How Wine Aromas Are “Revealed” Over Time
If you’ve ever let a bottle of wine sit out for too long on your counter, you’ll know that wine aromas can change over time — and not always for the better. But oftentimes these changes make the wine more interesting to drink.
I like to think of these changes as the ones we can “see” and the ones we can’t see. If a wine ages in new oak barrels, it’s going to taste and smell oaky. We can see the barrel, and we can anticipate its effect.
But then there are the changes that we can’t see. These are the tiny little chemical reactions taking place within the wine itself. Those reactions that take place during winemaking or aging can “reveal” new aromas from wine aroma precursors.
So much potential
An aroma precursor is a primary aroma that is currently non-volatile, meaning it doesn’t give off an odor, but it could be volatilized into a smell detectable by the human nose. You can think of these as potential aromas, the building blocks for what we can actually smell. In other words, they are the “ingredients” for the aroma, but they need the right conditions to change in a way that our human noses can perceive them.
Volatile aroma precursors develop in the grape berry in the vineyard. It starts around the stage “fruit set,” the stage when the fruit appears on the vine…
