Uisge Beatha Whisky prices compared

Whisky Nosing Kits, Flavour Wheels and Sensory Training

How to train your nose for whisky tasting: evaluating commercial nosing kits, navigating aroma wheels, and building a sensory vocabulary at home.

Written by

Published Updated

Tasting notes such as “stewed damson plums, polished mahogany, sea lavender and crushed allspice” can sound daunting or pretentious to a beginner.

Yet naming aromas is not a gift reserved for master blenders. It is largely a learned skill that links a smell to a word. When people struggle to name what they smell, it is often the “tip-of-the-nose” feeling: the smell is familiar, but the word will not come.

Three aids help: aroma kits, flavour wheels and a kitchen cupboard of everyday smells. Here is how each works. For the tasting method itself, see the whisky nosing and tasting guide.

Three ways to train your nose. Aroma kits, such as the Aroma Academy Whisky Aroma Kit with 24 aromas or Le Nez du Whisky with 54, hold one note per vial so you learn single aromas; faults kits add off-notes; but they cost a lot and fade once opened. Flavour wheels, the first published for whisky in 1979, arrange words from broad families in the middle to exact terms at the edge; they give you the words, not the smells. A kitchen cupboard of spices, fruit, honey and oats gives you everyday reference smells, but will not teach faults such as cork taint.

1. Aroma Kits: Are They Worth It?

Aroma training sets give you small vials of reference aromas to sniff on their own. Two widely sold whisky sets, as of 2026:

The Advantages

The Drawbacks

2. The Whisky Flavour Wheel

The first whisky flavour wheel came from Pentlands Scotch Whisky Research, now the Scotch Whisky Research Institute (SWRI). Sheila Burtles, Jim Swan, George Shortreed and Paul Rickards published it in 1979 in a paper on the flavour terminology of Scotch whisky (SMWS Unfiltered). Flavour wheels arrange descriptors in rings, from broad families in the middle to exact terms at the edge. The diagram below is a simplified example, not the SWRI wheel itself.

                    ┌── Primary Tier (Broad Category)
                    │     ┌── Secondary Tier (Sub-family)
                    │     │     ┌── Tertiary Tier (Exact Descriptor)
                    ▼     ▼     ▼
               [Cereal] ──► Malt ──► Horlicks, Malted Barley, Wort
               [Fruity] ──► Fresh Fruit ──► Green Apple, Pear Drop
               [Floral] ──► Heather ──► Dried Flowers, Honey
               [Peaty]  ──► Medicinal ──► Iodine, Antiseptic, Bandages
               [Woody]  ──► Vanilla ──► Custard, Coconut, Toffee
               [Feinty] ──► Leathery ──► Tobacco Leaf, Old Leather
               [Sulphury]─► Rubbery ──► Struck Match, Spent Fireworks

How to Use the Wheel During a Tasting

When nosing a dram, start from the hub and work outward:

  1. First, identify the broad family: Is the aroma predominantly Fruity, Peaty, or Woody?
  2. Move to the second ring: If it is Fruity, is it Fresh Fruit (orchard), Dried Fruit (sherry), or Cooked Fruit (jammy)?
  3. Reach the outer perimeter: If it is fresh orchard fruit, is it crisp Green Apple, ripe Pear, or White Peach?

Working from broad to narrow makes the choice less overwhelming and helps you settle on a precise word. A wheel gives you the words, not the smells, so it works best alongside a kit or the kitchen cupboard below.

3. The Kitchen Cupboard: Training at Home

You do not need a kit to build a vocabulary. Much of what you need is already in the kitchen, though it will not teach you faults such as cork taint; for those you need a faults kit:

The Spices (Oak Extraction)

Keep whole spices in small, clean glass jars:

The Fruits (Fermentation Esters)

Honey and Malt

Practical Training Exercise: Comparative Flights

One of the quickest ways to improve is comparative tasting.

Rather than nosing one whisky on its own, pour three small measures (about 15ml each) side by side from contrasting styles:

Moving between the glasses makes the cereal, dried fruit and peat smoke stand out in a way they may not in a single glass. To place your three on a map of smoke and cask, see our whisky flavour map.

Explore Benchmark Single Malts by Style

Compare UK prices on single malts by style:

About the author

John Fegan

· Editor

Hailing from the land of haggis and deep-fried Mars bars, John was always going to find his way to whisky. He has run Uisge Beatha since 2015 and Whiskipedia.com since 2020.