Nose Assessment: Condition, Intensity, and Development

In WSET's Systematic Approach to Tasting, the Nose section sits between Appearance and Palate. In the Level 3 Systematic Approach to Tasting Wine (Issue 2, 2022) it has four lines: Condition (clean or unclean, with 'faulty?' as the prompt), Intensity (light, medium(-), medium, medium(+), pronounced), Aroma characteristics (primary, secondary, tertiary) and Development (youthful, developing, fully developed, tired/past its best). The SAT is designed to build skills progressively through the qualification levels, and the nose lines differ by level. The Level 2 wine SAT (Issue 2, 2023) keeps Condition but uses a three-point intensity scale of light, medium and pronounced. The Level 4 wine SAT (Issue 1.2, 2023) keeps the five-point intensity scale but has no Development line on the nose; its Conclusions instead ask whether a wine is suitable for bottle ageing, with an explanation required.

• Condition: clean or unclean (faulty?), the same line on the Level 2, Level 3 and Level 4 wine SATs
• Intensity at Level 2: light, medium, pronounced. At Levels 3 and 4: light, medium(-), medium, medium(+), pronounced
• Development at Level 3: youthful, developing, fully developed, tired/past its best
• For lines where the entries are separated by hyphens, the Level 3 card tells students to select one and only one option

Condition connects to quality: the Level 2, Level 3 and Level 4 wine SATs all begin their quality scale with 'faulty'. Intensity also connects to quality: in the Diploma tasting guide (Issue 13, August 2018), the more concentrated and expressive a wine is on the nose and palate, the higher its quality level, though above a certain level the concentration of one aroma or flavour can make a wine seem out of balance. Development connects to readiness for drinking: as wines age, their aromas and flavours tend to develop from fruity and floral (primary) towards more savoury, earthy and spicy characters (tertiary), and a mainly fruity wine with a light acid or tannin structure is almost certainly in the 'drink now: not suitable for ageing or further ageing' category.

• The Level 3 quality line runs faulty, poor, acceptable, good, very good, outstanding
• The Diploma readiness question: is the wine too young, can drink now but has potential for ageing, drink now not suitable for ageing or further ageing, or too old?
• Complexity can come from fruit character alone or from a combination of primary, secondary and tertiary aromas and flavours, and not all high-quality wines are complex
• Leaving out 'development' on the nose is one of the common tasting-exam errors in WSET's 2024 Level 3 exam guidance

The Diploma tasting guide sets out the working method. When you swirl the wine and smell it for the first time, note first impressions in terms of aroma clusters such as red fruit, black fruit or oak; when you smell it again, pinpoint specific descriptors such as strawberry, blackcurrant or vanilla. For intensity, the general rule is that aromas immediately apparent when you place your nose above the glass are pronounced, aromas that are faint and hard to detect are probably light, and everything else falls into the medium category (medium(-), medium or medium(+)). Only one entry counts: a range such as 'medium(+) to pronounced' does not gain the mark even if one of the entries is correct. For development, the Wine-Lexicon's grouping does the work. It sorts aromas into primary (the grape and alcoholic fermentation), secondary (post-fermentation winemaking: yeast, malolactic conversion, oak) and tertiary (maturation: deliberate oxidation, fruit development, bottle age), to encourage tasters to think about how different aromas coincide with different stages of a wine's development.

• Primary clusters on the Level 3 Wine-Lexicon include floral, green fruit, citrus fruit, stone fruit, tropical fruit, red fruit, black fruit, dried/cooked fruit, herbaceous, herbal and pungent spice
• Tertiary bottle-age descriptors include leather, forest floor, earth, mushroom and tobacco for reds, and petrol, kerosene, hay, honey and nutty for whites
• Allow flexibility: a youthful wine with mainly primary aromas may still show 'tar' or 'kerosene', which could come from the grape variety, its origin or a winemaking technique rather than from maturation
• Riesling's petrol note comes from TDN, which often intensifies with age and sits somewhere between a primary and a mature, tertiary aroma
• Use the correct wording: at Level 3, 'pronounced intensity' gets a mark for aroma where 'high intensity' does not

Condition is a clean or unclean call. Fault assessment is not examined at Diploma, because wines are checked by the examiners before being decanted into neutral bottles, but the Diploma tasting guide still lists common wine faults in an appendix. Cork taint comes mainly from 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA), which has a distinct musty, mouldy aroma reminiscent of damp cardboard. One study measured TCA's aroma threshold in a Pinot Noir at 1.4 ng/L, and in an AWRI sensory evaluation, TCA at 1 ng/L suppressed ratings for overall aroma intensity and positive fruit-derived characters in a Semillon. At low levels the taint can be hard to identify, but fruit aromas will be muted, and because the origin can lie in the winery, the problem is not limited to bottles closed with a cork. Volatile acidity is mainly acetic acid (more than 93 percent) and is generally perceived as vinegar; published aroma thresholds run as low as 0.1 to 0.125 g/L, depending on wine style and the individual, levels are usually regarded as detrimental above 0.7 g/L, and the legal maximum for Australian wines is 1.5 g/L. Ethyl acetate smells of nail polish remover, has a published sensory threshold of 12 mg/L, and ranges from about 30 to 60 mg/L in normal wines to about 150 to 200 mg/L in defective wines.

• Brettanomyces: 4-ethylphenol (Band-aid, medicinal), 4-ethylguaiacol (clove, spicy, smoky) and 4-ethylcatechol (horsey) are linked to Brett growth; some consumers do not consider low levels of Brett a fault
• Reduction: a 'stinky' character, sometimes like rotten eggs, boiled cabbage, boiled onions or blocked drains, that in some cases dissipates once the bottle is open; the detection threshold of hydrogen sulfide in wine is about 1 to 2 µg/L
• Oxidation: ranges from a dulling of the aroma to cardboard, straw, hay-like, sherry-like and madeirised aromas; in wines made in an oxidative style it is not a fault
• Sulfur dioxide: at very high levels an acrid smell of recently extinguished matches, and at lower levels muted fruit aromas
• Out of condition: wines that have lost their vibrancy and freshness because they are too old or have been stored in bad conditions

Worked tasting notes in the Diploma tasting guide illustrate both scales. An entry-level Italian Pinot Grigio has light intensity aromas of very simple, neutral green fruit, while a high-quality Italian Pinot Grigio has medium intensity aromas of fresh stone fruits with some pear, banana and hints of ginger. In a Cabernet Sauvignon flight, a one-year-old Chilean example shows pronounced intensity of ripe, slightly jammy black fruit with herbaceous notes and a hint of oak; a five-year-old Napa Cabernet Sauvignon shows pronounced black fruit and oak with some tertiary characters beginning to appear; and a ten-year-old Haut-Médoc Cru Bourgeois shows medium intensity black fruit with obvious tertiary earth, cedar and tobacco, a wine assessed as fully developed. Grape variety shapes the aromas themselves: primary aromas come directly from the grape and are the reason different grape varieties smell distinct from one another, and Gewürztraminer is one of the most aromatic grape varieties, often filling the glass with rose petal, Turkish delight and lychee.

• Light: entry-level Italian Pinot Grigio
• Medium: high-quality Italian Pinot Grigio; ten-year-old Haut-Médoc Cru Bourgeois
• Pronounced: one-year-old Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon; five-year-old Napa Cabernet Sauvignon
• Fully developed: the ten-year-old Haut-Médoc, showing a lot of tertiary cedar and earth character and in slow decline

At WSET Level 3, the tasting exam expects a note on every SAT line. WSET's 2024 list of common Level 3 tasting-exam errors includes not writing notes for 'development' on the nose, not using the correct wording, giving ranges where one response is required, and not giving at least five accurate aroma descriptors, since there are five marks for aroma characteristics per wine. When a wine is simple, students should write 'simple' on both the nose and palate. At Diploma, the nose section of the Wine SAT carries 6 marks: 0 for condition, 1 for intensity and 5 for aroma characteristics.

• Level 3: write a note for development on the nose; leaving it out is a common exam error
• Level 3: write at least five specific aroma descriptors, including primary, secondary and tertiary aromas where relevant
• Diploma: condition carries 0 marks, intensity 1 mark and aroma characteristics 5 marks
• Level 4 SAT: an explanation supporting the assessment of a wine's suitability for bottle ageing is required

Primary sources: https://www.wsetglobal.com/media/11766/wset_l3wines_sat_en_may2022_issue2.pdf, https://www.wsetglobal.com/media/13156/wset_l2wines_sat_en_may2023_issue2.pdf, https://www.wsetglobal.com/media/13271/wset_l4wines_sat_en_aug2023.pdf, https://www.wsetglobal.com/media/6714/wset_l4diploma_cag_tasting_en_aug2018.pdf, https://www.awri.com.au/industry_support/winemaking_resources/sensory_assessment/recognition-of-wine-faults-and-taints/wine_faults/, https://www.wsetglobal.com/knowledge-centre/blog/2024/how-to-ace-the-wset-level-3-award-in-wines-tasting-exam, https://www.wsetglobal.com/knowledge-centre/wset-systematic-approach-to-tasting-sat, https://www.wsetglobal.com/knowledge-centre/blog/2026/strawberry-pepper-and-petrol-why-wine-smells-the-way-it-does. Last verified 2026-10-05