Aromas in wine

How can wine smell like vanilla? Or chocolate? Or how some people find cloves or candied fruit in the bouquet of aromas? And the smell of butter in wine? Where do these smells come from?

Welcome to the world of stereoisomers! During fermentation, yeast eats grape sugar and converts it into alcohol, and thousands of different complex chemical compounds are formed in the process. When aged in a barrel, chemical compounds are also formed. It is these compounds that use similar molecular mechanisms for the familiar aromas that our nose and brain can classify.

All the aromas we find in wine are called ” stereoisomers”, they are mirror images of smells that are familiar to us from everyday life (for example, blackberry, rose and butter smells).

The more you smell, and the more varied the aromas, the more your brain remembers them, which helps you discover them later in the wine.

P.s. Here’s an interesting experiment:

If you swirl the wine in the glass clockwise, the aroma of the wine will be brighter with fruity and strawberry notes, and if you swirl it counterclockwise, the aroma of the wine will be stronger with hints of oak.

Try it for yourself!