Following Your Nose

Seventeen of us plunge our noses into narrow wine glasses, sniffing and straining toward the red liquid at the bottom. We gasp and puff like machines about to breathe their last.

“I smell bacon,” one woman says loudly, and a few of us laugh. As if bacon would be something you’d find in a fine wine. Although, who knows? Another taster thought she had detected the scent of hair spray in an earlier glass.

“Actually, bacon fat is an acceptable term for Pinot Noir,” instructor J.B. Severin says to more than a few surprised faces at the Wine House in West L.A., where “Best of the Current Pinot Noirs” is the topic of this night’s intermediate class.

Go figure: Like my classmates, I’ve picked up bits and pieces of wine knowledge over the years, to the point that I can eyeball a wine list somewhat confidently or do the wine chitchat thing at parties.

Although I’m past “Wine for Dummies,” there is a gap: Often, labels confuse me, especially those from Europe, where wines are labeled according to where grapes are grown rather than which grapes go into them. And learning to describe characteristics in a wine--other than the most obvious berries or oak--can be baffling: Doesn’t bacon belong in the frying pan?

In our Pinot Noir class, as in many wine classes, the emphasis is on tasting and describing. Ten wines are poured “blind,” without our knowing which they are, and for each we are to fill out a chart noting appearance, aroma and taste. Many of us diligently swirl our wine, sniff and swallow it, but few of us can write anything more insightful than “floral” or “fruity.”

It helps when Severin, an instructor and the general manager at the Wine House, explains the personality of Pinot Noir: It can be anything from spicy to plummy to redolent of night-blooming jasmine. It’s less clear, though, when he says one wine has “that bright purple smell.” A few of us picture Barney.

The Wine House may offer more courses than any other shop in Southern California, with two a week, ranging from a four-part “absolute beginners” series to one pairing pizzas with wine. Depending on the instructor, students may get history and economics lessons during the two hours. Most classes cost $35, which is fairly typical of classes at other wine shops, though some can run $75 or more, depending on how expensive the wines are.

In “Zinfandel: Best of the Current Releases” a week later, Chip Hammack, a sales manager and wine buyer for the store, spends so much time detailing how Zinfandel grapes survived Prohibition that students begin to fidget. This is interesting, but they’re here to taste wine.

This time, as wines again are poured blind, I search for familiar scents. I detect the jammy aroma in the 1997 Pesenti Family Reserve and a pepperiness typical of Zinfandel in a 1997 St. Francis “Pagani Reserve.” I am not certain, though, whether I would have been able to pick up on these had Hammack not named them at the start.

“Smells like chicken,” someone jokes.

As the class continues, several of us feel our noses--or our ability to name what we smell--sharpening. There’s coffee, chocolate, burnt toast. The latter scent, we learn in a five-minute discussion, can come from the wine barrel.

The Wine House philosophy, Hammack says, is to get students to trust their palates. “It’s always good to take a class, read journals and books, but the bottom line is to trust your taste, go from there and be very communicative with sommeliers and salespeople.”

Classes are good selling tools for wine shops, but education is going on too. “We focus on getting a good cross-section; they’re not just wines we’re trying to push,” says Kyle Smith, a manager at Woodland Hills Wine Co., which offers weekly classes geared toward more advanced students. Instructors may explain the difference between two wines produced from vineyards within yards of each other. In other more advanced classes, students may study how wines age through a vertical tasting, at which they compare the same wine from different vintages.

Those featuring more expensive wines, such as a class on high-end Cabernets, usually sell out immediately, Smith says; people seem less interested in mastering wine basics.

The Wine Exchange in Orange doesn’t offer formal classes but tries to educate customers through tastings grouped by topic. This fall’s list includes tastings of Australian wines and 1997 Red Burgundies. A store employee pours and answers questions; the store’s newsletter, hand-written by owner Steve Zanotti, may offer further tasting notes. Zanotti thinks tastings are a good way to learn about wine but says they can be a Catch-22.

“Many consumers, if they can’t pronounce it, they don’t want to learn about it. That’s the hardest thing for anybody to overcome,” he says.

Sometimes the store will host a tasting under a grab-bag title to entice customers to try lesser-known wines.

Wine educator Matt Kramer says students sometimes expect the wrong thing from a class. “Most people think they want to know about wine, but they really want to know the grammar of wine: ‘How do I read a label?’ ” says Kramer, a columnist for Wine Spectator magazine and author of several books, including “Making Sense of Wine” (William Morrow, 1989).

“But it’s more important that you gain an understanding of what a Cabernet tastes like rather than decipher the Rosetta stone of the label.

“Learning about wine is not unlike learning about another language; everyone knows how daunting that is,” Kramer says. “But it’s a form of communication. You’re really seeking a means of communicating with the wine and having the wine communicate with you.”

Kramer might teach the meaning of “finesse” by pairing two wines and asking students to explain the differences. “Until you taste a wine that doesn’t have it, ‘finesse’ is just an empty word,” he says. “It’s the wines that do the teaching. If you don’t find it in the glass for yourself, it doesn’t matter if you’re the greatest wine teacher or writer in the world.”

You might find “burnt rubber” in a glass of wine, as does Peter Brown, who teaches a six-part wine series for UC Irvine Extension each quarter. But that’s part of learning about wine, he says; you smell it, you describe it and you develop confidence to believe your nose.

“That is a slightly accurate description,” Brown says of the burnt rubber, “and, for me, usually an indication of a good red wine. . . . In every class, I encourage students to develop their own vocabulary. We all grow up with different things. I’m from New Zealand and might describe something differently than someone else.”

Karen MacNeil-Fife is chairwoman of the wine program at the Culinary Institute of America’s Napa Valley campus. Students of her weeklong classes typically come from the wine and food industry, whether waiters and waitresses or wine salesmen and women. Almost everyone has what she calls “Swiss cheese” knowledge of wine: They know what they like, but there are gaping holes in their overall understanding.

“Getting to the next level is understanding what makes a great wine great,” she says. “That phrase ‘Any wine is great if you like it’ is really not true. That’s like saying Judith Krantz is great because you like her, when she’s probably not as good as Shakespeare.”

In her classes, she teaches five factors that make a wine great: its varietal character (that it tastes like the grape from which it’s made), integration (often described as balance in a wine), expressiveness (the wine beams out its personality), connectedness to a place (you can taste where the wine is from) and complexity (each time you taste the wine, you find something new).

“The ultimate reason to take a class is that wine will taste better to you afterward,” she says.

“Whether or nor you get bacon [when smelling a wine] is not important to your wine education; the key is not necessarily for you to see what everybody else does. The key is to verbalize something for yourself so that you have a way of remembering the wine. I had one student who said a Pinot Noir smelled like her grandmother. Everyone laughed, but I said that was a perfect description because the student will never forget this wine.”

In a class at Robert Mondavi Wine & Food Center in Costa Mesa, a wine is described in a way that’s hard to forget. Wine Education 102 covers sensory evaluation, winegrowing techniques and the effects of soil and climate.

Instructor Kurt Cobbett, a wine educator for Mondavi based in Oakville, Calif. is enthusiastically passing around grapes picked that morning and later juice he has hand-pressed from them. The 30-odd students, seated at tables stocked with water and plain wafer crackers, hear Cobbett’s philosophy long before tasting the seven wines at each place setting, six of which are Mondavi wines.

Three things affect a wine’s taste, he says: The type of grapes, where they are grown and who is making wine from them. During our nearly three-hour class, we also talk about matching wine with food, the differences between aged and young wines and how to remember what you’ve had that you liked so you can build upon that reference.

“I can’t be the guy up here who shows you the shining path; you have to remember the wine you liked, who made it and how old it was,” Cobbett says.

He has us try a tart white “mystery wine” and guess where it’s from. It turns out to be from France. Some French wines, he says, are “French-smelling,” which seems nebulous. He’s asked what “French-smelling” means.

He stops, smiles, then says, “More like cat pee.”

Not the first thing that came to my mind. I rather liked the mystery wine, a 1997 Didier Dagueneau “En Chailloux” Pouilly Fume, but I thought it tasted citrusy. To me, that’s a far better description. And this time, I trust my taste.