When we raise a glass of wine, we often stop to swirl the wine, and then breathe in its aroma before taking a sip. Often this tells more about a wine than an actual taste of it. Why is that?

The tongue can only really taste four flavors - salty, sour, sweet, and bitter.  However, all of the delicate shades of a wine - pepper, violet, mint, cantaloupe - can't be deduced by a tongue. Those all come from your nose, which is why wines don't taste as good when you have a cold or allergy. Your nose is the key to truly tasting a wine well.

When you swirl wine in a glass, you stir the wine molecules up in the air so you inhale as many as possible into your nose. Those wine molecules go streaming past the cilia that exist to block dirt and dust, and settle into matching molecules in the olfactory bulb, based on each particular smell. The two olfactory membranes are about stamp-sized and are just under the bridge of the nose.

This is how you smell cinnamon and licorice, chocolate and vanilla. It's not that someone dropped a chocolate chip into your wine - it's that a certain group of chemicals in the wine is identical to that in a chocolate chip!

Most humans can smell up to 10,000 smells, but as we age, our sense of smell deteriorates. Other things, such as smoking, can also harm the olfactory bulb sensors.

The seven main types of smells a nose keys on are:

So grab a glass of wine, give it a swirl, and give the old nose a workout! You might be surprised to see what it can detect in that regular glass of red wine!

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