After the summer, it's normal to feel a bit “out of shape”… even in terms of your sense of smell. Holidays bring intense moments, new places, and new scents, but they often interrupt the routines that help keep our noses active and trained. September, with its back-to-routine feeling, is the ideal month to adopt new habits and improve your sensory skills.
Training your sense of smell isn’t just for sommeliers or flavor professionals: it means learning to recognize and memorize aromas, refining our ability to taste food and drinks, and most of all, experiencing what we eat and drink in a deeper, more mindful way. With just a few minutes a day, our nose can become a real tool of discovery.
The sense of smell is often considered “secondary,” yet science shows it’s one of the most powerful senses we have.
A study published in Science estimated that humans are capable of distinguishing over one trillion different olfactory stimuli. An enormous number that reminds us just how refined our ability to perceive scents and aromas really is.
And that's not all: olfactory memory is extraordinarily long-lasting. While visual or tactile memories tend to fade over a few years, a scent can remain imprinted in our minds for decades.
Anyone who’s smelled a wine, dessert, or dish from their childhood knows how immediate and powerful the emotional connection to an aroma can be.
This happens because the olfactory system is directly connected to the limbic system, the part of the brain that governs emotions and memory. It doesn’t go through rational filters: a scent goes straight to the heart of our feelings.
So training your sense of smell means not only becoming more mindful tasters, but also enriching our emotional experiences.
Olfactory memory is an archive we all build day by day, starting from everyday experiences.
However, there’s a crucial aspect: we can’t recognize a smell if we haven’t already encountered it before and given it a name.
That’s why we often sense an aroma, but struggle to describe it. It feels “familiar,” but we can’t quite identify it—what’s missing is the linguistic link that fixes it in our memory.
Olfactory training has exactly this goal: to strengthen the connection between perception and language, transforming vague sensations into clear, usable memories. Just like with music: everyone can listen to it, but only those who know the names and rules can recognize a song at first listen and remember it over time.
The importance of an aroma vocabulary.
Many people have a sensitive nose, but lack the words to communicate what they perceive. That’s a real limitation: without a shared vocabulary, it becomes difficult to describe the sensations of a wine, an oil, or a chocolate—or to understand what others are trying to describe.
A common language is essential. Terms like “fruity,” “herbaceous,” and “floral” are broad categories that help you get oriented, but training allows you to go further and identify more precise nuances: cherry, raspberry, sage, toasted cocoa, black pepper.
Learning these words means expanding your tasting ability—not only becoming better at distinguishing sensations, but also at remembering and communicating them.
Training your sense of smell doesn’t require hours of study or complicated tools.
Just a few minutes a day are enough, if you use specific and targeted tools. Our aroma kits are created exactly for this purpose: offering a selection of representative essences that help you build a precise, personal “olfactory vocabulary.”
The main benefits:
• Guided experience: each aroma is presented in its pure, recognizable form, without interference.
• Progressive memorization: with regular practice, essences stick in your memory and become immediate reference points.
• Hands-on comparison: smelling a sample aroma and then searching for it in a wine, oil, or chocolate allows you to turn theory into practice.
• Fun: the “blind aroma recognition” game makes training engaging and stimulating, whether alone or with others.
Moreover, the ability to choose from dedicated collections (red wine, white wine, chocolate, oil, beer) makes learning more personalized and aligned with your interests.
September is the ideal time to start.
Just like going back to the gym in September to get back in shape, our sense of smell also deserves to be trained. Just a few weeks of consistent practice are enough to see real improvements: greater precision in recognizing aromas, more confidence in describing a wine or food, and more pleasure and awareness in everyday experiences.
With autumn around the corner and red wines returning to the spotlight on the table, there’s no better time to start again.
If you want to start or resume your sensory journey, we invite you to explore our aroma collections: practical, fun, and scientifically effective tools to develop your olfactory memory.
👉 Discover the standard collections and tailor-made olfactory training