Six families · 70 descriptors

The aroma wheel

Narrow by family before reaching for a specific fruit. Recognition is easy; recall from nothing is not.

FruityVegetalWoodyMineralSmokyBalsamicAromaschoose a family

Fruity

The grape and the climate. Red fruit points to a cooler site, black fruit to a warmer one, and tropical fruit to warmer still.

Training the vocabulary

Smell things deliberately when you are not drinking. Open the spice drawer and go through it jar by jar. Smell wet stone after rain, cut grass, leather, a struck match. The bottleneck is almost never the nose - it is the absence of a labelled memory to match against.