“The bouquet of wines is like a warm up to an active sporting event, the preliminary show can get you excited,” writes wine columnist RICHARD CALVER.

Love that old pun: the nose is in the middle of your face because it’s the scenter. I have oft buried my nose deep in a glass of wine to let the bouquet do the talking.

With training, the aroma from wine should be distinguishable as primary, from the grape variety, and secondary that is from the processes of wine making, especially the ageing process. 

Faults should be detected straight away as on the nose: a recent 2017 cabernet sauvignon from one of my favourite vineyards, Burge Family Winery, displayed a stable floor smell and tasted foul. 

It reminded me of the old joke that was in currency when I was a political adviser: a caucus is a dead animal. In any event, in my understanding, this aroma comes from an overabundance of a chemical known as molecule 4-ethylphenol, derived from phenols.

In lower concentrations it gives aged wine a well-textured flavour of leather, but in higher concentrations it is a bane. 

There was also likely to have been some cork taint, often associated with a smell of mouldering newspaper (and I don’t mean the fate of The Australian) which occurs when the cork used to seal the bottles is contaminated with a molecule called Trichloroanisole (TCA) that is quite discernible even in very small concentrations. 

The winery immediately on complaint replaced the bottle affected and the replacement 2017 cabernet sauvignon next tasted was singing. 

The bouquet of wines is like a warm up to an active sporting event, the preliminary show can get you excited. This is unlike games such as Scrabble or Monopoly where you just get board. 

I recently experienced that excitement when I was, as I often do, sitting at the Symposium wine bar at the ANU awaiting a taste of the latest wine to be sold by the glass. 

As the day had been warm, I chose a white wine, the 2023 Usher Tinkler Paperwasp Vineyard Chardonnay. This is a wine from the Hunter Valley known more for its semillons than for chardonnay, so expectations were low. 

I buried my nose in the glass and I immediately smelled butter and nectarine. I said to my mate: “Obviously, a bit of malolactic fermentation going on and a very clean mix of fruit with a hint of flowers.” 

“What?” he said. “All that from a bloody sniff?” 

“Yes,” I said, “the

nose is large enough to get those notes and you can train yourself to detect them. It’s like the advice you have to give to boys about love: if at first you don’t succeed, try a little ardour.” 

“Groan,” he said. 

“On taste, its got a good balance between butter and oakiness, the latter usually imparted by French oak. It has good length and its very well balanced. Thumbs up all right.”

The label revealed that the label name was from the fact that the paper wasps nest in the canopy of the winery at the exact time of hand harvesting, not for the fact that there’s a sting in the aftertaste. 

What do you call a smelly lawyer?

Law and Odor.