What's that smell?

Ask a wine enthusiast about an embarrassing wine moment and chances are you’ll hear a story of how – when still new to the world of wine – the person consumed a whole bottle, not realising that it was indeed faulty. It happens all the time. If you don’t know the range of wine faults, and their range of odours, your ‘ignorance’ won’t only land you in embarrassing situations, but it might also result in you consuming bad wine.

 

Intimidated? No need to be. Wine Faults from the Le Nez Du Vin collection, by Jean Lenoir, is a nifty kit containing a range of scent references that will enable you to memorise and better identify the phenomena that can contaminate wine. This specific wine faults kit (there are a whole range of other kits containing various other scent references pertaining to specific wines, styles, and specific aromas such as oak) contains 12 scent bottles holding liquid which illustrate a series of faults – vegetal, rotten apple, vinegar, glue, soap, sulphur, rotten egg, onion, cauliflower, horse, mouldy-earth and cork.

After running through these scents, it is unlikely you’d be unable to identify the off-odours in wine again, although the kit includes a booklet explaining the cause of these smells and the bottles can be stored if you’d like to refresh your memory. A must buy for those eager to make the shift from consumer to cognoscenti.

Wine Faults Le Nez du Vin is distributed by Reciprocal for R895. Tel 011 482 9178