have no really attractive attributes. You don't want to get distracted by some lovely aromatics in the wine itself when you're trying to create an aroma standard. On the table before me, I have the materials I am going to use and you can see just how simple this is. I've got a banana, I'm going to make a banana standard and a grapefruit and some honey. I've got some canned asparagus, fresh asparagus just doesn't smell the same. We can't get that nice thiol asparagus note unless the asparagus has been cooked and so canned asparagus is perfect for this. We're also going to use vanilla and butter at the end. Butter with a diacetyl aroma, as you may remember is a by product of secondary fermentation in wine. And vanilla is an odor that comes from the breakdown product of lignan extract, in other words oak extract, in wine. Over on the red side, we're going to make a raspberry and a blackberry standard. Boy, do those look good. And we're going to make a strawberry jam standard. Strawberries themselves are not that aromatic, but when you smell strawberry in wine, in my experience, I more often smell it as the jammy rendition of strawberries. In Pinot Noirs, for example, strawberry jam is a classic marker for me. We're going to use raisins. Very often red grapes are left a little bit too long on the vine, and when they come in and get crushed in, all the berries go in the tank including the raisins that happen to be present. So, a raisiny note or even a pruny note is found in wine. We're going to use some bell pepper to approximate a veggie smell in wine. Actually, in the case of bell pepper, the piercing smell that it has is identical to what you find in Cabernet and certain other wines. Bringing up the rear, I'm going to make a vanilla or vanillin standard over here as well, because either white wines or red wines kept in barrels can extract that same aromatic from oak. These are very easy to do and in a moment, I'll just make up the white flight first, and then I'll make up the red flight and show you how you, too, can do this. One interesting exercise that I tell my students is that if you have a particular wine type that interests you and you want to explore that wine type, such as Pinot Noir, for example. Look in your tasting notes, look in the tasting literature, and look in the wine review magazines that you might have, and see just what descriptors people are using from around the world for that particular wine. In this example, Pinot Noir. Pick 12 or 16 of them and go out and buy items and make reference standards. You can use these reference standards as a tune up for yourself, for your friends, or for your tasting group and after you make them, you can go back and dilute them. You can make them full strength at first and then dilute them and make them half strength, you can make these aromatics more and more faint until you're really, really good at picking them out in wine. Remember smell is the most elusive aspect of wine evaluation, however, it’s probably the most important. If I've said this before, I'll just say it again, 80 or 90% of what we perceive when we taste wine is due to the fact that we can smell. Let’s make up some aroma standards and see how easy this is to do. I've added all of the odor components to these six glasses. You might remember banana, grapefruit, honey, asparagus and this was the brine from the asparagus can. This is butter extract that you buy in the grocery store that you put in your frosting, I guess, if you are making frosting. But this has in it a diacetyl which is an aromatic found in wine and then in the very last one, I put vanilla and I used to use regular vanilla extract. But it's brown [LAUGH] as you probably know. If I put a brown liquid in a glass of wine, I can spot it ten yards away, I know that's the vanilla standard. One of my chef students a while back clued me in to the fact that you can buy decolorized Spanish vanilla and so that's what I use. I used a clear vanilla so it didn't really affect the wine's color. What I'm going to do now is go through and take out any food elements that would be in there that would clue me into what it is I added to the wine starting with the banana. A couple of other little pieces, and of course, the grape fruit rind. I can't take the honey out but I am going to use this fork to dissolve it a little bit more. Honey just heads straight for the bottom and does not go into solution, so you might want to play with that. No problem there, no problem there, no problem there. Now everything looks like wine, more or less. Let's go through and smell all these and test our strength. The first one, remember banana. Nice, very reminiscent of banana. The second one. Grapefruit test, very distinct grapefruit test. Honey. Asparagus, specifically canned asparagus. Nice, that's beautiful, that's a butter standard. Here's our vanilla standard. Now, you can see what I've done, I've put two ounce plastic cup lids on each of these. These are easy to find, you can find these, of course, online or you can go to your local restaurant that gives you condiments to go, and ask if you can beg, or borrow, or buy a couple a dozen. But they're very handy to have and if you're using these standard 10 ounce glasses, they fit very, very nicely on top because I don't want to stand here and smell all of these all at once as I'm standing in front of them. I want to seal the odor in each one of these so I can smell them individually. Here is my set of white aroma standards, and they're all fairly obvious. I've made very strong standards, so it would be no problem for me to recognize these. I'm going to label these glasses just arbitrarily one, two, three, four, five, six, and so, of course, now I know which is which. I know that they run all the way from banana to vanillin or vanilla at the end. Once I'm really familiar with these smells at these strengths, what I'll have my friend do while I'm out of the room is dilute them by half. Maybe by adding two more ounces of wine to each glass or maybe pour half out and add another ounce or two to the glass. In other words, to make them lower in strength, lower in aroma and then I'm going to have him or her renumber the glasses. A new one through six, not the ones that correspond with the numbers that I know. I'm going to come back in and going to go to the flight again and I'm going to say, [SOUND] that must be the vanilla standard. [SOUND] Asparagus, and you get the idea. So, if I were training panelists to taste wine for me, that's exactly what I would do. I would make up standards that were appropriate for the particular wine that we were studying and then I would make them more and more and more dilute, more and more faint, until my panelists who were trained to pick them out at very, very low levels. As you recall, wine aromatics are faint, they're subtle, they're nuances. They're not very, very high in concentration and very obvious, but they're fleeting aromatics, which is why we need to train to be able to smell them. Here are our red aroma standards. Let me smell through them, make sure that they're true to smell. First one, my goodness, that's good already, raspberry, blackberry, that's excellent, strawberry jam, raisins. If you're using dried fruit, such as raisins or dried apricot or dried peach or dried pear, you typically will need to let them sit longer because they need to plump up and let the wine extract their flavor, but I think this one's good. Bell Pepper. And vanillin. Here's our flight of six. These are relatively easy to smell in the strength that I've made them. But again, what I might do is leave the room and have my friend double the volume in every glass, making the aromatics diluted by 50% and come back and see if I can smell through them again. Of course, I'll have them change the numbers. If I were having you participate in my taste panel, that's what I would do for you. I would make up white and red wine standards with various food, or herbal, or spice elements, and I would make them more, and more, faint to train you to be able to pick them out and name them at the strength that they actually exist in wine. If you if you do this a few times and even as I said earlier, tailor it to what ever type of wine you are studying at the moment, you can become very very good at picking up wine aromatics. It's something that we're not naturally very good at because we have never practiced it, this is how you practice it. It's very, very effective and a great way to tune up your nose.
