Wine Essences Collection - Professional Set of 24

Common essences found in all types of wine are captured in glass vials. These same essences are used by wine merchants, wineries and educators as a tool to develop the olfactory senses for the complex components of wines.

This Basic Set contains 12 essence vials and a descriptive booklet, all contained in a beautiful hinged rosewood box.

The Essence Collection

Discovering the extrasensory enjoyment of wine!

More than half the pleasure of wine enjoyment is the sensation of complex odors and aromas that create the character of a wine. The Essence Collection will help you arouse your curiosity and train your palate so you can enjoy your favorite wines to the fullest.

By becoming a "wine detective," you will not only enjoy the taste of wine, but will begin looking for the complex aromas and smells you never knew existed in wine.

Without the sense of smell, we would taste very little. Our individual sense of smell is 10,000 times more sensitive than taste! In fact, we can detect olfactory subtleties of particular odors at the molecular level!

According to Harper’s “The Wine and Spirit Weekly,” the sense of smell is part of a complex olfactory system that allows us to enjoy the subtleties of both wine and food: “Whereas there are just five basic tastes, we can discriminate among many thousands of volatile compounds, or “odorants.” Indeed, much of the character and interest in wine stems from the complex odors detected by the olfactory system; our taste buds alone give limited detail.

So how does olfaction work? Our olfactory epithelium, located at the top of our nasal cavity, contains olfactory receptor cells, each of which expresses just one type of olfactory receptor. Each of these receptors – and there are hundreds of them in humans – is tuned to recognize the particular molecular structure of different odorants. It’s not clear how we can discriminate among thousands of different odors with only a few hundred different receptors, but it appears likely that there is some sort of combinatory processing going on.”

Scents also trigger our imagination – we learn to "think with our nose," so to speak. While drinking wine, we break down and remember certain scents that are present. With the proper training, we can begin to categorize and describe what we like and don’t like about a wine and become sensitized to a wine’s potential. Only when we have taken a sip of wine, breathe in a little air through our mouth, hold, and then swallow, do we sense the aroma of the wine. As the smell of the wine reaches up into the olfactory neurosensory cells of the nasal membrane, the blend of taste and smell evokes a complete wine experience.

Suggested Use

The Essence Collection was designed to help you “educate your palate” in order to maximize your enjoyment of wine. The enclosed booklet gives a brief description of the contents of each of the vials in the collection. Pick a vial, and read the description in the booklet first.

Then open the vial and hold it no closer than 6 to 8 inches from your nose. The smell will reach your nose in a second or two. Take your time in going from essence to essence. You might only want to do a few at a time. You may prefer to arrange a “group training” that will allow you to further challenge your olfactory abilities.

After you and others have taken the complete "lesson," you can test one another. Have someone else open the vials (covering the number) while you, with open booklet in hand, try to match the essence with the page in the booklet.You will be quite surprised how well you will remember these smells.

The next time you taste wine, you may want to test your memory first. Then, if necessary, go back and check the booklet and vials.

Professor Tim Jacob of Cardiff University, an olfaction researcher, says “It is possible that we do each have different smell universes, but it is remarkable that we agree about smells to the degree we do. You might say the brain does quite a lot to the information it receives from the tongue and the nose.

Much of the skill of a wine expert comes from learning the odor complexes produced in wine. We know that learning plays a very important role in the naming of odors.” Jacob agrees that learning is crucial: “The inexperienced person does not have a smell vocabulary. This hugely restricts their ability to describe and define odors.”

Even for wine experts, a common problem is the impoverished language we have for describing tastes and smells. In Jacob’s opinion, “A large part of the wine taster’s skill comes from being able to develop some sort of classification system and then to associate words/categories with smells.”

We are sure you will find that The Essence Collection will tantalize and induce you to explore the enormous subtleties of wine.

To your health!

This wonderful Wine Essences Collection will make the perfect Gift for any Wine Lover!!!