I’ve used scent training for our sommelier training for decades. It’s a core part of our programming. I hadn’t planned on ever developing scent kits until 2020. I started by creating kits for people with anosmia: scent therapy is very effective for regaining the sense of smell. I packaged them to help our students recover when they got hit with the original variant of COVID-19.
Soon after, we started filming for the online version of our Core Sommelier program, and I started thinking about creating a series of scent kits to accompany our classes. After six months of development, we had a series of scents that were perfect for training sommeliers.
Key Aspects of a Wine Scent Kit
Build the Scents!
Developing a kit is far more complicated than it seems. First, you need to have a scent lab that can create hundreds of different wine scents. Each of those scents takes at least ten compounds to develop, which means having a library of several thousand compounds on hand.
For instance, creating a realistic smell of a Honeycrisp apple—a common scent in white wines—is far more complex than it seems. Here is how I create the scent of “Apple” in many white wines, which is included in our “White Wine Aroma Kit.”
I start with Ethyl Butyrate, Hexyl Acetate, and 2-Methylbutyl Acetate to evoke the apple scent, but to get it right, I add Ethyl Acetate to mimic ripeness. I then add 1-Hexanol and Trans-2-Hexenal to replicate the scent of green apple skin. Then, there could possibly be some Methional to mimic an over-ripe apple or possibly Acetaldehyde and Hexyl Butyrate to make the apple scent more complex and realistic.
I also like adding a bit of Benzyl Acetate to add a note of apple flowers to the mix if I want to evoke an apple orchard rather than a single apple.
A wine aroma kit needs to contain all the common fruit scents, but many of the scents are only available in specific wine varietals, such as the grass smell of Sauvignon Blanc and the ginger note of Viognier.
Chemical Accuracy
One critical detail is that aroma must accurately represent wine scents and flavors. For instance, the smell of grassiness in the aforementioned Sauvignon Blanc is not a pure grass smell; it’s more of a kind of wet and moldy pile of grass. That’s because the scent reminds us of grass, but it’s really 2-Methoxy-3-isobutylpyrazine.
The creator of the scent kit has to understand the chemistry of wine to know what compounds create the wine scents. The person also has to have the palate of a sommelier to understand those scents, and they also have to be a skilled perfumer to adapt them into a liquid form. Without these three skills, a scent kit will be useless.
Why We Build Our Own Kits
We have always preached against pre-built scent kits, mainly because no significant producers understood wine chemistry, and their scents were inaccurate enough to train sommeliers.
Once we started offering online sommelier courses, we needed to come up with a new solution. This is why we build each of our wine aroma kits by hand. It’s the only way we can ensure the necessary quality control. We also don’t sell them on the open market, as they are very expensive to create.
Combined with Education
Just the scents alone aren’t enough. A sommelier student needs to understand how to find the scents in wine and what scents they need to look for in a specific wine. There are layers of flavors in wine. The top notes can be delicious elements of fruit and oak that are hard to see past. Our sommelier students are trained to notice the scents below them and to recognize how wine is produced. This is why our scent kits are included with a class: without that education, a scent kit is useless.
Our kits have been massively successful, and they are now used across the USA. If you are taking a sommelier program at university or with the National Wine School, you are probably using the wine scent kits we developed.
Types of Wine Aroma Kits
We have a core of wine aroma kits we use in sommelier programs and many others for specific certification courses and wine events.
The Varietal Fingerprint kit is the most widely used, as it’s part of the L2 Online Sommelier Course. It includes all the core varietal fingerprint scents of all major wine varietals. We also have a kit of oak barrel flavors, which is a personal favorite. There are specific kits for red wine aromas and another for white wine aromas.
We also have custom aroma kits for French wine regions, including Bordeaux, Burgundy, and the Rhone Valley.
Pricing & Packaging of Our Aroma Kits
We use jewelry-quality boxes for our kits and perfumer-quality glassware for the scents. Depending on the kit, it is either numbered or color-coded. Each kit contains the essential 5-8 scents required for the class in question. To keep our wine aroma kits well-made and focused, we charge 1/4 of what Nose du Vin or Aromamaster charges. We also sell our kits at cost, as they are part of a class.