To distill the idea down: Tim Gaiser MS believes that most people encode scent memories as visual memories. He thinks that by changing the size of the internal image, or intensity, or any of the other levers (modalities) that you can alter, i.e. increase or decrease your abilities with tasting. 

In an arena that focuses very heavily on tasting, wine appreciation, this is obviously an important concept. 

Personally, I like to recreate scents from memory, using his methods, to see where I have scent gaps. I imagine, without the object in front of me, that I am smelling, say, a lemon. Can I imagine that aroma so intensely that it is like I”m holding a lemon under my nose?

I then take that experience and magnify it even more. How intense can I make the smell of lemon. Can I imagine the difference between a lemon custard, a fresh lemon, and lemon zest? I notice what I’m doing (I’m picturing the lemon, but where is it in my minds eye)? Is it still or a moving picture, near or far, blurry or crisp, etc? So, in addition to smell being something we experience in the world, it is also something we retain and carry memories inside ourselves of experiences in the past.

We can call those aromas memories up at will, and most people likely have a visual component to the memories. That makes sense: we are all largely visual beings. 

This is the list of what Tim Gaiser calls the ‘Basic Set.’ A set of aromatics that, when mastered, one can describe and taste a great majority of the worlds wine.

• Green Apple
• Yellow/Golden Delicious Apple
• Pear
• Lemon
• Lime
• Orange
• Banana
• Peach
• Apricot
• Black Cherry
• Blackberry
• Red Cherry
• Strawberry
• Cranberry
• Raisin/Prune
• Roses
• Violet
• Mint/Eucalyptuse
• Rosemary
• Black/White pepper
• Vanilla
• Cinnamon
• Clove
• Toast
• Coffee
• Chocolate
• Mushroom/Forrest Floor
• Chalk

I would say, unless you’re a fucking weirdo, that you certainly recognize all of those items. This is where the fluency bias will rear its ugly head though. Just because you can drive to the store and buy a green apple does not mean you could smell a glass of wine and pick it out. And the green apple in the example isn’t the important one. Take any element of tasting that is your blind spot, coffee, toast, apricot, rosemary, etc etc. Just because you can visually picture the item doesn’t mean you have a sufficiently developed scent memory to bring it up on command. 

Your ability to think about the item, your familiarity with the item in your day to day life, blinds you to the fact that you may have a aroma gap. If you don’t trust me, watch any brand new wine taster smell their first glass of wine. You’ll rarely hear individual fruits, usually some comment about how it smells like wine. 

Because, here’s the thing: tasting wine is like learning ballet is like learning the guitar is like learning programming. You start somewhere. You slowly get some fluidity and ability. It smells like just wine till you finally pick out some berries. Then you pick out some more. And you either develop those areas slowly, deliberately, and methodically, or you plateau, and you miss out on one of life’s truly best offerings: mastery. 

There is an additional point here. This can’t be rushed. Slow mastery here is key. Picture the fruit, smell the fruit. Smell the wine. Make the connection. Rinse, repeat, master. 

Or, you know, just drink the wine and forget about all this tasting stuff. It’s a bit much.