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). WSET says its 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: WSET's Diploma tasting guide (Issue 13, August 2018) says the more concentrated and expressive a wine is on the nose and palate, the higher its quality level, while cautioning that 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: the same guide says that as wines age their aromas and flavours tend to develop from fruity and floral (primary) towards more savoury, earthy and spicy characters (tertiary), and that 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 readiness question in WSET's Diploma guide: 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 WSET's Diploma guide adds that not all high-quality wines are complex
• WSET's 2024 Level 3 exam guidance lists leaving out 'development' on the nose among common tasting-exam errors

WSET's Diploma tasting guide describes 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 guide's 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: WSET's Diploma guide notes that 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
• A 2026 WSET blog explains Riesling's petrol note as TDN, which often intensifies with age and sits somewhere between a primary and a mature, tertiary aroma
• Use the correct wording: WSET's 2024 Level 3 exam guidance says 'pronounced intensity' gets a mark for aroma where 'high intensity' does not

Condition is a clean or unclean call. WSET's Diploma tasting guide lists common wine faults in an appendix, while noting that fault assessment is not examined at Diploma because wines are checked by the examiners before being decanted into neutral bottles. The AWRI's wine faults page (checked 2026) supplies the chemistry. Cork taint comes mainly from 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA), which the AWRI describes as having a distinct musty, mouldy aroma and WSET as reminiscent of damp cardboard. The AWRI cites one study that put TCA's aroma threshold in a Pinot Noir at 1.4 ng/L, and found that TCA at 1 ng/L suppressed ratings for overall aroma intensity and positive fruit-derived characters in a Semillon. WSET notes that at low levels the taint can be hard to identify but fruit aromas will be muted, and that 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, per the AWRI) and is generally perceived as vinegar; the AWRI reports an aroma threshold as low as 0.1 to 0.125 g/L, depending on wine style and the individual, with levels usually regarded as detrimental above 0.7 g/L, and gives the legal maximum for Australian wines as 1.5 g/L. Ethyl acetate smells of nail polish remover, has a reported 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: the AWRI links 4-ethylphenol (Band-aid, medicinal), 4-ethylguaiacol (clove, spicy, smoky) and 4-ethylcatechol (horsey) to Brett growth; WSET notes that some consumers do not consider low levels of Brett a fault
• Reduction: WSET describes 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 AWRI puts the detection threshold of hydrogen sulfide in wine at about 1 to 2 µg/L
• Oxidation: the AWRI describes a range from a dulling of the aroma to cardboard, straw, hay-like, sherry-like and madeirised aromas; WSET notes that 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, per WSET
• Out of condition: WSET describes wines that have lost their vibrancy and freshness because they are too old or have been stored in bad conditions

WSET's Diploma tasting guide illustrates both scales with worked tasting notes. 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 the guide calls fully developed. Grape variety shapes the aromas themselves: WSET notes that primary aromas come directly from the grape and are the reason different grape varieties smell distinct from one another, and a WSET educator writing in 2026 calls Gewürztraminer one of the most aromatic grape varieties, often filling the glass with rose petal, Turkish delight and lychee.

• Light: entry-level Italian Pinot Grigio (WSET Diploma example)
• Medium: high-quality Italian Pinot Grigio; ten-year-old Haut-Médoc Cru Bourgeois (WSET Diploma examples)
• Pronounced: one-year-old Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon; five-year-old Napa Cabernet Sauvignon (WSET Diploma examples)
• Fully developed: the ten-year-old Haut-Médoc, showing a lot of tertiary cedar and earth character and, per the guide, 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. It also tells students to write 'simple' on both the nose and palate when a wine is simple. 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; WSET lists leaving it out as 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 2026-09-29