The Tool That Transformed Wine Tasting

[AKR]

The Tool That Transformed Wine Tasting

In 1984, a professor at the University of California, Davis, introduced her Wine Aroma Wheel. Its goal: to banish pretension and get more precision from the language we use to describe what we’re drinking.

By Lettie Teague
Oct. 1, 2020 9:56 am ET

WHEN I PUT my nose into a glass of wine, I can usually and reasonably cogently describe what I smell. But if I used a Wine Aroma Wheel, would I detect even more?

First published in 1984 by Ann C. Noble, a sensory scientist at the Department of Viticulture and Enology at the University of California, Davis, the Wine Aroma Wheel is rather unprepossessing in appearance for such an influential tool. A chart in the form of a circle—initially printed on paper, now laminated plastic—it contains 119 scent descriptors, arranged in three tiers that radiate outward, and ranging from general terms such as “fruity” to more specific words such as “berry” and “citrus” to yet more specific words like “blackberry,” “raspberry,” “strawberry” and “black currant.”

The Wine Aroma Wheel has spawned many imitations over the decades. (And Prof. Noble has sent many “cease and desist” letters to their creators.) With the field of available tasting tools now quite crowded, does that make the Wine Aroma Wheel any less relevant or useful today? I decided to (belatedly) give the Wheel a turn.

‘How can you even evaluate your own wine against others if you don’t use the same words?’
Prof. Noble created the Wine Aroma Wheel with the goal of establishing a specific vocabulary of tasting terms so that wine professionals could better understand one another. “How can you even evaluate your own wine against others if you don’t use the same words?” she asked, rhetorically, when we talked on the phone a few weeks ago. The tool was an immediate hit in the trade and received so much publicity that consumers clamored for it. The laminated version available for purchase today made its debut in 1990. After Prof. Noble retired with emeritus status in 2002, she took her Wheel on the road, giving lectures to tasting groups around the country. She also taught short courses in the U.S., Italy and Australia.

It’s hard to grasp just how radical this invention was when it was introduced. “People didn’t have words to describe wine,” said Prof. Noble, now 76 and still living in Davis. The words they did use tended to be nonspecific ones like “elegant” and “masculine,” which the professor found maddening. “What the hell is an ‘elegant’ wine?” she demanded.

To develop a set of precise terms for the Wheel, Prof. Noble collected words used to describe wines by students in different lab sections of her sensory evaluation of wine course. “Each table would list all the words that they came up with and we’d rate them,” she said. She also consulted lists of wine terms previously published and circulated lists to people in the wine industry to gauge their willingness to use or not use different words. After meeting with fellow wine professionals she further winnowed her collated lists down to the 119 words ultimately deemed Wheel-worthy.

Winemaker Mia Klein was among the students who helped choose the words and “one of the best noses” in the group according to Prof. Noble. Ms. Klein went on to build a storied career in Napa; Araujo Estate, Dalla Valle and her own label, Selene Wines, are a few of the notable names on her résumé. She considers the time she spent with Prof. Noble formative, for her as well as her profession. “A big part of working in Ann’s lab was working on the Wheel,” Ms. Klein recalled.

Before talking to Prof. Noble, I purchased a Wine Aroma Wheel of my own. (They go for $9 at winearomawheel.com.) It came in pale shades of green, pink, yellow, orange and lilac—not wine colors, I noted, or even colors that echo the words on the Wheel. I asked Prof. Noble whether the shades signified anything. “Pastel colors are easier on aging eyes,” she replied. The original wheel’s colors were more primary and much darker, she noted.

As one with aging eyes, I appreciated the current color scheme. But my 29-year-old stepdaughter, Molly, a graphic designer, disagreed. “I’d update them,” she said. “They could be more vibrant.” She recognized the value of the Wheel itself, however. “I love the concept. It’s very easy to follow,” she said. But Molly wondered if an opportunity was being missed. “An interactive app on your phone would be more appealing to millennials,” she said.

Prof. Noble said she’d considered creating an app before turning the running of the Wine Aroma Wheel business over to her good friend Isabelle Lesschaeve, an Atlanta-based sensory scientist, in 2019. Though Ms. Lesschaeve has no immediate plans to build an app, she does hope to incorporate the Wheel into an online tasting program next year.

When I invited a few friends over for a socially distanced visit to try out the Wine Aroma Wheel along with a few bottles of wine, their responses were mixed. My friend Allison didn’t care for the colors. “They don’t really say anything,” she said. But she did find the guide to aromas typically associated with different grapes, printed on the back of the Wheel, helpful. (Sauvignon Blanc, for instance, is characterized as “floral, fruity, vegetative or herbaceous.”) My friend Alan was more skeptical. “I think it’s a gimmick. People who say they’re smelling those things aren’t really smelling them,” he said. “It’s a way for people to act like they know about wine.”

I found some of the Wine Aroma Wheel’s words more relevant than others in regard to the wines we were tasting. “Citrus” and “fresh,” “nutty” and “cherry” are terms I regularly use to describe wines. But some of the more esoteric and unappealing words—“hay/straw,” “rubber,” “plastic,” “sweaty,” “wet dog”—struck me as less useful. (I guess I should be grateful that none of the wines we opened as we took the Wheel through its paces smelled like sweat or a dog.)

While I may not be spinning my Wine Aroma Wheel again anytime soon, I certainly think this tool would be useful for wine drinkers who haven’t yet developed much of a vocabulary for describing what they find in their glass. Its terms were, after all, very seriously considered and voted on by smart people and “good noses” like Ms. Klein. And so I raise a glass (of an “elegant” wine) to Prof. Noble and her mission to banish vague and pretentious language from the world of wine.