Floral Aromas in Wines

"One of the most lovely aromas that you ca get out of a wine is the scent of flowers. We don't always think about flowers in our food or our drinks, but wine generally can take on a nice floral aroma. This is a gross generalization; however a lot of times floral aromas come out of the top of a wine glass, and if you're not familiar with flowers, all you have to look for is a general floral scent; maybe something like a bouquet of flowers, or a wedding bouquet, or a bunch of flowers, or the aroma that you get when you walk into a flower store. If you can smell that, you're doing pretty well. If you know a little bit more about flowers, you might be able to recognize some of the individual aromas. Some of them are rose, geranium, lavender. Honeysuckle is also very common. Another way that you can recognize a floral aroma is to think of perfume. A lot of people think perfume, or perfumey, or some sort of cosmetic smell is the way that they can sense a floral aroma, and that's true. As a matter of fact, a lot of us are more familiar with floral aromas from the cosmetics that we use than from the actual flowers. Another floral aroma that is one of my favorites, and very common in both white wines and sparkling wines is honey. You can smell honey in the middle of a glass, or at the top of the glass. I classify it as a floral aroma because it just kind of makes sense that bees make honey from flowers, so we're going to call it a floral aroma. It does kind of coincide with a lot of the other floral aromas. So whether it's a specific flower, or just a big bunch of flowers that you're smelling in there, look for the floral aromas at the top of a glass of wine."