How to use your nose
How important is the sense of smell to our experience of wines? We know that a large part of what we call taste is in fact due to smell. The tongue’s receptors only provide information about taste: sweet, sour, salt, bitter and umami. Wine critics will talk about notes of melon and pineapple in Chardonnay and the licorice and cherry character of Chianti, but we don’t have melon or pineapple, licorice or cherry receptors on our tongues. Our experience of fruit flavours is largely due to smell. Yet those fruity flavours are experienced as if coming from the tongue. Yet it is the brain that combines the taste, touch and smell, and fuses them into a single, unified experience of flavour. It is this integrated working of the brain that experts try to unpick, with only some success, when tasting professionally.