A is for Aroma

Aroma is a wine term that basically just means the scent when a wine is sniffed. You know all those snooty wine tasting people who insist you sniff the wine and not just drink it like a pleb? They are looking for the Aroma.

I hope his taste in wine is better than his taste in clothes...

The aroma can also be tasted through the olfactory effects when the wine is drank. Part of tasting anything comes from the smell of it, so the same is true for wine.

Now, if you want to be extra snobby, you can insist on the difference between Aroma and Bouquet. The Aroma, in that case, is the scents present in the wine specifically from the grapes. There are different scents associated with different varieties of grape. I will not go into them now because... reasons.

(Those reasons are that I am lazy and this is supposed to be a quick and dirty post.)

Bouquet, on the other hand, is the term for the scents in wine derived from the chemical reactions as the wine ages and ferments. They develop over time.

A few fun facts about Aromas:

There are hundreds of different possibilities.

Warm or room-temperature wines give off more aromas than chilled wines, because science.

When detecting Aroma in wine, sniff the wine, then swirl, then sniff again. Different aromas can be determined before and after the swirling, again, because science.

If you are really interested in knowing more about Aromas and the types, there is a very cool in-depth resource here.