Le Nez du Vin Aroma Kit Review: Which Kit to Pick (or DIY)

TLDR

Le Nez du Vin is a set of numbered vials, each holding one wine smell, first made by Jean Lenoir in 1981. Pick the 12-aroma kit for the colour you drink most, or the 24 for both, and start with kitchen jars. Buy a commercial kit only if you taste regularly and already know the basics.

What Is in Each Le Nez du Vin Aroma Kit?

Le Nez du Vin sells its wine kits by colour and size. The 12-aroma red and white kits are drawn from the 54-aroma master kit and keep its vial numbers. The 24-aroma Duo combines the two, and faults and new oak come as separate 12-aroma boxes. The 12s ship with a booklet on where each aroma shows up in wine.

Kit	What is inside	Who it suits
6 aromas, introductory	Six wine aromas, sold as a gift	A present for a curious beginner
12 aromas, red wines	Strawberry, raspberry, blackcurrant, blackberry, cherry, violet, green pepper, truffle, liquorice, vanilla, pepper, smoky	Mostly red drinkers: the best first kit
12 aromas, white wines and Champagne	Lemon, grapefruit, pineapple, lychee, muscat, pear, hawthorn, honey, boxwood, butter, toast, roasted hazelnut	Mostly white and sparkling drinkers
24 aromas, Duo	The red and white 12s together	Anyone who drinks both colours
54 aromas, master kit	The full set the 12s are drawn from	Students on a long tasting course, trade tasters
12 aromas, wine faults	Fault smells split off from the original 1981 set	Trade tasters who need to catch a bad bottle
12 aromas, new oak	Common aromas from new oak barrels, sold as a companion to the master kit	Master-kit owners who taste a lot of oaked wine
Kitchen DIY kit	Fruit, spice, peel, honey, butter and toast in small jars	Every beginner, before any of the above

For exam study there is also Napa Valley Wine Academy's 48-aroma TasteCoach kit, which the school says is built to match the WSET Systematic Approach to Tasting.

Quick check

One question on what you just read

You are new to wine and want to train your nose on a budget. What is the smart start?

ABuy the biggest aroma kit you can findBWait until you can afford Le Nez du VinCSniff and name real kitchen ingredients

Tap an answer to see how you did.

Is Le Nez du Vin Worth It?

Yes, if you taste often and keep missing the same smells. No, as a first step. Wine Spectator's Dr. Vinny says the kits pick aromas "closely related to the molecular composition of wine." The same answer adds that they are not "a complete replacement": a nose in a bowl of real strawberries makes a stronger memory.

What the money buys is consistency. Taittinger's profile of Le Nez du Vin says the aromas are "natural or synthetic depending on the case," and each vial smells the same every time it is opened. Retailers guarantee the vials for five years and say they can last up to ten with proper storage. A kitchen has no violet, hawthorn or boxwood at all.

Jean Lenoir's first box held 54 smells, including faults such as glue and rotten egg. Those faults now sit in their own box, aimed mainly at professionals. Buy it if you work with wine or return bottles often; otherwise start with the guide to spotting wine faults by smell.

If every kitchen jar below is easy to name with eyes closed and real wine still hides the same smells, buy the 12 for the colour you drink most. If a Cabernet and a Pinot Noir still smell alike, spend the money on wine and the deductive tasting method first.

How Do You Make a Wine Aroma Kit at Home?

Fill small jars with kitchen stand-ins for the 24 aromas in Le Nez du Vin's red and white kits. Fruit, peel, spices, honey, butter and toast cover most of them. Violet, hawthorn and boxwood have no kitchen match, and those three gaps are the best reason to buy a kit later.

Kit aroma	Kit	Kitchen stand-in
Strawberry, raspberry, blackberry, cherry	Red	Frozen berries and cherries, thawed
Blackcurrant	Red	A spoon of blackcurrant jam
Green pepper	Red	A slice of green bell pepper
Truffle	Red	Dried porcini soaked in a little water (close, not exact)
Liquorice	Red	A piece of liquorice root
Vanilla	Red	A split vanilla pod
Pepper	Red	Freshly cracked black pepper
Smoky	Red	A pinch of smoked paprika
Lemon, grapefruit	White	Strips of peel
Pineapple, lychee, pear	White	Tinned pineapple and lychees, a ripe pear
Muscat	White	Muscat grapes, in season
Honey, butter	White	A spoon of each
Toast, roasted hazelnut	White	Toasted bread, hazelnuts browned in a dry pan
Violet, hawthorn, boxwood	Red and white	None in a kitchen: buy the kit for these

Sniff each jar with your eyes closed, in short sniffs, and say its name out loud twice. Keep sessions to five minutes, twice a day. The nose grows less sensitive to a smell it keeps sniffing, so short sniffs keep each jar clear. The full technique is in how to smell wine.

Fresh fruit lasts a few days in a jar, and dried spices last months. Wine Folly builds its home kit on dry spices for that reason: "they last longer." Replace anything that fades.

How Do You Practise With an Aroma Kit?

Train in three steps: name each smell blind, then pick two smells out of one jar, then find them inside a real wine. The guide to training your sense of smell explains why single named smells come before a full glass of wine.

• Blind single aroma. Shuffle the jars or vials, cover the labels, sniff and name each one, then check. Retest the misses the next day.
• Two-aroma blend. Put two references in one jar, such as a cinnamon stick and a coffee bean, and name both. Most beginners catch one and miss the other.
• Wine deconstruction. Smell a real wine and name the broad family first: fruit, floral, spice or earth. Then narrow to one fruit or spice and write the guess in a tasting notes template before reading the back label.

The blend drill trains the skill a glass of wine demands, where dozens of smells arrive at once. The wine aroma wheel guide gives the ladder from family to single smell, and how to describe wine turns the names into a sentence.

What Can an Aroma Kit Not Teach?

A kit teaches the names of single smells. It cannot teach structure, a grape's identity or a palate of your own, because each of those needs wine in the glass. Pair any kit with one or two practice wines a week.

• Structure. Acidity, tannin and body are what link a smell to a grape, and no vial carries them.
• A clear note. Turning smells into a tasting note takes a framework and the tasting vocabulary cheat sheet.
• A palate. Comparison drills across regions, ages and styles, set out in develop your wine palate, build it over months.

How to taste wine and primary, secondary and tertiary aromas show where each smell in a glass comes from, and the tasting hub collects the rest of the method.

In the Sommy app, the Wine 101 course has a bite-sized lesson on training your nose. Tonight, set out three jars of cherry, vanilla and cracked black pepper, sniff each with your eyes closed, then pour a red and look for one of them in the glass.

Sources

1. Taittinger: Le nez du vin (Jean Lenoir, 1981; natural or synthetic aromas; the faults box)
2. Napa Valley Wine Academy: Le Nez du Vin aroma kits and the TasteCoach 48 kit
3. Wine Spectator: Is a wine aroma kit a good investment?
4. Vinum Design: Le Nez du Vin, 12 aromas, red wines
5. Rose Hill Wine Cellars: Le Nez du Vin white wine aroma kit, 12 aromas
6. Wine Folly: Make your own wine aroma kit