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The way a wine's bouquet changes as it ages is one of most fascinating aspects of enology. Over time, a wine may develop a surprising and pleasant bouquet of aromas, or it may lose its “personality” and take a turn for the worse. There are many chemical reactions that occur in a wine during its evolution over the years, but the oxidation process is the only one that greatly affects the wine's aromas.  Oxidation of the wine's aromatic chemical compounds happens over time to all wines: red, white, sparkling, sweet, fortified, and others. Oxidation is due to the leak of air through the pores of...

Everyone knows Weizen beer and many appreciate its unique and unmistakable bouquet. However, not everyone knows what these aromas are due to! Weizen, (wheat in German), is a high fermentation, wheat-based beer that was created in Munich in 1500. The "Purity Edict" issued at that time prohibited breweries from using malts other than barley and for almost 300 years the Bavarian royal family was the only one to have the right to produce wheat-based beers. For this reason, the circulation of beer was limited to the noble class and the clergy. Only from the end of the 1800s did production rights extend...

Last week we looked at flower aromas in white wines and now we're going to look at flower aromas in red wines. As previously stated, when trying to decipher what floral aromas you sense in a wine's bouquet you can use a first rule of thumb which seems to apply in many cases: generally speaking, you can find white and yellow flowers in white wines and red and purple flowers in red wines. But if you want to go further with your olfactory analysis, you need to be able to identify some basic flowers. Red wines always surprise us with the breadth of their bouquet and the intensity of their aromas. Unlike white...

In life, we are constantly surrounded by flowers and their scents, both directly and indirectly. However, it is very difficult to distinguish one flower from another, blindly, only on the basis of its scent. It's even more difficult to distinguish the scents of specific flowers within a wine's aromatic bouquet.   "What floral note can you smell in this wine?" Here we can apply the first rule of thumb that is often the case with wine bouquets: generally speaking, we can find white and yellow flowers in white wines and red and purple flowers in red wines. But if we want to go further with our olfactory...

We have talked in the past about the link between scent and literature. We have seen how perfumes are the protagonists of novels, poems, recent stories and those that are more rooted in history. The reference to smell, however, is also present in art. When observing an artwork, our sense of smell is stimulated not directly, but rather through our eyesight that observes the work's composition, colors and subject matter, triggering that series of mnemonic reactions that serve to remind us of the corresponding smell. This past month, the Prado museum in Madrid opened its exhibition entitled "The Essence of Painting. An Olfactory Exhibition," where thanks to...